16, completed only a few days earlier, also received its premiere on this concert, which also included a performance of his Sept chansons de Clement Marot, for tenor and piano, Op.

[4] The Octet is dedicated to André Gedalge, one of Enescu's professors at the Conservatory, whose support in convincing the firm of Enoch & Cie to publish the score was deeply appreciated by the composer[3]

The conductor Karl Krueger reported that, when he asked the composer how he felt about having the work played by a larger body of string players, Enescu enthusiastically replied, "That's how it should be!".

[5] When Enoch reprinted the score in 1950, Enescu added a new preface in which he endorsed this option, but with some qualifications:This work can be played with a full string orchestra on condition that certain singing parts [passages chantants] be entrusted to soloists.

[6]Enescu's composition stands in contrast to Felix Mendelssohn's Octet, which sets a soloistic violin part against an accompaniment of the other stringed instruments.

Enescu's work on the other hand is "a genuine octet that finds its most natural expression just in its hallucinatory convergent and divergent contrapuntal voices".