Anton Bruckner's String Quartet was composed in 1862 at which time he was, at thirty-eight, a student of Otto Kitzler. Bruckner regarded the compositions he produced during this period as exercises. In the case of the C minor String Quartet, the goal was to master form and the chamber music idiom. Listeners new to this work will find virtually nothing premonitory of the essential Bruckner in it but this piece, highly by the book, is well-crafted and charming, often looking back to the late Classical-early Romantic period. If anything Brucknerian can be divined, it is the very subtle thematic connections between movements, possibly intentional.

The Quartet commences with something of a two-part theme, the first Albinoni-like and the second more animated, similar in nature to some of Elgar's string writing. The lyrical second theme has a slightly brooding character, not yet inhabiting the songlike world of Bruckner's later second themes. The development is unusual in its working out of the two parts of the main theme and largely avoiding the second theme. The recapitulation is very conventional and the movement comes to a concise end. The main theme of the slow movement is searching with a faint suggestion of Liszt; however, one may detect a premonition of mature Bruckner in the shifting of tonal planes and a characteristic slightly clerical closing cadence. The more animated middle section is very Schubertian in its use of insistent dotted rhythms and makes for an attractive contrast. The return of the main theme is more contrapuntal while retaining its muted lyricism. The charming scherzo is virtually a minuet, very Haydnesque and almost anachronistic; interestingly the clerical cadence reappears, suggesting a possible link to the slow movement, a device to which Bruckner would return in later works. The trio is more in the nature of a Ländler and quite Austrian in flavor. The finale is a rondo, its first theme bearing a resemblance to that of the first movement. The lyrical second theme is followed by an unusual spiraling figure leading back to the first theme. This in turn is followed by a rhythmic contrapuntal episode, followed by a repetition of all three themes in order. A sequence on a fragment of the third theme leads to the terse coda.

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