String Quartet in E major is the eighth of Dvorák’s fourteen works for the most common of chamber music ensembles. The score, originally correctly designated as Op. 27, was written between 20 January and 4 February 1876 in Prague. It was Dvorák’s preceding loss of his second child that apparently gave the piece its tinge of melancholy – although the quartet is set in a major key, it mostly plays in a minor one. The work was not published until 1888, when Simrock purposefully used the higher Opus number 80. The publication is part of the first Complete Edition of the Works of Antonín Dvorák.