Johanna Senfter

String Quartet F Sharp Minor Op. 28

The composer Johanna Senfter (1879 1961) from Oppenheim concerned herself with chamber music for strings all her life, even studied violin in Frankfurt herself. Max Reger then gave her lessons in Leipzig, first privately, then in his composition class at the conservatoire and valued her 'extraordinary compositional talent'. The strict teacher more and more became a committed promoter of the works by Johanna Senfter. For a period of 50 years, the composer concerned herself with the string quartet genre, from Quartet No. 1 in D minor Op. 4, composed shortly after the turn of the century, to the sixth and last Quartet in C minor Op. 115 which was performed for the first time in 1960, one year before her death. The Quartet in F sharp minor Op. 28 is her second quartet which was premiered in Darmstadt on 5 November 1922. In this work, as in later works, Senfter combined traditional form models - here Baroque movements like gavotte, saraband, gigue - with expressive, late Romantic musical language. The work, consisting of six short movements, may without doubt be regarded as a valuable addition to the quartet repertoire.