'The next I'll do is 3 violin quartets'' wrote Schumann to Clara Wieck in 1838, stating his reasons in a letter dated 17 March 1838: ''The thought of the quartets gives me pleasure. The piano is getting too narrow for me. In composing now I often hear a lot of things that I can barely suggest. For instance, it is remarkable how I invent almost everything canonically and never discover the imitating voices until afterward, very often in inversions, inverted rhythms.'' The new urtext edition is based on the text of the Schumann Complete Edition.