In 1887, Antonín Dvořák selected 12 of the 18 love songs from his collection Cypresses (Czech: Cypřiše), B.11, of 1865, and arranged them for string quartet, B.152.
2–4, 6–9, 12, 14, and 16–18; the original songs are for solo voice and piano, and are settings of poems by Gustav Pfleger Moravský from the collection "Cypresses" (hence the title).
They were originally titled Echos of Songs, later Evening Songs, under which name numbers 1–3 & 9 were given their 1st performance by Karel Ondříček, Jan Pelikan, Petr Mares & Alois Neruda, at Umělecká beseda, on 6 January 1888.
[4] The original songs are clearly recognisable in these string quartet arrangements, with melodic line, rhythm and harmony unchanged.
For No.11, Dvořák changed the key, and half of them he extended by repetition, mostly with some interchange of allocation of lines to the different instruments.