[2] A further adjustment to the last seven bars of the score was made on 1 October 1951, on an addendum sheet attached to the cello part of the autograph parts now in the George Enescu Museum in Bucharest, with a note in the composer's hand reading "2de version (definitive) des dernières mesures du 2d Quatuor à cordes (sol majeur), Georges Enesco, op.

[4] Enescu replied on 7 December 1952 that he had no new work in preparation and consequently could not accept the advance proposal from the Koussevitzky Foundation, but he had just finished his Second String Quartet, dedicated to Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.

Enescu's letter crossed in the post with an acknowledgment of the manuscript's safe arrival, written on 17 June 1953 by Edward N. Waters, Assistant Chief of the Music Division.

[9][10] The members of the Stradivarius Quartet were Wolfe Wolfinsohn and Harry Kobialka, violins, Eugene Lehner, viola, and Alfred Zighera, cello.

These parts, prepared from an unknown and now-lost manuscript source, were used for a performance at the Dalles Concert Hall in Bucharest by the Radio String Quartet (Mircea Negrescu, Dorian Varga, Marcel Gross, and Ion Fotino), on 19 October 1956, in what was believed in Romania at the time to be the world premiere.

It was at a conference held in conjunction with this very festival that the Romanians were astonished to learn for the first time, from a paper presented by the American musicologist Irving Lowens,[11] of the existence of the autograph manuscript score held by the Library of Congress in Washington (together with a set of parts made by a copyist, but with corrections and annotations in Enescu's hand), and that the Quartet had already been premiered in 1954.

The work consists of four movements: The overall plan is very similar to that of Enescu's Octet, written fifty years earlier, in that it is constructed as a vast sonata-allegro form.

[13] Although the layout follows the traditional four-movement pattern for string quartets, Enescu's sometimes unconventional procedures have provoked considerable disagreement when it comes to describing the structure of the individual movements.