String Quartet in D major (Britten)

String Quartet in D major (with neither an official number nor an opus number) by English composer Benjamin Britten was written in 1931. He revised it during his final illness, and it was first published in 1974.
History.
The quartet was completed during Britten's second year of study at the Royal College of Music. Britten showed the score to his mentor Frank Bridge, who called its counterpoint "too vocal". John Ireland, his official teacher, disagreed. It was played through privately by the Stratton Quartet in 1932. Britten was "v. pleased" with the result, "it sounds more or less as I intended it".
In 1974, the composer revised it for publication, at the urging of Donald Mitchell. The revisions seem to have been fairly small.
Structure and analysis.
The quartet is in three movements:
A complete performance takes about 19 minutes.
Musicologist Peter Evans considered it an immediate background to, and to strongly foreshadow, Britten's "Sinfonietta", which was published in 1932 as his Op. 1.