Farewell, Lera Auerbach’s String Quartet No. 6, carries the German title Abschied. In two movements — Prologue and Epilogue — the quartet frames farewell not as an ending alone, but as a space of memory, threshold and after-sound.

Written for and dedicated to the Tokyo String Quartet, the work stands as an intimate chamber farewell: a concentrated form in which beginning and ending mirror one another, and where the traditional quartet becomes a vessel for leave-taking.

A farewell in two panels: prologue and epilogue, arrival and departure, the first word already remembering the last.

The quartet was co-commissioned by Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical Madrid, BASF-Kulturmanagement and 92nd Street Y New York, and received its first performance in Madrid by the Tokyo String Quartet.

String Quartet No. 6 “Farewell” follows String Quartet No. 5 “Songs of Alkonost” and turns from mythic song toward the ritual shape of departure. Its two-part structure gives the work an unusual symmetry: a prologue that already contains the possibility of ending, and an epilogue that feels like a final illumination.

As chamber music, it is presented here with the official Boosey & Hawkes / Sikorski work and purchase pages rather than rental-material links.