It would be an exaggeration to claim that Joseph Haydn invented the string quartet. But he did establish an ideal of the genre. His C major Quartet op. 20 No. 2 stands at the turning point of his efforts to achieve a tonal and structural balance that is formative for this ideal. Not long after Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven created a milestone on the way to an increasingly expressive and dramatic musical language with the first of his three “Razumovsky Quartets”. This expressive language appears also in Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, bearing witness to the life of its creator with all its hostilities and threats.