[7] By that point, poor health left Shostakovich unable to give a preliminary performance on the piano as he had with his previous quartets.

The quartet's cellist, Sergei Shirinsky [ru], one of the group's two remaining founding members, had a heart attack earlier that year and was also having health problems at the time.

[4] During the rehearsals, he asked the members to play the opening movement "so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.

[7] Shostakovich asked the Taneyev Quartet, whom he had already familiarized with the score, to take over the responsibility of the world premiere,[9] an offer which they accepted.

[10] Prior to the Moscow premiere, Dmitri Tsyganov, the Beethoven Quartet's last surviving founding member, visited Shostakovich in the hospital for interpretive advice.

This gives way to the "Intermezzo," which conceals a self-quotation from The Nose,[3] a score which had been revived in the Soviet Union for the first time in 45 years while the quartet's premiere was being prepared.

In an article published by the Information Bulletin of the Copyright Agency of the Soviet Union, Shostakovich wrote, "I tried to make [the Fifteenth Quartet] a dramatic work; it is hard to say whether I succeeded.

[17] After listening to a private performance by the Taneyev Quartet at his apartment, Shostakovich thanked them for "having penetrated so deeply the essence of this philosophical work, which I hold most dear.

[22] According to Krzysztof Meyer, the Fifteenth Quartet was greeted with a standing ovation at its premiere, which Shostakovich acknowledged with difficulty because of his deteriorating physical abilities.

Gerald Larner in The Guardian called it "a beautiful work, a credible and more than worthy companion to the recent symphonies" and that it was "yet another demonstration how fruitful, in creative terms, is Shostakovich's present preoccupation with death.

"[24] In a review for the Birmingham Post, John Falding wrote that Shostakovich's ability to sustain the quartet's "haunting sadness and [its] atmosphere of total desolation" was a "mark of [his] brilliance".