LDV101

17 TALICH QUARTET When he began composing his Quartet no.12 in Fmajor op.96 (B179) , known as the ‘American’ Quartet, Dvořák already had eleven string quartets to his credit, but he had not returned to the genre for almost thirteen years. During this period he had gone through several intellectual crises and undertaken extensive concert tours. It was only when he fled the hustle and bustle of New York life and found relaxation and happiness during the contented months he spent in the small Iowa town of Spillville in 1893 that he returned to this particularly intimate form of expression, one that required intense stylistic concentration. Like the famous Symphony ‘From the New World’, with which it is contemporary, this quartet reflects the composer’s adventures on the American continent, and in particular his sincere interest in the latter’s folk music and the sounds of its natural environment. As a result, the impressions with which he had been imbued left a distinctive stamp on his new works composed there and on the idiom of his penultimate creative period.