Bartók's Second String Quartet was composed - with several long interruptions - between 1915 and 1918, after he had spent several years almost solely devoted to collecting folk music. The melody and r...
The String Quartet no. 3 is the shortest of Béla Bartók's six Quartets, and was also composed in a remarkably short time. He wrote the score in September 1927, and in the following December it won him...
Even before his String Quartet no. 3 appeared in print in 1929, Bartók was already working on a fourth in the summer of 1928. This five-movement work is arranged symmetrically around a highly expressi...
The longest and at the same time most complex of Bartók’s six string quartets was composed in the summer of 1934 as a well-paid commission for the renowned Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in Was...
Bartók began work on his Sixth String Quartet in the summer of 1939 as a guest of Paul Sacher in the idyllic Swiss mountain village of Saanen, before the impending outbreak of war drove him first to B...
'Harmony, bliss, music of Raphaelesque beauty! and yet in its simplicity, how wonderfully artistically everything is done.' This is how Theodor Billroth enthused about the first String Quartet op. 88...
As with its companion work op. 88 from 1882, Brahms's second string quintet was supposed to be completed in the relaxed atmosphere of a summer in Bad Ischl, but eight years later. The work's first tec...
In setting Richard Dehmel's poem 'Verklärte Nacht' (Transfigured Night) in his op. 4, the young Arnold Schönberg pursued the intention, as he himself said, of 'attempting those new forms in chamber mu...
The music world associates Verdi's name so obviously with his operatic output that his contributions to other genres can easily be overlooked. His only chamber work owes its existence to an enforced b...
The Weinzierl castle in Lower Austria, which still stands today, can be considered to be the birthplace of a chamber music genre, which is firmly established in our present-day repertoire. The young H...
