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Intimate Letters is a dramatic retelling of the passionate illicit love affair that resulted in one of the finest and most passionate string quartets of the 20th century . It was not until 1916, when he was 61, that Janacek had anything resembling a success, with the Prague premiere of Jenufa, having been ignored throughout his life by the Prague chattering classes as a country hick, and a workmanlike composer who was just a provincial organist. Janacek's frustrations are surely one of the reasons why he behaved so badly. After several affairs with much younger women, he became infatuated with a Kamila Stosslova, a 35-year-old married woman with 2 children, who remained his obsession, and the subject of the String Quartet Intimate Letters, until his death in 1928. In this dramatic recreation Timothy West reads the composer's love letters chronologically placed between the movements of the composer's magnificent 2nd string quartet.