Stepan Jezek
I believe that the quartet is the best thing I could have come across. It’s an extraordinarily unique and interesting mixture of individual and collective life. Everyone’s there for themselves, and yet we make up a single body. This means a constant search for some balance between one’s own ideas and the interest of the whole. After all, it’s like in a marriage, you simply have to compromise… But as I see it, compromising is the best way to totally destroy art or marriage. Compromise, by its nature, brings mediocrity and dullness. And it’s clear that no one wants dull life or dull art.
Fortunately, my own marriage is not based on compromising. We prefer something I’d rather call understanding, which is completely different from compromising, because it leaves you freedom – the main condition of happiness in life. It’s the same in art – real artists have been inwardly free and unrestrained, and their creations definitely haven’t followed the rule of compromise. Incidentally, that’s why outstanding personalities have so often been unsuccessful and misunderstood by their contemporaries – they just don’t go with the crowd.
But the whole thing is more complicated in the quartet than in marriage. First of all, marriage involves just two people, and to come to an agreement is incomparably easier for two than for four. And also, my wife and I became close simply because of mutual fondness. We’re on the same wavelength. But the quartet is a professional body. We, of course, need to get on well, but apart from that, we have to understand each other in musical terms.
The question therefore is how to create, out of four diverse people and four different musical visions, a single harmonious whole, while avoiding half-hearted compromising. I guess there’s simply no universal answer to this. I can only say that, while working, I experience most joy and satisfaction at the moment when the four of us become inwardly involved in common creative work, everyone presenting their personal very best. These are wonderful instants. Constant mutual criticism, which can sometimes be so irritating and gruelling, ceases to be a limitation, and turns into an immense propelling force which drives us forth. It’s strange how time flies in such a moment. A four-hour rehearsal passes rapidly, and one feels more freshness and vigour at the end than one did at the beginning.So, apart from the fact that I simply enjoy the quartet because it gives me, as a musician, the opportunity to fulfil myself superbly, it’s also a school of life. Being able to voice and accept criticism; being able to describe all my ideas precisely, but also sensing what’s best to leave unsaid; bringing in individual abilities and opinions, but also sharing artistic intimacy – in all this (and, of course, in many other things) I must develop constantly. It’s clear that when I joined the quartet, I didn’t have a clue about most of these things. And it’s also clear that, in a few years, I’ll comprehend more than I know now. So it’s quite possible that you’re the last one who’s reading this text, because I might just be about to delete it and write something completely different here.
Štěpán Ježek began playing the violin when he was five. After completing the Prague Conservatory, he graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, where he and his classmates founded Bennewitz Quartet. Ha taught at the International School of Music and Fine Arts (Prague) for a few years. With his wife Silvie, he occasionally performs at festivals of contemporary music, where they have premiered several pieces by his mother, Olga Ježková.
He likes playing soccer and chess, he reads books about astronomy, and, in his free time, he does amateur photography. The most frequent subject of his pictures is his wife Silvie and son Jakub.
