If you say “Dvořák” and “string quartet” to most classical music lovers, they will immediately think of Dvořák’s “American” Quartet in F Major, composed during the summer of 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, where the composer and his family were vacationing after his first year as Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City.

Now, the “American” Quartet is an irresistible, tuneful masterwork – but it’s a little sad that its popularity with music lovers doesn’t extend to the 13 other string quartets that Dvořák composed, like his joyful and exuberant String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat Major, published as his Opus 105.

That quartet, too, was begun in America, in March of 1895, less than a month before Dvořák left America, and completed in December of that year after he had returned to Prague. In the last decade of his life, Dvořák devoted himself mostly to composing tone poems and operas based on Czech folk legends, so this quartet in A-flat Major proved to be the last he completed.

Its premiere performance took place in Prague on today’s date in 1896, given by the famous Rosé Quartet of Vienna, whose 1st violinist was Arnold Rosé, the concert master of the Vienna Philharmonic in those days.