String quintets date back as early as 1607, when the quintet was employed in Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo. Fast-forward over 200 years later, and you will find the works of Franz Schubert that were written for string quintet, one example being his String Quintet in C Major for Strings, D. 956. Franz Schubert lived from 1797 to 1828. The String Quintet, which is Schubert's final chamberwork and his only full-fledged string quintet, was written in 1828 two months before he died when Schubert was 31 years old. Amazingly, when Schubert offered his work to one of the publishers, he was uninterested, causing Schubert to have a private rehearsal of the piece just one month before his death. Amazingly, the piece was not heard in public until 1850, an entire twenty-two years after he died. It then was finally published in 1853. Typically, a string quartet would be comprised of two violins, one viola, and two cellos. When deciding on the instrumentation for their quintets, both Mozart and Beethoven chose to keep a normal string quintet instrumentation, and simply added a second viola. Schubert, however, did not decide to take this route. He decided instead upon adding a second cello, which gives his Quintet a slightly different sound resulting in bit of a darker and more grave sounding ensemble. Schubert had great admiration for Mozart and Beethoven, so it has been suggested that Schubert selected the key of C major for his only string quintet because both Mozart and Beethoven composed string quintets in that key. It has also been noted that the opening theme of Schubert's quintet contains quite a few elements that Mozart's String Quintet No. 3 in C major, K. 515 contained. These similarities include irregular phrase lengths, decorative turns, and rising staccato arpeggios although the staccato arpeggios occurred in Schubert's recapitulation, not his opening theme. The Quintet contains four movements in the typi