The Spokane String Quartet opens the 2026 portion of its season with three composers examining change in their lives. Haydn in 1799 was working on his last string quartet, the same year that Beethoven was working on his first. Both were commissioned by the same patron, and Haydn’s later work is often compared to Beethoven’s earliest. Bartok was starting his career when he wrote his first quartet in the early 1900s. And Schumann wrote his first quartet in 1842, an intense time known as his “year of chamber music.”