Schubert began work on his twelfth string quartet in early December 1820, shortly after a "
Schubertiade" held at the home of
Ignaz von Sonnleithner on the first of the month. It was his first attempt at writing a string quartet since completing the
String Quartet No. 11 in E major, D 353 in 1816. After completing the
allegro assai first movement, Schubert wrote out the 41
bar exposition of the following
andante movement before abandoning the work. As with the later
"Unfinished" Symphony, there has been much speculation on why Schubert left the composition incomplete. One view presented by
Bernard Shore is that Schubert put it aside to follow up another musical idea and never got back to it. Javier Arrebola speculates that the work (like several others written during the same period) was put aside because it "...did not yet represent the great leap forward he was striving for". It has also been speculated that the work was abandoned because Schubert, having written a powerful first movement, was unable to come up with an effective following movement. The
Quartettsatz received its posthumous premiere on 1 March 1867 in
Vienna, with publication of the score, edited by Brahms, following in 1870. For a number of years it was believed that the
Quartettsatz was an early work dating to around 1814 (perhaps a confusion with the
Quartettsatz in C minor D 103). In 1905, Edmondstoune Duncan wrote of the composition that it was "...fairly workman-like and effective, but is of little further consequence, and is only mentioned by way of completeness". established the work's true importance as a forerunner of the late string quartets which are among Schubert's greatest works. Four years after the "Quartettsatz," Schubert returned to the genre to write the
Rosamunde Quartet, D 804, which was followed by the
"Death and the Maiden" Quartet D 810 and the
Fifteenth Quartet, D 887. ==Structure==