8/31–Franz Schubert: String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”)

A cartoon published shortly after the death of Irving Berlin (1888-1989) showed him being welcomed into Heaven by Franz Schubert (1797-1828): at last, a meeting between two of the greatest songwriters of all time, the 20th-century American and the 19th-century Viennese. But Schubert’s hundreds of songs don’t account for all the output of his short life; he also composed symphonies, piano pieces, and a variety of chamber works including 15 string quartets.

The year 1824 was filled with professional disappointments and personal crises, most fatefully the onset of a mortal disease, probably syphilis–untreatable at that time–that would kill him four years later. He wrote to a friend, “I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this makes things worse instead of better.” He also wrote, “Each night, on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again.” It’s interesting to couple this quote with one from the distinguished baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who performed Schubert’s songs to such perfection: “For Schubert, death was no Biblical punishment, no merited chastisement for our sins, but rather a friend and comforter who opens the gates to another world.”

Schubert didn’t give way to his depression, deep though it may have been; he kept on working, and his works of 1824 include two string quartets, one subtitled “Rosamunde” for the similarity of one of its themes to his stage music of that name, and the other called “Death and the Maiden” because its slow second movement is a set of variations on the melody of a song he’d written earlier with that title (“Der Tod und das Maedchen” in German). This song, with its tale of the death of a person still young, suited exactly his mood at the time.

All four movements of this quartet are cast in somber-sounding minor keys; the few passages that modulate to a major key stand out with particular effectiveness. The first movement, allegro (lively), is dominated by the triplet rhythm of its main theme; the second theme is introduced by the two violin players, playing in harmonious intervals a third apart. The ending is very soft. The second movement, which contains the song theme and variations, is marked andante con moto (moderately slow, but moving.) Major keys are heard briefly, and the fourth variation, the next-to-last one, is contrasted to its companions by being entirely in a major key. The third movement, a scherzo to be played allegro molto (very lively), starts in minor but shifts to major for its middle section. The headlong finale, presto (very fast), has the rhythm of an Italian tarantella, famously described in folklore as a dance of death. So the specter is there, from first to last, all through the piece. And yet what a wealth of glorious melody Schubert has given us, in spite of his sorrows.

program notes by Andrea Lamoreaux