Josef Suk (1874-1935)
A Summer's Tale, Op. 29
A Winter's Tale, Op. 9

Josef Suk belongs to the second generation of Czech nationalist composers, after Smetana and Dvorak. He was born in 1874 in Krecovice, the son of a village schoolmaster and began to play the violin at the age of eight and later the piano, writing his first composition, a Polka, in 1882. At the age of eleven he entered the Prague Conservatory, studying the violin with the director Antonin Bennewitz and theory with Josef Foerster. His chamber-music teacher, during an extra year of study in 1891, was Hanus Wihan, for whom Dvorak wrote his famous Cello Concerto in B minor and who trained the distinguished Czech Quartet in which Suk played second violin until his retirement in 1933 with the consequent disbanding of the quartet, after giving some four thousand concerts. He studied composition first with Karel Stecker and, after his graduation in 1891, studied with Dvorak, wh