Schubert: String Quintet in C major, D.956 (Op.163, 1828)

Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio
Scherzo: Presto  Trio:  Andante sostenuto
Allegretto

It was a humbling experience, 44 years ago in a recording studio, suddenly to realize that one was committing a performance of a piece of music to posterity at the same age as that of the composer when he wrote it. Such a coincidence must be commonplace, but with Schubert and his string quintet the awful awareness that his last birthday had already (unknowingly?) been celebrated provoked a frightening consciousness of one’s own mortality. With every subsequent performance comes a feeling that the interim days or months are a bonus, making each occasion something of a celebration. Indeed, there is much of this music that – on the surface, at least – is celebratory, from the first blazing tutti in the opening movement, through the “horn-calls” and the brazenness of the Scherzo, to the whipped-up tempo of the finale’s coda. But despite its great length, and the addition of an extra cello to the normal string quartet – with the massive sonorities thus made available – one’s lasting impression of the quintet is surely far removed from grandeur or thrills. If one is shocked by the Andante sostenuto of the Trio, then perhaps one has not fully understood Schubert’s entreaties; for does he not desire this to be the inner sanctum of the work, its unearthly stillness underlining the essence of the previous Adagio and the first movement’s second subject, as well as preparing us for the elevated repose at the close of the exposition and recapitulation in the finale? And what of the beginning of this Trio, with its dotted rhythm which serves to soften the jolt after the feverish energy of the Scherzo? We think back to the first violin’s famous counterpoint at the start of the Adagio, itself a sweet recollection of that dark presence, like a distant military march, which had challenged and transformed the outpouring of song at the end of the first movement’s exposition. Indeed, this sinister figure continues into the development section, and its uneasy influence is never really shaken off again.

Such cross references are as important psychologically as they are structurally. Another principal foundation lies in key-relationships and modulations, together with their various associations. Schubert’s predilection for slipping into flatter keys is nowhere more manifest than in this work, although the direction taken is not always the most expected. An important exception is the upward journey, for the Adagio, to Schubert’s Edenic key (apparent from many of his Lieder texts) of E major, a key associated by Baroque composers with Heaven. This in turn is countered in the stormy central section by a pointedly abrupt – “Neapolitan” – transition to the flat supertonic, F minor, the traditional key of chants lugubres.

Even if one has no technical knowledge of key structure, however, these important relationships and modulations still have the power to strike an emotional or sub-conscious response. Likewise one need not have tasted the special atmosphere of a Heurige in order to grasp the nostalgia implicit in the finale’s sublimation of Viennese café music. A major chamber work may seem an unlikely setting for an evocation of such a milieu, but those who frown have not fully followed the degeneration of the Adagio’s blissful dream into a nightmarish confrontation with reality. But by choosing so hedonistic a representation of that reality Schubert at least presents each of us with the choice of forsaking the inner experience for a pleasurable engagement with the tunes themselves. You don’t have to be a thirty-one-year-old musician to find a congenial spirit in the soul of this generous man – that mixture (according to the poet Mayrhofer) of “tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and melancholy”.

FSQ performances have always been from the Neue Schubert Ausgabe, published by Bärenreiter. The score is based on the first edition of 1851-3 (C. A. Spina/A. Diabelli & Co., parts only), but with inconsistencies of articulation, dynamics, phrasing, and appoggiaturas corrected – made possible by comparing the first edition of the G major Quartet, D.887, with an extant manuscript. No such manuscript exists for the Quintet. The most notable departure from traditional practice lies in the considerably increased number of accents, these occurring where Schubert’s exaggeratedly intense writing of the appropriate sign has long been mistaken for a “hairpin” diminuendo – for example, on the very last note of the work: the once familiar dying away – undeniably effective though it is – was never intended by the composer; instead there should be a stress on that cryptic D flat appoggiatura.

© Alan George
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