Janáček completed the First String Quartet in 1923, immediately after putting the finishing touches on The Cunning Little Vixen. It is an often-performed work, a fitting representative of his late style in a chamber-music setting. Of particular interest to this study is its motivic treatment and the relationship between motives and form in the first movement: the main motives are expanded to establish the structural basis while outlining a relatively traditional sonata form. My analysis examines the main theme's transformations into various melodic and accompanimental details. Common-tone retention is shown as an element that adds unity.

Like many of Janáček's compositions, this quartet has an underlying program, one based on Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). A few words about the program will indicate the composer's mindset in the work's creation and add an extra dimension to an appreciation of the music. The novella's plot revolves around an unhappily married woman who throws herself into the arms of a new lover and dies tragically at the hands of her husband. She is an amateur pianist, the lover a semiprofessional violinist; from the husband's point of view, his wife's ultimate decision to commit adultery emerges during their performance of Beethoven's violin sonata. Janáček commented: “I had in mind a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death… .” According to Josef Suk, one of violinists involved in the work's premiere, “Janáček meant the work to be a kind of moral protest against men's despotic attitude to women.” In addition to a quotation from the sonata, the quartet contains passages that may suggest images related to the characters and events of Tolstoy's story. Of course, since the work is instrumental, any programmatic details are a matter of interpretation and speculation, but they are in line with Janáček's approach.

This quartet was not Janáček's first composition to use The Kreutzer Sonata for its program; he completed a piano trio based on the same subject in 1908 (revised 1909), a work that is now lost. There is some question as to whether all of the quartet movements were written in 1923, or whether some were adapted from the trio. Janáček did acknowledge that he reused ideas from the trio, but we can only speculate about the relationship between the two. Based on the compositional style it appears that the entire quartet was indeed written in 1923.