Weitere intime Briefe

Leoš Janáček's passionate and inspiring emotions towards the 38-years-younger, also married Kamila Stösslová produced more than 700 letters and his 2nd string quartet Intimate Letters. In the last two years of the composer's life beyond the ordinary letters they used an 'album', a little hand-written book into which he entered his impressions of meetings with Kamila. The album contains not only text entries but some short musical sketches between the lines. Sometimes few bars of a melody, sometimes just a chord. These fragments did not become parts of any terminated work by him, and had the role of actual, ephemeral messages more than compositional drafts.

''In Weitere intimeBriefe I used some fragments of fragments found in Janá ek's album and put them in a musical context which is quite different from the original one or from Janá ek's own string quartet (which is otherwise one of my favourites of the genre). (Péter Tornyai)

The work has been commissioned by the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen: it was premiered on December 16, 2019 by the Asasello Quartet in Neuss.