Genius in the Making Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Franz Schubert

(1797–1828)

String Quartet in E flat major, D87

Allegro moderato

Scherzo. Prestissimo

Adagio

Allegro

Schubert was still a schoolboy at the Vienna Stadtkonvikt, or city seminary, during the time he composed his earliest string quartets. His principal teacher both at the school and privately was the court Kapellmeister, Antonio Salieri, who in the later nineteenth century – not least due to a short play by Pushkin and an opera based on it by Rimsky-Korsakov – acquired the wholly unfounded reputation of having poisoned Mozart out of jealousy for his superior genius. Schubert dedicated several of his early pieces to Salieri, including a cantata marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian composer’s arrival in Vienna. The text, by Schubert himself, culminated in the words, ‘Unser aller Grosspapa, bleibe noch recht lange da!’ (‘Granddaddy to us all, remain with us for a long time to come!’).

Schubert’s aptitude as a violinist led to his taking up the position of leader of the school orchestra; but the instrument he preferred to play, particularly when it came to chamber music, was the viola. Although there was a string quartet at the Stadtkonvikt, Schubert intended his early quartets primarily for performance at home, within the family circle. His elder brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand took the violin parts, Schubert himself played the viola, and their father the cello. The comparative simplicity of the cello part in these early pieces is probably explained by the modest accomplishments of Schubert père.

Between 1810 and 1813, Schubert composed around ten string quartets, of which at least two have been lost. No fewer than five, of which the E flat major work being heard this evening is the last and most successful, date from the single year of 1813, by which time Schubert had reached the ripe old age of sixteen. If his quartet writing at this stage is sometimes lacking in drama and tension, the charm and generosity of his melodic invention are certainly disarming. One feature of D87 that singles it out from its companions is the nature of its two inner movements. While the slow movement in the remaining works of this period is invariably a gently flowing Andante, here it is a much slower Adagio; and in place of a moderately-paced minuet, Schubert writes a scherzo with a whirlwind tempo marking of Prestissimo. Moreover, the usual order of the two movements is reversed, with the Scherzo preceding the slow movement. Although Schubert doesn’t indicate a tempo-change for the Scherzo’s trio section, in all likelihood he intended it to be played more slowly. It’s a shadowy piece in the minor, most of it performed pianissimo, and its first half is underpinned by a drone on the cello’s two lowest ‘open’ strings, lending the whole thing a hurdy-gurdy effect.

The slow movement begins with the sound of horn calls. Eventually, its opening theme gives way to a new subject over a gently tapping repeated-note accompaniment. As though reluctant to spin the piece out unduly, Schubert does not recall this second subject in the movement’s second half, but he alludes to its drum-like repeated-note rhythm during the closing moments, in a coda of utmost delicacy.

Perhaps in abbreviating the slow movement Schubert was anxious to proceed to the finale – understandably so if that was the case, because it is the most successful and characteristic movement of the four. It’s a piece that betrays a conception in orchestral terms, and it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination to hear its opening subject given out by orchestral strings, with the winds taking over for the contrasting second theme. There are, in fact, similarities between this piece and the finale of Schubert’s Third Symphony, written nearly two years later. Both have a driving energy and momentum that show the composer’s increasing mastery. In the quartet the pianissimo ending of the movement’s first stage, followed by a sudden fortissimo and an abrupt switch of key, is an event considerably more dramatic than anything that has been heard hitherto; and the music’s continuation achieves a new-found sense of urgency. The restlessness of this passage spills over into the coda, where Schubert suddenly introduces a syncopated repeated pianissimo note on the viola, before an abrupt flourish from the full orchestra, as it were, brings the work to a rousing finish.

Franz Schubert

Quartettsatz in C minor, D703

Allegro assai

Following the E flat Quartet, D87, Schubert composed a further three string quartets during the period of his apprenticeship. The first of them, written in the autumn of 1814, is notable for its melancholy slow movement in G minor, and this was the key Schubert chose for his next quartet, D173, of March 1815. His youthful quartet activity came to an end in 1816 with a work in the more unusual key of E major. It was first published more than twenty years later, in tandem with D87, when the two works appeared as the composer’s Op. 125 Nos. 1 and 2 under the imprint of the Viennese publisher Josef Czerny (no relation to the famous pianist and former pupil of Beethoven, Carl Czerny). Shortly after Schubert’s death Czerny issued several of his works for the first time, including the ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet and the ‘Trout’ Piano Quintet.

Looking back on his early string quartet efforts in the summer of 1824, just a few months after he had completed ‘Death and the Maiden’, Schubert seems to have had scant regard for them. In response to a letter from his elder brother Ferdinand, who described his pleasure at rediscovering those youthful pieces, Schubert told him, ‘As far as your quartet sessions are concerned … it would be better for you to play quartets other than mine, for there is nothing to them, except perhaps that you like them – you who like everything of mine.’

Schubert had made a brief return to string quartet writing at the end of 1820, in a manner that showed his ambition to produce a work more serious and intense than anything he had attempted in the genre before. But just as his first efforts to master the piano sonata some three years earlier had resulted in several aborted projects, so, too, the string quartet of 1820 was destined to remain unfinished. Over the string quartet, as over the piano sonata, loomed the giant figure of Beethoven (‘Who can do anything after Beethoven?’, Schubert once complained to a friend); and perhaps it was unwise of Schubert to have chosen to make his return to the quartet arena with a piece in C minor – the key Beethoven had made so much his own in such pieces as the Fifth Symphony and the ’Pathétique’ Piano Sonata. In terms of its actual material, the one portion of the work Schubert did manage to complete – the so-called Quartettsatz, or ‘Quartet Movement’, D703 – is of the highest quality, though it is possible that he remained dissatisfied with its unorthodox form. At any rate, he abandoned the score after having composed no more than forty measures of a slow movement in A flat major. The Allegro assai was published for the first time in 1870, more than four decades after Schubert’s death, while the fragmentary slow movement didn’t appear in print until 1897, when it was issued in the first collected edition of the composer’s works. The editorial board (it included Brahms) regarded the quartet torso as being comparable in value to that of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony.

