Czech Chamber Music Society • Czech Nonet

The Czech Nonet, one of the world’s oldest chamber ensembles, will soon be celebrating its centennial. Founded in 1924 by students at the Prague Conservatoire (Spohr’s Grand Nonet was among the works heard at their first public performance), the ensemble quickly gained recognition as an important interpreter of the classical repertoire and as an equally enthusiastic pioneer of new music. Their playing and their unique combination of instruments inspired many new works by leading contemporary composers including Sergei Prokofiev, Witold Lutosławski, and Bohuslav Martinů.

The ensemble’s special instrumentation (violin, viola, cello, contrabass, and wind quintet) offers a nearly inexhaustible range of colour combinations, achieving the richness of sound of a chamber orchestra, and enabling the natural inclusion of repertoire ranging from the Baroque era to the present day. Despite this, the Czech Nonet faced a repertoire crisis in its early years, causing a five-year interruption of their activity. The ensemble’s existence was rescued by approaching Foerster and Hába, who composed works for them. A major milestone in the ensemble’s history came in 1959 with the Nonet Bohuslava Martinů, thanks to which the Czech Nonet made its international breakthrough.

Since then, the Czech Nonet has appeared at many important international music festivals (Salzburg, Edinburgh, Prague Spring etc.) and has given many concert tours in the countries of Europe and North and South America as well as in Japan and Africa. They have appeared at prestigious concert halls around the world including Vienna’s Musikverein, Munich’s Herkulessal, and the Library of Congress in Washington. They now perform most often in Germany and are seldom heard in this country. Local audiences, however, may recall their participation in the popular cycle Music Among the Paintings held at the Gallery of the Liechtenstein Palace.

The rich discography of the Czech Nonet is recorded on 45 LP records and CDs issued on the Supraphon, Panton, and Harmonia Mundi labels. Their recording of the Nonet by Bohuslav Martinů won the top award from the prestigious music review journal Répértoire in 1996, and in 2003 their recordings of music by Beethoven won the CHOC du Monde de la Musique. 

The famed violinist Louis Spohr was equally acclaimed as a composer. Unlike most virtuosi of his day, however, he did not compose solely for his own instrument, but also wrote symphonies, operas, oratorios, and many chamber works. In 1813 in Vienna he met the Jihlava native Johann Tost (1755?–1831), a former violinist of the Esterházy orchestra at the time when Joseph Haydn was employed there. After the orchestra was dissolved, Tost set up a music copying workshop in Vienna, and for that purpose he purchased the works of various composers, or he commissioned new works from them. Although he cannot be considered to have been a music patron in the truest sense of the word, he helped bring of number of musical works into the world. This was also the case with Spohr’s nonet. Tost ordered some chamber works from Spohr, and he secured the rights to them from the composer for a few years, only thereafter permitting them to be issued in print. He made no secret of his goal: “On my business travels with such artistic treasures, I can create wide-ranging contacts with music lovers who will then be helpful with my other business dealings.” (Of course, he was far more successful as a merchant of wine and textiles.) Among Spohr’s compositions for Tost, there were two with highly unusual instrumentation: the Octet for clarinet, two French horns, violin, two violas, cello, and contrabass, Op. 32, and the Grand nonetto, Op. 31. As Spohr wrote in his autobiography, the idea of writing for a combination of four string instruments and five winds came from Tost. What he wanted was for each instrument to have a chance in the composition to exhibit its own typical character. Spohr admitted he was lured by the unusual task despite the peculiar terms of the commission, which he gladly accepted and completed. The work was first heard privately and soon afterwards publicly as well, but Spohr did not record the date of the first public performance, which still has not been precisely dated. The work was printed in 1819 by the Viennese publisher S. A. Steiner. A review of the printed edition describes the work as “a lovely blossom that displaces all the cloying vacuousness and shallow humour” being written at the time. Spohr then programmed the work on his concert tours in Paris, London, Leipzig, Weimar, and elsewhere. The work was acclaimed for its originality and for the balanced use of the individual instruments because the composer did not give preference to his own instrument, the violin, at the expense of the others. 

A century later, the Czech Nonet was established as an ensemble with permanent members at the Prague Conservatoire at the suggestion of the violinist Emil Leichner, Snr. (1902–1973). Their first official concert took place on 17 January 1924 in Prague, then for four years the ensemble members worked in Lithuania as teachers at the newly founded conservatoire in Klaipėda. After returning to their homeland, overcoming a crisis, and undergoing turnover of personnel, the ensemble acquired a wealth of experience on the concert stage, inspiring numerous Czech and foreign composers to write new works specifically for their instrumentation. The ensemble quickly built an international reputation, greatly helping to enrich the repertoire for this unusual combination of instruments.

