As a young chorister, the fourteen-year-old Franz Schubert penned his first string quartets, a qenre that he would continue to explore until the last vears of his life. Fifteen auartets, of remarkable originality and bewitching lyricism, entered into history, bearing at once the legacy of the Classical Era and a vision of the future. These works are marked by the tides of life – disillusion. illness, but also the flourishing of a magisterial mind.