Josef Suk

Josef Suk (1874–1935) was a leading Czech composer and violinist of the generation after Dvořák, and closely bound to him both as a pupil and as family. The most gifted student in Dvořák’s composition class at the Prague Conservatory, Suk later married Dvořák’s daughter Otilie, becoming the older master’s son-in-law. As a violinist he was a founding member of the celebrated Bohemian (Czech) Quartet, which he served for some forty years. As a composer he began in a sunny, lyrical late-Romantic style close to Dvořák’s, but after the shattering deaths of both Dvořák and his wife Otilie within little more than a year (1904–05) his music deepened into something darker, more searching and harmonically adventurous, as in his vast Asrael Symphony. He is regarded, alongside Janáček, as one of the most important Czech composers of the early twentieth century, and was the grandfather of the famous violinist of the same name.