February 22, 1848, riots seized Paris. Two days later, the government of Louis Philippe fell. News, and violence, spread quickly—by March 13 thousands of workers filled the streets of Vienna, challenging imperial troops. Liszt, on his way back to Weimar with his new mistress Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, toured their barricades and penned a male-voice Arbeiterchor, which he coached the workers to sing in the open air—though he found it prudent to delay publication. In June, Wagner, Kapellmeister at Dresden, delivered an intellectually pretentious but vehement harangue before several thousand members of a group developing plans to arm the people. When fighting reached Dresden the following year, and the opera house was burnt, Wagner, fleeing to Swiss exile, was a prime suspect. Meanwhile, by the beginning of March, revolutionary fervor had brought people into the streets of Kassel, capital of Hesse—among them Louis Spohr, the Elector's Generalmusikdirektor—demanding reform. Spohr attended the insurgents' meetings, inspected their entrenchments—"You see we can make as good barricades here as in Paris!"—and led the crowd in Ernst Moritz Arndt's popular anthem for a united Germany, Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland. Seeking to defuse an inflammatory situation and minimize violence, the Elector acceded to all demands. For a moment, everything seemed possible—freedom of worship, of speech, an uncensored press, a German nation, utopia. A token of those heady days, Spohr entered the string Sextet in C, Op. 140, in his works list as "Written in March and April at the time of the glorious People's Revolution towards the Rebirth of Germany's Freedom, Unity and Greatness." To have been composed in such incendiary times, the Sextet breathes a curious serenity, an almost visionary aura of benediction in which the exuberant ardor of such early works as the Nonet, Op. 31, or the Double Quartet, Op. 65 (which, thanks to a classic recording featuring Heifetz and Piatigorsky among the ensemble, kept Spohr's name alive through the latter twentieth century), has mellowed. Less viscerally gripping, perhaps, the Sextet is immediately engaging and expressively richer—alive in every part, it possesses a tapestry-like glow. Its opening movement is a lyrically effusive hymn of thanksgiving whose themes are caressed throughout by a trilling motif. The brief, stately Larghetto is a barely restrained ode to joy that seems to pinch itself in confirmation of its dream of harmony. The final Scherzo alternates a Ländler-like promenade—the people united in a dance of freedom—with a giddily mercurial Presto.

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