Louis Spohr was accepted during his lifetime as one of the most important violinistcomposers of early German Romanticism. A great violinist in his own right, Spohr wrote his quartets, which span more than fifty years of his creative career, in order to display his own technical brilliance. No. 32, written at the time of the 1848 Revolution, which the liberal Spohr openly supported, is a warmly optimistic work with rich harmonies pointing ahead to Brahms. However, Quartet No. 34, written five years after the revolution had been brutally repressed, carries an undertow of sadness and unsettling syncopation, a sure sign that frivolity could no longer prevail.