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‘O youth of our days, thou art gone!’: Schubert’s two string quartets of 1824 FOLLOWING a flurry of activity as a composer of string quartets at the tender age of sixteen, Schubert wrote only three further quartets during his period of apprenticeship—one in each of the succeeding three years. After this there was a long hiatus, broken only by an attempt, at the end of 1820, to write a quartet in C minor. (Its opening movement, the only portion of the work Schubert completed, is familiarly known as the Quartettsatz, or ‘Quartet Movement’.) By the time Schubert returned to the medium of the string quartet, in the spring of 1824, he was writing not for the family drawing room, but for the concert hall. At the same time, the world of his youth had been irretrievably lost to him, and a marked change had come over his music. The previous year he had felt the first symptoms of syphilis, and had been forced to write several of the songs in his cycle of rejected love, Die schöne Müllerin, during a protracted stay in hospital. His state of mind is revealed in a letter to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser, of 31 March 1824: I feel as though I am the unhappiest, most miserable man on earth. Imagine a man whose health will never be regained, and whose despair at the thought makes things increasingly worse, rather than better; imagine a man, I tell you, whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom happiness in love and friendship offers nothing but the greatest pain, for whom enthusiasm for what is beautiful threatens to disappear, and ask yourself if that isn’t a miserable and unhappy man? Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer, ich finde sie nimmer und nimmer mehr— now I can sing that every day, because every night when I go to sleep, I hope not to wake up again, and each morning serves only to renew yesterday’s grief. F 2 With Schubert’s acute awareness of his own mortality came a new-found determination to make a bid for posterity. In the same letter in which he so tellingly quoted the opening lines of his earlier setting of Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade—‘My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, never and never more shall I find peace’— Schubert informed him: I have composed 2 quartets for violins, viola & violoncello, and intend to write another quartet. Altogether, in this way I intend to pave the way towards the grand symphony. The latest in Vienna is that Beethoven is giving a concert in which he is having his new symphony [No 9], three movements from the new Mass and a new overture [Die Weihe des Hauses] performed. God willing, I am also thinking of giving a similar concert in the coming year. Just how lofty Schubert’s aspirations were is shown by the fact that he dedicated his new quartets to the famous violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the leader of the string quartet so closely associated with Beethoven’s works in this form. Nor can it be coincidental that the following year the first of Schubert’s published piano sonatas appeared with a dedication to Beethoven’s staunchest patron, Archduke Rudolph of Austria. Schuppanzigh was enthusiastic about the first of Schubert’s new works, the Quartet in A minor D804, and included it in one of the matinee concerts his quartet held in the spring of 1824. Judging by a report Schubert’s artist friend Moritz von Schwind sent to Franz von Schober, another member of the composer’s intimate circle, the performance was a success:
Schubert’s Quartet was performed, in his opinion rather slowly, but very cleanly and tenderly. It is on the whole very delicate, but of a kind that a melody remains with one as in songs, all feeling and thoroughly expressive. It received much applause, especially the minuet, which is extraordinarily tender and natural. A Chinaman next to me found it affected and wanting in style. I should like to see Schubert affected just once. Schuppanzigh’s favourable opinion of Schubert’s quartetwriting did not, however, extend to the second work of the planned triptych. ‘Death and the Maiden’ was first played through at the lodgings of another of Schubert’s friends, the composer and conductor Franz Lachner. According to Lachner, Schuppanzigh advised Schubert to limit himself to writing songs. His criticism of the D minor Quartet must have come as a bitter blow to the composer, and it may well explain why he temporarily shelved the third work of his series. (In the summer of 1826 Schubert composed his great G major Quartet D887, which may have been intended as a companion-piece to the two works of 1824.) All the same, Schubert had cause to be grateful to Schuppanzigh: of all his many large-scale chamber masterpieces, the A minor Quartet was the only one to appear in print during his lifetime. The title-page of the first edition proclaimed: Trois Quatuors pour deux Violons, Alto et Violoncelle, composés et dédiés à son ami I. Schuppanzigh … par François Schubert de Vienne. As for ‘Death and the Maiden’, it was first issued in 1831 by Joseph Czerný, a publisher who acquired several of Schubert’s works (besides the D minor String Quartet, they included the ‘Trout’ Quintet) shortly after his death in November 1828. Schubert’s two quartets of 1824 seem to be suffused with regret for the lost world of his youth, and the String Quartet in A minor D804, in particular, is one of the most hauntingly melancholy pieces he ever wrote. Its minuet harks back to his setting of a stanza from Schiller’s Die Götter Griechenlands (‘The Greek Gods’), also in A minor, which he had written some five years earlier, and which poses the question ‘Schöne Welt, wo bist du?’ (‘Beautiful world, where art thou?’). The turn to the major for the trio of Schubert’s minuet coincides with Schiller’s plea: ‘Kehre wieder’ (‘Come back’). The minuet is not the only portion of the A minor Quartet to be based on pre-existing material. The opening pages of the slow movement are transcribed from the B flat major Entr’acte in the incidental music Schubert had recently written for the play Rosamunde. The theme, with its pervasive dactylic rhythm, is typically Schubertian, and it was to reappear in a slightly different form in the composer’s famous B flat major Impromptu for piano of 1827 (D935 No 3). What is remarkable about the Quartet’s slow movement is the manner in which Schubert manages to imbue the innocuoussounding tune with symphonic tension. In marked contrast to Schubert’s D minor Quartet, all four movements of the A minor work begin pianissimo, and it was perhaps this unusual feature that led Moritz von Schwind to remark on the delicateness of the work as a whole. In the opening movement, the melancholy main theme is actually preceded by two bars of bare accompaniment—partly in order to soften the first violin’s thematic entry, but also to throw into relief the shuddering rhythmic figure that underpins the accompaniment. The same figure runs like a guiding 3
Page 1: FRANZ SCHUBERT DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
Page 5 and 6: almost manic exuberance. His model
Page 7 and 8: 1977, winning First Prize and the C
Page 9 and 10: Schwind, ami de Schubert, envoya à
Page 11 and 12: jusqu’à la faire déborder sur l
Page 13 and 14: urteilen, den Schuberts Freund und
Page 15 and 16: choralartige Passage, die eindeutig
Page 17 and 18: SCHUBERT STRING QUARTETS ‘DEATH A

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