The String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18, was composed in 1860 by Johannes Brahms. It was published in 1862 by the firm of Fritz Simrock.
The sextet is scored for two violins, two violas, and two cellos.
The sextet has four movements:[1]
The outlines of the main themes of the first movement and finale are similar (the first four notes of the cello theme of the first movement are almost identical with those of notes two to five of the finale, and there are other similarities more easily heard.)
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There are earlier examples by Luigi Boccherini (two sets of six each). However, between the Boccherini and the Brahms, very few for stringed instruments without piano seem to have been written or published, whereas within the decades following Brahms' two examples, a number of composers, including Antonín Dvořák, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Joachim Raff, Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, all wrote string sextets.
Exceptions, composers whose sextets appeared between the Boccherini and the Brahms, include a sextuor a deux violins, deux violes, violoncelle & basse from the 1780s (still later than the 1776 or so of Boccherini's opus 23) by Ignaz Pleyel[2], Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński's opus 39 in E-flat (from 1845 or 1849?)[3][4], Louis Spohr's in C opus 140 of 1848, but they do not seem to have been many.
This sextet was used as soundtrack by French director Louis Malle in the movie "The Lovers" ("Les Amants", 1958).
The second movement of the Sextet was featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Sarek".