String Quartet in D Major, Op. 4 (1916)

The untimely circumstances of Wilhelm Grosz's unexpected passing in 1939 meant that some works mentioned in the papers of his estate were lost. This was the case with his only String Quartet, three movements of which were rediscovered in a library in the Netherlands in 2016, with the composer's hand (many thanks to my friend Matthew Baker, who assisted with obtaining digital images of the original). 

Grosz's 1936 Werkverzeichnis (directory of works) refers to the manuscript as "bei mir" (in his possession), meaning that the work was not published by Universal Editions.  How the original manuscript came to be in this Dutch library remains a mystery for now.

The work was conceived during Grosz's time in the Austro-Hungarian Army, probably completed after the war, and is an ambitious attempt to distill the lush, complicated harmonic language of Mahler and Schreker into a quartet format.  According to Grosz, it was first performed in 1919 by the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet in Vienna (the first three movements). A second performance with the missing fourth movement was given in 1923 in Vienna by the renowned Amar-Hindemith Quartet.  So far, attempts to locate the fourth movement have proven fruitless - the Centre du Musique Hindemith holds no records of this performance, and the Freiburg Hochschule (where Licco Amar ended his teaching career) holds none of the violinist's personal papers.