Unfinished Quartet (Parts): By Dmitri Shostakovich

Being published for the first time, this composition was discovered in 2003 in Shostakovichs Archives by Olga Digonskaya and Olga Dombrovskaya. This work has been defined as one of Shostakovichs early attempts to write the Ninth Quartet, but for some reason, was never completed. The work was written between the end of August, 1961 and the third or fourth weeks of June, 1962.

The composition consists of two authors manuscripts. The first is an incomplete fair score of the first movement (a total of 225 bars) on 12 sheets (one empty) of 12-line piano score paper, paginated by the author on every page, 1 through 22, and with bar-by-bar indexing in indelible pencil. The authors manuscript is written in purple ink. In the upper margin of the first sheet, the composer wrote,