The Royal String Quartet is a global brand in the world of chamber music. The ensemble, which has won two Fryderyk awards, was founded in 1998. Considered specialists in 20th and 21st century music, the artists also perform masterpieces from earlier eras in a phenomenal way. The programme of their May concert at the NFM includes the works of composers without whom the musical literature for string quartet would certainly look completely different.

The six Viennese Quartets were written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1773, shortly after he arrived in the capital of Austria. These pieces are an obvious result of his confrontation with the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. The source of inspiration for the young composer were in particular the works of Joseph Haydn. The last of these quartets, featured in the programme, is no exception in this respect – it contains, for example, obvious references to Haydn’s Quartet in D minor op. 9. “If he had written nothing but quartets and the Requiem, they alone would have earned him immortality,” the oldest of the Viennese Classicists was to say about Mozart many years later.

Commentators have detected Russian influences in Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, written one hundred and twenty years later. In the impressionistic sound language of the composition, one can indeed hear the influence of exoticism – not only Russian, but also the sound of the Indonesian gamelan admired by Debussy during the world exhibition in Paris in 1889. The quartet, the only one in Debussy’s oeuvre, is one of the compositions that opened his mature period.

Although for Johannes Brahms the two quartets from opus 51 were the first ones he completed, when he began working on them he was already a fully formed artist, a forty-year-old composer. Previously, he had been afraid to challenge the legend Ludwig van Beethoven, whose achievements in this genre were unquestionable. Brahms managed to create original works that were an inspiration for generations to come, such as Béla Bartók or Arnold Schönberg, the latter being an apologist for Brahms’s work.