Evening concert: Dvořák

No wonder the Pavel Haas Quartet, as a promoter of home-grown music, puts on an all-Dvořák program. The Czech Antonín Dvořák engaged in the string quartet genre all his life. Some quartets, including the ‘American’, have become world-famous, but most have yet to be discovered by the public. One of them, the Eleventh String Quartet of 1881, was commissioned by the concertmaster of the Vienna opera orchestra, on the advice of Brahms. 

A better-known string quartet by Dvořák is the Fourteenth, his last. It shows Dvořák’s overwhelming happiness on returning to his homeland. As a young piano teacher, Dvořák fell madly in love with his pupil Josefa and for her he wrote a series of love songs. His feelings were not reciprocated, and, like Mozart, he married the younger sister of his first flame. Some of the songs Dvořák later published in a string quartet version under the title ‘Cypresses’.