Classical Music for String Quartet

Although Dvorak's stay in America (1892-95) was very successful, the composer suffered a good deal from homesickness. He had begun the string quartet in A flat major in New York, but continued with it...

Composed in autumn of 1881, Opus 61 is the last of Dvořák's 'middle' quartets by chronology for which Beethoven and Schubert served as the most significant models. Beethoven's influence, from thematic...

Béla Bartók's six string quartets, composed between 1908 and 1940, are 20th-century milestones of the genre. His First String Quartet is closely linked to his unhappy love for the violinist Stefi Geye...

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...

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...

Six works belong to opus 9 - the first group of Haydn's string quartets of which we know. The composer also went new ways as far as form was concerned: whereas he had still adhered to the five movemen...

The autograph score of the Quartets op. 17 was in the possession of the imperial police chief Johann Nepomuk Neuwirth, whose widow gave it to the Wiener Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in 1875. It is sa...

The chamber music world has been eagerly awaiting this - all of Haydn's string quartets are finally available in Henle Urtext quality! The last edition to be finished contains the String Quartets op....

The quartets were dedicated to the violinist Johann Tost, who was the second principal violinist at the Esterházy court during the 1780s. His business sense led him to sell twelve quartets - opus 64 w...

Haydn dedicated the series of Quartets op. 71 and 74 to the Hungarian Count Apponyi, a Viennese patron of music and a freemason friend. Haydn composed them when he was enjoying a great deal of success...

The five string quartets in this volume are generally designated as Beethoven's 'middle quartets,' even though stylistically they do not all build a closed unit. More than three years lie between the...

Brahms had already composed over 20 string quartets (he confessed to a friend that he had burnt all of that 'stuff') before he finally presented his Opus 51 to the public. In the end only three surviv...

Critical report only.

Wissenschaftliche Gesamtausgabe, Critical Report, paperback, Series XII, Volume 2

The E-flat major String Quartet, op. 127, is a key work not only in Beethoven's Oeuvre but in the entire history of the genre. The first of the late quartets, it 'transfers the formal and symbolic asp...

Beethoven's op. 135, one of the last works he composed, is equally famous for its compositional clarity and for the inadequacy of previous editions. Theproblem lies in the surviving sources, for Beeth...

> Inaccuracies in the first edition regarding the articulation and dynamics have been carefully resolved The quartet in a minor is one of the chamber music works with which Schubert wanted to 'pave th...

Schubert only took ten days to write his String Quartet in G major, one of his truly monumental chamber music works. With its almost symphonic dimensions, this late quartet is reminiscent of his great...

The immediate model for this first important chamber music work by Ravel was Debussy’s String Quartet from 1892/93. Nevertheless, the composition, written in 1902/03, already contains unmistakable fea...

(parts only unless otherwise specified)