Schubert: String Quartet in D minor, D.810 “Der Tod und das Mädchen”
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro molto
Presto – Prestissimo
What more is there to say about arguably the most popular and famous of all string quartets?! Certainly for this writer there has been, over the past few years, the thrill and amazement of new discovery: because the quartet repertoire is of such quality and vastness it follows that no amount of longevity as a player can deny such an experience on a fairly regular basis. But in response to the incredulity of listeners, who enquire as to why it took 43 years of quartet playing to take on this of all pieces, the main response has been simply that it was well worth the wait! The Fitzwilliam policy always used to be that audiences can hear this, and other well-known pieces (eg Smetana’s From My Life), whenever they want to; and our feeling was that we would contribute much more to concert life by promoting music they might not otherwise hear. But there comes a time when one needs to start ticking off these timeless masterpieces, before the opportunity is lost….. And in this instance it has truly been cathartic: this musical icon, that one has known so well all one’s life, heard on countless occasions played by other ensembles, coached at chamber music courses, occasionally read through of course – eventually performed (and recorded) ourselves! Truly an experience never to be forgotten.
There were a number of features that surprised – even shocked – us during our first attempt: for example, the ferocity of much of the first movement, the incredible imagination – yet firm discipline – of those so-familiar variations; above all, the wild tempestuousness of the tarantella finale (Brian Newbould prefers “Saltarello”), which left us all physically and emotionally shaking at certain moments – notably, following a spidery decrescendo, that scary silence when the music temporarily pauses for breath from its headlong momentum. These are sounds that can keep you awake at night; yet one can only be aghast to look back to an earlier generation of music commentary, there to be reminded that certain composers – whose genius we would nowadays not dare question – seemed to be the butt of endless criticism. Schubert (in the good company of such successors as Bruckner and Tchaikovsky) was often found wanting over matters of form and structure: Arthur Hutchings declared this celebrated D minor quartet to be “not a perfect work”, whose first movement contained “…defects, which are entirely architectural…”; and continuing: “…the finale, however fine a conception in itself, is the very movement which is hardly in keeping with the pathos of its fellows”. To his credit, Sir Jack Westrup admired its “ruthless logic…..tautness of construction….an intelligence which is firmly in control”! Contradictory or not….? And it is no surprise to find the most perceptive of all to be our leading Schubert scholar, Brian Newbould himself: when you have spent hours, months – years! – grappling with a composer’s unfinished manuscripts, making them available to the world through inspired performing editions/completions, you are surely more likely to have got under a composer’s skin than most others. Of course, Prof Newbould realizes that such remarks as those of Hutchings are founded on misguided attempts to judge one composer’s structures using criteria derived from an earlier era. He also recognizes the sheer scale Schubert was aspiring to, when he suggests that the very opening simulates “trumpets & drums” (and often, over the years, reminding us that tempi for Schubert’s first movements must normally be correspondingly more spacious than for, say, Beethoven). Just being content to sound like a conventional string quartet in “late” Schubert simply will not do! In his classic book on the symphonies we are reminded that “…the appeal of the symphony was so strong that he never lost his commitment to it….”
On 31st March 1824, Schubert wrote to his friend, the painter Leopold Kupelwieser, that he had recently completed two string quartets – the A minor and D minor. But the tone of much of the letter is uncomfortably gloomy, often despairing; and he actually quotes two lines of Goethe which he had set ten years previously in Gretchen am Spinnrade: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy; never, never again will I find rest”. Having contracted syphilis two years earlier, he might well have felt his days to be numbered – although such speculation can be treacherous: remember that Gretchen was composed in 1814, by a lad of seventeen; whereas the gloriously sunny B flat trio appeared in 1827, right after Winterreise, when his demise was certainly all too near at hand.
The gloomy melancholy which pervades so much of the A minor quartet is also embraced (to a certain extent) by its successor (all four movements of which, highly unusually, are in the minor key); but now expanded into a more vigorous, at times almost aggressively confrontational, energy and passion. In the letter to Kupelwieser he goes on to declare that he wanted to write a third quartet “and so prepare the way for a grosse Symphonie”; in fact the G major was not composed until two years later (suggesting maybe that he actually used the Great C major symphony of 1825/6 as practice for this grosses Streichquartett….?!). So if we wonder why works like the D minor and G major quartets strike us as being more symphonic in their gestures than we might have expected, we only have to recall these various statements – allied to the practical fact that the last ten years of his life presented no opportunities at all for the public performance of a new Schubert symphony. The first six had been composed at a rate of one a year, when there was an orchestra available to him either at school (the Vienna Stadtkonvikt), or at Otto Hatwig’s music salon. Thereafter he actually completed only one more symphony (No.9), even though he attempted no fewer than six others (including the famous “Unfinished”, as well as the Tenth). No doubt there were many more being spawned in his mind, and it might not be too fanciful to speculate that the last two quartets, the string quintet, two piano trios, the late A major piano sonata, were really all symphonies that could never expect to find an orchestra to play them!
There is a popular misconception that Schubert never actually heard two of his greatest symphonic works: the ninth symphony and this quartet. Whilst it is true that there were no public performances during his lifetime he did actually hear them both rehearsed. One wonders whether he too was as taken aback by what he had done as we quartet players have been…. The often terrifying power and directness of this piece might well have left him as breathless and exhilarated as the music itself.
© Alan George
