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Completed a year before his death, Britten's fourth and final examination of the string quartet genre contains music that reflects his own acceptance of his mortality. At the same time, it contains a humorous bit of poking fun at a colleague who believed that a string quartet composed of textures less than four lines were missing the point of a string quartet. The first movement, entitled "duets," almost completely avoids four-part writing, and the third movement, "solo," is an even more obvious foil.
The fifth and final movement, "La Serenissima," owes much to his final opera, A Death in Venice, op. 88, and to the city of Venice itself, where Britten had spent many happy holidays (Britten wrote much of this quartet in that city). Its form is a passacaglia, a structure that had served Britten very well over the course of his career, and one of which he had repeatedly illustrated his mastery. It is fitting that his "final artistic testament" (although not his final work) should take this form. Britten completed only one more work after this one, but it was with the String Quartet No. 3 that he left his real final mark.
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