Gebel: String Quartets

Franz Xaver Gebel’s biographer Ernst Stöckl reported that while there were at least three Gebel string quartets, he was familiar with but one, the published Quartet in D major. Despite persistent research in Russian libraries, he was unable to find the others mentioned in contemporary discussions about concerts. Recently however, the sheet music for the Quartet in E-flat major, printed in Moscow around 1840, where Gebel spent the remainder of his life after 1817, was found in a German library. The Hoffmeister Quartet performs these rarely heard, little-known early-Romantic gems.