Louis Spohr, the composer, wrote his first string quartet around age twenty and his last completed large-scale work, String Quartet No. 36, over fifty years later, showing a continuous engagement with the genre.
Compositional Technique
Spohr's Quatuor brillant (or Solo-Quartett) was a type of chamber concerto where a virtuoso violinist could display technical brilliance with string accompaniment when an orchestra was unavailable.
Composition History
Spohr's Quartet No. 31, Op. 132, could have been called 'the Wagner quartet' because Spohr played it at Mendelssohn's house in 1846, where he met Wagner for the first time.
Historical Context
At the time of Spohr's birth in 1784, Haydn's innovative Op. 33 quartets had been published for only two years, and Mozart was still working on his six quartets dedicated to Haydn.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Spohr was an early champion of Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets in northern Germany, performing them soon after publication, despite some notable musicians, like cellist Bernhard Romberg, finding them "absurd stuff."
Composer Biography
Spohr's second marriage in 1836 to Marianne Pfeiffer, an accomplished amateur pianist, led him to concentrate on works involving the piano for eleven years, causing a long gap in his string quartet compositions.
Recording & Production
This recording breaks Spohr's 150-year embargo on his final string quartet, Op. 157, which he had banned from public performance due to a period of deep melancholy after an injury.
