Prima parte. Moderato –
Seconda parte. Allegro –
Recapitulazione della prima parte. Moderato –
Coda. Allegro molto

Composed in 1927, Bartók’s Third String Quartet was written for a competition launched in 1925 by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia for a new piece of chamber music, with three prizes totalling $10,000. When the competition closed at the end of 1927, 643 compositions had been submitted to a panel that included the conductors Willem Mengelberg and Fritz Reiner. The judges awarded the $6,000 first prize jointly to Bartók (for this quartet) and the Italian composer Alfredo Casella. The quartet was premiered at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia on 30 December 1928 and given for the first time in Europe a few weeks later, in Budapest on 19 February 1929.

The work is played without a break, but falls into two large sections, each one slow–fast. The quartet fuses a Beethoven-like sense of interweaving musical lines and extremely economical use of musical ideas with rhythmic elements and melodic contours that derive from Bartók’s study of Hungarian folk music, expressed in a harmonic language that is uncompromisingly of its time. For the first time in this quartet, Bartók uses techniques (including playing with the bow as close as possible to the bridge, and the ‘Bartók’ pizzicato where the string hits the fingerboard) that become familiar devices in his later quartets. Despite the contrasts between different sections, it is a work of fierce intensity that reaches a a pulverizing conclusion.