Duets: With moderate movement
Ostinato: Very fast
Solo: Very calm
Burlesque: Fast, con fuoco
Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima): Slow – Slowly moving

This late and very private masterpiece was Britten’s last chamber work, completed in November 1975. It is also one of his very few works to contain self-quotations, from the opera Death in Venice. The structure is unusual (Britten contemplated calling it a ‘Divertimento’) and the five movements form an arch. Colin Matthews, who worked as Britten’s assistant on this quartet, has written that ‘the main weight [is] borne by the outer movements, while the middle movements are in the nature of intermezzi.’ The first movement is a melancholy Andante, while the brittle ‘Ostinato’ and ‘Burlesque’ frame the ‘Solo’, an Adagio of breathtaking restraint and luminous beauty. The Finale, ‘La Serenissima’, is an intimate hymn to Venice, a gentle Passacaglia (a favourite Britten form – in Peter Grimes and the Second String Quartet), but one which never finds repose: just as it seems to be settling on E major, Britten ends the work on a most enigmatic musical question mark.

Nigel Simeone 2013