The Quartettsatz begins in a mysterious and agitated atmosphere, with continual tremolos forming a cumulative crescendo that reaches its climax on a dramatic chord. These opening measures are not heard again until the very end of the piece, where the same chord forms part of the forceful concluding cadence. Meanwhile, Schubert has presented a warmly expressive second subject which reappears near the close, not in the main key, but in a comparatively distant one. Only in the final moments does the music at last make its way homewards, with the return of a third theme, now in a gentle C major. That theme is, however, brushed aside in dramatic fashion by the reprise of the movement’s opening measures.

Schubert’s unfinished C minor quartet remained an isolated venture until, some four years later, he began work on a series of three large-scale quartet masterpieces that have taken their place as cornerstones of the repertoire. In the early months of 1824 came the ‘Rosamunde’ Quartet, D804 and the ‘Death and the Maiden’, D810; and they were followed in the summer of 1826 by Schubert’s last quartet, in G major, D887.

Claude Debussy

(1862–1918)

String Quartet in G minor

Animé et très décidé

Assez vif et bien rythmé

Andantino, doucement expressif

Très modéré – Très mouvementé et avec passion

Debussy’s String Quartet, composed in 1893, was his first significant chamber work. At this time he was heavily involved with Symbolist ideas and aesthetics, and was busy with the revision of his ‘poème lyrique’ La damoiselle élue, based on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as with the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (inspired by a famous poem by Stéphane Mallarmé), and a series of Proses lyriques, to texts of his own. In addition, his opera Pelléas et Mélisande was beginning to take shape. The String Quartet, then, represented an uncharacteristic excursion into ‘pure’ music, and perhaps for that reason its composition didn’t go as smoothly as Debussy would have liked. On 2 July 1893 he confessed to his composer friend Ernest Chausson: ‘As for the last movement of the quartet, I can’t get it into the shape I want, and that’s the third time of trying.’ All the same, Debussy planned to follow the work with a successor, and he promised Chausson, ‘I shall write another [quartet] which will be for you, and seriously for you, and I shall try to bring some nobility to my forms.’ When Debussy’s Quartet was published it appeared with a title-page boldly proclaiming it as his 1er Quatuor, though its successor never got off the ground. The work was dedicated to the Ysaÿe Quartet, who gave the premiere on 29 December 1893. A second performance took place in Brussels the following year, during a Debussy festival which also included La damoiselle élue and the Proses lyriques. The concerts were given under the auspices of a society called the ‘Libre Esthétique’, and they were held in a salon hung with paintings by Renoir, Gauguin, Pissarro, James Ensor, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Sisley and others. The Quartet, Debussy told Chausson, had ‘moved people the way it didn’t in Paris’.

Shortly before embarking on his String Quartet Debussy had heard a Mass by the sixteenth-century composer Palestrina. He found it a deeply satisfying experience, and it was one that clearly left its mark not only on his chamber work, but also on the dramatic aesthetic of Pelléas et Mélisande. ‘Even though technically it’s very strict’, he told Chausson, ‘the effect is of utter whiteness, and emotion is not represented (as has come to be the norm since) by dramatic cries, but by melodic arabesques. The shaping of the music is what strikes one, and the arabesques crossing with each other to produce something which has never been repeated since: harmony formed out of melodies!’ Debussy’s Quartet can hardly be held up as a paradigm of contrapuntal art, but the flavor of its melodic material, particularly in the first movement, seems to reflect something of his enthusiasm for Renaissance polyphony.

The Quartet’s initial theme, played very confidently in richly-scored chords, is one that threads its way throughout the work, with only the slow movement being free from its influence. In the first movement, most of the ideas seem to grow directly out of this motto: the gently flowing melody that follows shortly after the opening measures, with its ‘murmuring’ sixteenth-note accompaniment; and a more expansive variant of the same rising and falling idea which has the accompaniment correspondingly broadened. But there is also an important contrasting theme whose rocking motion is given out in a slower tempo. It is this theme that predominates in the movement’s central section, allowing the music to reach a passionate climax.

In the scherzo-like second movement, with its highly original use of pizzicato, the motto theme assumes the guise of an ostinato, played over and over again early on by the viola. The motto subsequently appears in a much broader form, as a warmly expressive violin melody, and as a passionately intense recitative-like idea played on the violin’s G string.

Paul Dukas (the composer of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) described the slow movement as being ‘of truly exquisite poetry, and of great delicateness and profound thought’. Its serene first theme, played with mutes, is followed by a more flowing contrasting section whose opening viola solo is clearly based on the same melodic shape. An acceleration in pace and an increase in tension eventually give way to an abbreviated reprise of the initial section, allowing the music to die away in an atmosphere of utmost calm.

The finale begins with a long transition from the slow movement’s key to the Quartet’s home key of G minor, and with a gradual acceleration towards the urgently driven motion of the last movement proper. The central section of the piece features a broadened, more passionately expressive, version of the motto theme; while towards the end – at the point where the music turns from minor to major – the motto reappears in the chordal form in which it was heard at the beginning of the first movement. From this point on, the music’s energy progressively increases, as it hurtles towards a brilliant conclusion.

GENIUS IN THE MAKING

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST