Martinů returned to the string quartet genre in 1946, commissioned by Arthur Tillman Merritt, head of the musicology department at Harvard University, for a forthcoming symposium on music criticism.
Although Martinů was still recovering from a serious accident he suffered in a fall from a terrace in Great Barrington on 17 July 1946, he nevertheless accepted the prestigious commission and began composing his String Quartet No. 6 in mid-October, which he completed on 25 December 1946. It was premiered by the Walden Quartet on May 1, 1947 at the Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Martinů was present in person and thus witnessed first-hand the success of his composition, which concluded the concert. The high number of music critics present at the symposium and its associated concerts was evident in the extraordinary number of reviews published in American newspapers and magazines in the following days and weeks.
The Walden Quartet decided to include the work in the repertoire from the following season, and the players therefore refused to return the performance material in which the Paganini Quartet had expressed interest. A recording of the Walden Quartet made in 1953 is an extremely interesting and, even for the critical edition, valuable record of the performance of the 6th String Quartet. The first European performance took place on 4 October 1955 at London's Wigmore Hall by the Indig Quartet.
The Czechoslovak premiere by the Hába (later Novák) Quartet took place on 5 June 1955 at the Rudolfinum in Prague. The ensemble then performed the work in a number of Czech cities, in Stockholm, Berlin, Tehran, Beirut and Cairo, and recorded it in March 1958 in a radio studio in East Berlin.
The String Quartet No. 6 was offered to Martinů by the publisher Melantrich. He signed the contract for publication on 15 December 1947 in New York. As a result of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, Martinů lost track of the score's future fate and therefore conducted parallel negotiations with the publisher Boosey & Hawkes. The first printed edition of the pocket score was published in 1950 by the newly established National Music Publishing House Orbis. Martinů was not involved in it, receiving it only by post in June 1950, and expressed his praise for it with the reservation that they had forgotten to include a dedication to Mrs Rosalie Barstow. In April 1958, however, he wrote to Šafránek asking him not to overemphasise this unrealized dedication in his forthcoming monograph in view of the composer's wife.
Aleš Březina, Hudební rozhledy, 6/2020