At each end of this timespan, Quartettsatz and Shostakovich’s eleventh are structurally unique. The former is a self-contained piece that was originally the opening movement of an entire quartet, but Schubert only managed to continue a further 41 bars into the slow movement before he set it aside, never to return to it before his untimely death aged just 31. Similarly, Shostakovich’s eleventh is performed as one continuous piece, but here, the composer made the deliberate choice to split it into seven short movements, each contrasting sharply in character.

The quartet was the first of four to be dedicated to members of the Beethoven Quartet; in this instance, the second violinist Vasily Shirinsky, who had died the previous year. The lingering influence of Beethoven is also found from the outset of Schumann’s third quartet; a slow introduction forms the basis of the first movement’s thematic material. With this work, we return to the standard string quartet structure of four movements, with a notably unusual treatment of the Scherzo second movement as a set of variations.