The third quartet, in F major, remained incomplete at the composer's death.
[1][2] Grieg wrote the quartet in 1877–78, while living at a farm in Hardanger.
[1][3][4][5] He wrote to a friend "I have recently finished a string quartet which I still haven't heard.
It strives towards breadth, soaring flight and above all resonance for the instruments for which it is written.
English musicologist Gerald Abraham, writing in 1948, suggested that Claude Debussy's String Quartet, also in G minor, was either consciously or subconsciously modelled on Grieg's quartet.