With the staging of Leoš Janáček’s String Quartets No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata” and No. 2 “Intimate Letters” (1854–1928), we continue our collaboration with the renowned Kuss Quartet, which began to great acclaim with the Beethoven evening “Force & Freedom”. The fact that both quartets—premiered in 1924 and 1928, like Beethoven’s adapted quartets—belong to their composer’s late period and are among the Kuss Quartet’s declared favourites, inspired this programming choice.

In his first engagement with the “royal discipline” of chamber music, Janáček drew inspiration from a famous work by Beethoven – the “Kreutzer Sonata”, dedicated to violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Janáček’s musical reflection on Leo Tolstoy’s novella of the same name, which deals with love, sex, jealousy, and murder, allows for a thematic connection with Heiner Müller’s „Quartett”. Dramaturgically, the juxtaposition of the “Kreutzer Sonata” with Janáček’s second quartet, composed five years later, is particularly intriguing. Here the 74-year-old composer appears as a passionate lover, hopelessly devoted to the much younger Kamila Stösslová, to whom he wrote these “Intimate Letters” as tokens of his deepest longing and affection. The inversion of a possible relationship trajectory within Janáček’s catalogue – beginning with the murderous jealousy of a betrayed husband and culminating in the rapturous devotion of an enamoured man – forms a fascinating mirror game.

Heiner Müller’s play „Quartett” (1980/81) inverts Janáček’s principle of duplication: while the composer expanded Tolstoy’s sonata for violin and piano into a work for four strings, Müller (1929–1995) condensed the characters of Choderlos de Laclos’ famous epistolary novel “Les Liaisons dangereuses” (1782) into two voices. He nevertheless titled the piece Quartett, as his protagonists exchange and blur their (gender) roles – a structure that, like Janáček’s “Intimate Letters”, arises from intimate correspondence.

It is a hall of mirrors of human desire and suffering, in which Janáček’s music becomes both impulse and commentary on Müller’s literary composition. With a pair of actors, a pair of dancers, and the Kuss Quartet, we create a production that, amid profound political and social upheaval, explores the questionable refuge of the private sphere – which ultimately proves to be a battlefield of mutual destruction. These unassimilated social contradictions corrode the individual from within.

The young and versatile percussionist Lorenzo Riessler and the virtuoso trumpeter Paul Hübner lend the text both percussive sharpness and electronically enhanced resonance.

On 30 December 2025, the 30th anniversary of Heiner Müller’s death will be commemorated.