Slovenská hudba, Vol. 46, No 1, p.7-40, 2020

Ján Levoslav Bella: Chamber Music for String Instruments.
The Editor’s View. (II)

The study offers the survey of Ján Levoslav Bella’s chamber music for the line-up of the string quartet and string quintet. It gives basic information regarding the preserved compositions, correcting erroneous – though widely spread – facts with the goal to rectify the distorted view on the creation of our best romantic composer. On the basis of the summarized knowledge we can unequivocally confirm that also with his chamber music Bella ranked among the top composing exponents of his time, not only in domestic context. The first part of the study (published in the preceding issue of the Slovenská hudba revue) presented three quartet compositions, in this part the survey is supplemented with remaining quartets and the only string quintet. The presented knowledge resulted from the work of the author-editor on the Complete works of Bella’s chamber music.