The Museum of Uncommon Composers #3: Josef Suk - Part of the Final Paragraph

The story of Josef Suk is the story of the aesthetic moderate, who has no champion because he fits no neat agenda, and adjusted himself like a magpie to the various musical influences of his era. Is he fully the equal of Dvorak or Janacek? Well... no. Dvorak and Janacek were unrepeatable musical events, stars who burned at the brightest possible flame who reinvented themselves time after time to fit the requirements of their eras, their commissions, and their performers. But if Edward Elgar and Jean Sibelius, so particular to the ethos of their times and places, can be considered among the great composers of all time - and deservedly, so can Josef Suk. If the unique musical language of Carl Nielsen can be understood beyond the boundaries of border and language, so can Josef Suk. And if musical conservatives like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and even Bach and can force us to reconsider what's conservative and what's progressive, so can Josef Suk. In nearly any other small nation, the quality of Suk's music would make him stand tall as their greatest composer. He had the good and bad luck of being born in a country and an era with so many great composers that you had to be careful not to step on them. He embodied his era's contradictions, a 19th century gentleman forced prematurely to confront the century of death. It spurred him prematurely into a new era, and caused him no end of nostalgia for the world to which he could not go back. Suk received a very dark glimpse of the future, so dark he simply laid down his pen - exactly as Elgar and Sibelius did, who found the truths of this new era just too terrible to keep telling them....