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The String Quartet No. 12 in F, Op. 96, B. 179, nicknamed the American, is one of the most popular...

The String Quartet No. 12 in F, Op. 96, B. 179, nicknamed the American, is one of the most popular pieces of chamber music by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. Dvořák composed the Quartet in 1893 during a summer retreat from his teaching post in New York. He spent his vacation in the hamlet of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community. The quartet was written around the same time as the New World Symphony, the crowning masterpiece of Dvořák's years in the United States. Of his time in Spillville, Dvořák said "As for my new Symphony, the F major String Quartet and the Quintet (composed here in Spillville) -- I should never have written these works 'just so' if I hadn't seen America." In the second movement, a listener may detect the melancholic longing of an African American spiritual, a sentiment with which the homesick Dvořák sympathized. The spirited third movement imitates the rhapsodic song of an American bird, and in the final movement, the composition strongly suggests the presence of a railway or train. The première performance took place on January 1, 1894 in Boston at the concert of Kneisel Quartet (members were F. Kneisel, O. Rott, L. Svècenski, Al.