String Quartet no. 11 in C major op. 61

Dvorák composed his ambitious String Quartet in C major op. 61 in the autumn of 1881. It was commissioned by Joseph Hellmesberger Sr., the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic and first violinist of the Hellmesberger Quartet who however dismissed it as a “weak work” and never played it in public. Rather, the premiere took place a year later in Berlin with the Joachim Quartet.

Dvorák, on the other hand, considered his Quartet op. 61 to be “the greatest and also most accomplished” of his existing chamber music works. The filigree texture of the work as well as the echoes of Schubert's Quintet in C major and Brahms's Sextet in G major show that he was decidedly trying to shed the cliché of a naïve writer of Slavic melodies and place himself in the Viennese tradition.

Simrock’s first edition of the score served as the editor's main source. The autograph score as well as the first editions of the parts and Dvorák's four-hand piano arrangement were also evaluated. The edition contains a facsimile of twelve discarded measures of the Violin Sonata op. 57, which Dvorák used and developed further in the second movement of the quartet.