Extending String Quartet: Fellow Travelers

Against a backdrop of photos, the Ragazze Quartet plays music by composers with an American history: Fellow Travelers. Dvořák pursued fortune, Bartók was on the run. Both couldn’t settle in the New World, but they wrote some of their most beautiful compositions there.

Dvořák was happiest in New York in the company of other emigrated Czechs. His Twelfth String Quartet is a representation of the walks through the American landscape that he took every day shortly after dawn.

At the time when Bartók composed his last string quartet (he completed the work in Budapest in August 1939), he had already said goodbye to his homeland in spirit. Only his mother's poor health kept him at home. She died in December, immediately afterwards the composer left for America.