Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 07/21/2012, uploaded on 01/15/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Schubert’s thousand or more compositions are the product of an extraordinarily full life that was somehow condensed into less than thirty-two years. It was only at its end that Vienna’s musical society, which still revolved around the aging Beethoven whom Schubert worshipped from afar, became aware of his existence and of his genius. When Schubert died, the poet Franz Grillparzer, who had so eloquently eulogized Beethoven sixteen months earlier, wrote his epitaph: “The art of music has buried a precious possession, but even fairer hopes. Franz Schubert lies here.”  

Schubert’s friends were not members of the great families, noble and wealthy, who for several generations were involved in the Viennese careers of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. They were almost without exception people of his own age, many of them talented, who lived as simply and poorly as he. In the spring of 1826, Schubert and two other young men went off to spend some time in a country village not far from Vienna. The weather was terrible, and his friends’ preoccupation with their unhappy love affairs of the moment bored him. He tried to put together ways to realize his great ambition to write a major opera, but this was not to be. Between June 20 and 30, he composed this great string quartet instead, and having used up all his expensive ruled music paper, he went on in the next few days to write some songs (“Who is Sylvia?” and “Hark, Hark, the Lark” among them) on whatever scraps he could find. Ten days after the quartet was finished, he wrote to a friend, “I have absolutely no money, and things in general are going very badly for me, but I don’t mind and am in good spirits.”  

By early 1828, musical Vienna had begun to realize that there was a curious young man of extraordinary gifts in town, and his friends decided that he should give a concert of his works. They arranged for the use of a hall and participation of musicians who had been members of Beethoven’s circle. The first movement of this string quartet was played, and the concert was a huge success with its standing room-only audience, but the critics paid little attention because they were much more interested at the moment in Paganini, who was also in Vienna. Schubert’s friends wanted to put on a repeat performance, but he used his profits to buy a new piano and immediately lost interest in more concert-giving. There is no record of another performance of this quartet or any part of it until 1850, and it was not published until 1851.

Some German scholars find the origins of the symphonic style of Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) in this quartet’s heavy, orchestral writing for the strings, in its harmonic restlessness and its somber agitation.  Light and dark are seen or heard in its continual major-minor shifts. Idiosyncratic rhythmic features that turn up in his other important late works are particularly prominent here as well.  

The first movement, Allegro molto moderato, opens with an introductory statement that is almost a piece of powerful prose declamation with an orchestral accompaniment, and the second theme, with its repeated, quirkily off-beat rhythm, persists, as do similar figures in some of the piano sonatas. The structural idea of the second movement, Andante un poco moto, is the alternation of serene grace with outbursts of dramatic and passionate agitation. The Scherzo, Allegro vivace-Trio: Allegretto, is based on the kind of repeated-note figure that Schubert liked so much, set here in a spectral version of the rhythmic pattern he had used in the scherzo of his huge and still relatively unperformed great Symphony in C Major. The quartet finale, Allegro assai, is a fiercely whirling tarantella in the form of a rondo, a wild dance whose beat is almost never abandoned through its entire great length.   (Notes from a Penn State performance by the Takács Quartet)

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