The Nonet No. 2 by Bohuslav Martinů was commissioned by the Czech Nonet and was written during the last year of the composer’s life. Martinů had already composed a work for nine instruments in 1924 (Nonet No. 1), but for a combination of strings, winds, and piano, and only a torso has been preserved. The ensemble’s founder, the violinist Emil Leichner, Snr., asked the composer to write a work specifically for the Czech Nonet in 1948, but nothing came of the request. Leichner did not give up, and he approached Martinů again ten years later, when the ensemble was preparing a programme to celebrate the 35th anniversary of its founding. Martinů was recuperating from an operation he had undergone in November 1958, and although he was finishing the opera The Greek Passion, he accepted the commission. The Nonet No. 2 is dated “January 1959”, and the composer sent it to the ensemble in the first week of February. The Czech Nonet scheduled the work’s premiere for its appearance at the Salzburg Festival, at which the ensemble was to be a participant in July 1959. Martinů took a sceptical view of the announcement of the venue for the premiere; in a letter to Miloš Šafránek dated May of that year, he expressed concern that in Salzburg, only dodecaphony can succeed, and whatever does not conform with avant-garde trends is ignored. Before departing for Austria, the Czech Nonet performed the work in June in Polička and also in Prague for a few invited guests. The official premiere in Salzburg took place on 27 July 1959, and it was well received despite the composer’s apprehensions. The Czech premiere of the Nonet had been scheduled for 15 October of that year, but the composer’s death on 28 August hastened the performance, so the Nonet was heard a month earlier in honour of Martinů’s memory. According to Harry Halbreich, author of a Martinů biography and of a catalogue of the composer’s works, in the composition, “like in late Mozart, expression of deep feeling and the wisdom of a lifetime are concealed under the façade of a light divertimento and smiling purity of expression. It is the composer’s ‘most Czech’ work not only because it was intended for Czech musicians, but also because with deep nostalgia, it expresses the unfulfilled desire of the terminally ill musician in exile for his homeland.” In the words of the composer’s biographer Jiří Mihule, “there is no chamber work by Martinů that contains throughout such wealth in the communication of emotion.”

Witold Lutosławski received instruction in mathematics and the natural sciences while simultaneously studying violin, piano, and music theory. His artistic career was postponed by the Second World War, during which the young musician and his colleague Andrzej Panufnik earned money by performing in cafés as a piano duo. He was already at work on his First Symphony by 1941, which was finished in 1947 and was premiered the following year by Grzegorz Fitelberg in Katowice. Like in Czechoslovakia and other countries of the Eastern Bloc, the aesthetics of Socialist Realism were imposed after the war, and the symphony was harshly criticised based on those criteria. The composer then found himself at a stylistic crossroads, which he overcame with his Concerto for Orchestra (1954). Thereafter, he went his own way. His Preludia taneczne (Dance Preludes) date from that same year. Written at the request of the publisher Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne in Krakow, which was planning an edition of didactic works for violin and piano, Lutosławski instead chose to write for the clarinet. The work, which employs folklore elements from northern Poland in the composer’s stylisation, does not quote any specific songs. It stands out from other didactic music and has become a welcome part of the concert repertoire. The first performance of the Dance Preludes was given on 15 February 1955 by the Polish performers Ludwik Kurkiewicz and Sergiusz Nadgryzowski. In 1955, Lutosławski arranged the composition for clarinet, harp, piano, strings, and percussion (first performed in 1963 by Benjamin Britten with the English Chamber Orchestra). Another arrangement was made in 1959 for the Czech Nonet, which performed it in Warsaw that November. 

Josef Bohuslav Foerster was one of the first composers to write a work specifically for the Czech Nonet. HIs Nonet was premiered on 19 March 1932 in the Small Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna together with the Nonet, Op. 40, by Alois Hába and the Nonet by Louis Spohr. A Viennese critic gave the following apt description: “The Czech Nonet is a collective of musicians who embody their country’s musical, rhythmic, lively temperament, […] the atmosphere of Bohemia’s forests and meadows makes itself felt in this composition. Foerster’s nonet consists of variations on two themes and makes the overall impression of a rhapsody. A charming, gracefully joyous dance motif takes us to the composer’s homeland, then that is replaced by a yearning, elegiac motif that sings with such romantic warmth that one might speak of a Czech Robert Schumann. We are receiving the spirit of Dvořák from Foerster’s hands. [...] We listen to Foerster’s composition with sheer joy, and we are sorry when the music is over.” The Prague premiere of the Nonet took place on 22 November 1932 at a concert presented by the Society for Modern Chamber Music at the Municipal House’s Smetana Hall. The programme also featured music by Alois Hába, the Lithuanian composer Jeronimas Kačinskas (a pupil of Hába and a friend of Emil Leichner), the Croatian composer Josef (Josip) Mandić, who had settled in Prague, and Miroslav Ponc, another pupil of Hába. On a programme consisting of music by representatives of radical compositional currents, the composition by Josef Bohuslav Foerster represented a work by an authority of Czech music who was respected by the younger generation and who claimed the legacy of Bedřich Smetana.