Dvořák composed his ambitious String Quartet in C major, Op. 61, in the autumn of 1881 at the request of Joseph Hellmesberger Sr., the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic and first violinist of the Hellmesberger Quartet. However, the commissioner dismissed it as a weak work and never performed it publicly. Instead, the premiere took place a year later in Berlin with the Joachim Quartet. Dvořák, on the other hand, considered his Quartet Op. 61 to be the greatest and most complete of his chamber music works to date. His deliberate attempt to shed the cliché of a naive writer of Slavic melodies and to align himself with the Viennese tradition is evident in the intricate texture of the work and the echoes of Schubert's Quintet in C major and Brahms' Sextet in G major. The editor Simrock used the first edition of the score as the main source. Additionally, the autograph score as well as the first editions of the parts and the four-hand piano arrangement by Dvořák were evaluated. The edition includes a facsimile of twelve discarded measures from the Violin Sonata Op. 57, which Dvořák used and further developed in the second movement of the quartet.