Location
Mozart String Quartet #15 in D minor, K421/417b (1783)
Britten String Quartet #1 in D major, Op. 25 (1941)
Born in Salzburg, Mozart (1756-1791) showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, Mozart was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death have been much mythologized. This string quartet is the second of the quartets dedicated to Haydn and the only one of the set in a minor key. Though undated in the autograph, it is believed to have been completed in 1783, while his wife Constanze Mozart was in labor with her first child Raimund. Constanze stated that the rising string figures in the second movement corresponded to her cries from the other room.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945). The quartet was commissioned by arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, while Britten was living in America. At the time, he and Peter Pears were staying as guests of the English piano duo Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson at Escondido near San Diego, California. It was the last important work of his American period. Britten remarked that three months to write it was "Short notice & a bit of a sweat, but I'll do it as the cash will be useful!" The fee was $400 (roughly equivalent to $6,700 in 2017).