Each of the four string quartets by the Bohemian composer Hans Winterberg (1901-1991) has its own unusual history. The first, composed in happy times in Prague in 1936, had to wait until 2024 for its premiere. The second was composed under dramatic circumstances in the war year 1942, when Winterberg, by a twist of fate, was not deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp like his colleagues Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krsa and Gideon Klein, thus surviving the Shoah. The third, like all his other works not published during his lifetime, was composed in 1957, at another existentially difficult time after his great success as a composer in Munich in the early 1950s, where he had fled shortly before the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1947. Due to its enormous interpretative challenges, it was not until 1970 that Winterberg found an ensemble in the legendary Sonnleitner Quartet – members of the Munich Philharmonic – that could do justice to the technical and emotional demands of the work.

This first edition of the second string quartet documents both versions of the quartet: the original from 1957 and the second with the retouching that the composer made after the failure of the first performance in 1969 by the concertmaster quartet of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.