Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

String Quartet in A minor, Op.29 ("Rosamunde")

Allegro ma non troppo
Andante
Menuetto: Allegretto
Allegro moderato

Franz Schubert stands out amongst the great Viennese composers of the classical and romantic eras. Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and later Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler all enjoyed, if not success, a reasonable degree of prosperity and recognition in Vienna. Schubert is the exception - alone amongst them, he died largely unrecognised as a composer, and, alone amongst them, he was Viennese by birth. He stands in musical history as the supreme example of the "prophet without honour" - for it is hard to imagine a composer more typical of his time and place. Inheritor of the perfected classical tradition of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, he brought to it the poetic ideals of his generation, the young romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Caspar David Friedrich, and a uniquely Viennese blend of styles and emotions. the Vienna of the early 19th Century, the so-called Biedermeier period, was a meeting-place not only of the German's Bohemians, Magyars and Slavs of the Austrian Empire, but also of the Italians who until 1866 were Austrian subjects; a true crossroads of Europe. In Schubert's music, as in that of the Strauss family and all truly "Viennese" music, a southern influence may be felt; in long, singing melodies, often harmonised in sweet thirds and sixths, in a certain Italianate elegance and lightness, and in the way that a yearning minor-key melody can suddenly veer into the major in a manner that makes it seem only more heartbreakingly poignant.

The A minor Quartet is a perfect example of all these Schubertian traits. Some 15 of Schubert's string quartets have come down to us; and while only three of these and a single C-minor movement have an established position in the repertoire, it is fair to say that, with the C major String Quintet and the B flat Piano Trio, they represent the pinnacle of his output in the medium of chamber music. The A minor Quartet was the only one of these works to be published in Schubert's lifetime. He had written it in 1824 and it was premiered in March that year by a quartet led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the work's dedicatee. It was to have been the first of a set of three quartets, but financial pressures and a period of creative depression intervened, so that when the Quartet was published in September it was alone, and destined to remain that way. Schubert appears to have been under considerable emotional strain at this time; he had just recovered from the first attack of the disease which was to kill him; and while these feelings initially bore fruit in the A-minor Quartet, by the middle of the year they had driven him to despair.

The quartet opens with a lyrical sonata-form Allegro , prefaced, unusually, by a restless accompaniment figure as in Mozart's tragic G minor Symphony. The first violin sings a long, melancholy melody, which gains in emotional power on its sweet, A major repeat. At the centre of the movement, darkness re-asserts itself in a stormy development section, and it is in this mood, after sweet major-key episodes and sudden melancholy stillnesses, that the movement ends. The Andante is a broad sonata-rondo on a theme from Schubert's incidental music to the play "Rosamunde, Furstin von Cypern" of 1823 - from which the quartet takes its nickname. The play was not a success and Schubert obviously felt that his music needed "rescuing"; for he also utilised this theme in a piano impromptu, Op.142. The ensuing Menuetto is in traditional minuet form, but from its first bar we are in an unmistakably Romantic sound-world, the bleak opening figure like lonely horn-calls. This figure originates in one of Schubert's songs, "Die Gotter Griechenlands" , where it accompanies the words "Fair world, where art thou?", a hint, perhaps, at the quartet's inner programme. The major-key Trio is more typically Austrian in character. The quartet's finale is a jaunty rondo, cast in A major and written in a "Hungarian" style which some writers have attributed to Schubert's visit to Zseliz in Hungary in the summer of 1824. Apart from being chronologically wrong, it's more likely that Schubert was simply exercising the Hungarian streak that was part of his common Viennese heritage - Vienna was, after all, less than a day's journey from the Hungarian border. The good spirits of this lively movement, like the G major finale of Mozart's G minor quintet, do not so much resolve the drama which has passed, but serve only to heighten its pathos.


R.G.Bratby 1998


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