The Terra Quartet Opens the Season: Part II, Britten's 2nd String Quartet

With Market Square Concert's first concert of its 45th Season this Thursday at 7:30 at uptown Harrisburg's Temple Ohev Sholom, the Terra String Quartet, winner of the prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Competition, performs two major string quartets: Franz Schubert's String Quartet in A Minor, D.804, the "Rosamunde" Quartet, and Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op.36.

In the previous post which you can read here, I wrote about the Schubert and also gave you the background on how the Terra Quartet came to step in for the previously scheduled Galvin Cello Quartet who had to cancel their October Tour due to last-minute, unforeseen complications.

Benjamin Britten, February, 1945

In this post, it's Britten's turn with his 2nd Quartet, completed in mid-October of 1945.

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The inception for his new string quartet was a specific concert at Wigmore Hall, one of the major chamber music venues in London, to be held on Nov. 21st, 1945, marking the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Henry Purcell, long regarded as one of the leading English composers and generally (if sadly) acknowledged at the time as the last English composer to have earned any international recognition. 

On the next day, November 22nd, the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, there was another concert planned at Wigmore Hall featuring another premiere by Benjamin Britten. 

The 22nd was also Britten’s 32nd birthday. 

And more importantly, this all came five months after the premiere of a work that would place Britten at the forefront of English Composers on the International Front: his first full-length opera, Peter Grimes. 

Shortly after that auspicious debut on June 7th, 1945, Britten conducted his orchestral suite from Grimes, the “Four Sea Interludes,” which would soon become a concert staple for orchestras world-wide (even in the 1990s, it was referred to as “the most recent work to have entered the mainstream repertoire”). In a short time, Britten would find himself not only famous but regarded as “the first English composer to receive international recognition since the death of Henry Purcell.” 

Then he composed two new works: a setting of nine sonnets by 17th-Century English poet John Donne, ending with the famous “Death Be Not Proud,” which he completed on August 19th; and a string quartet commissioned for the Zorian Quartet’s concert at Wigmore Hall to mark the Purcell anniversary, which he completed on October 14th. 

Another date puts much of this into a different kind of context: the Year 1945. Oh yes, you may remember, thinking of History in General. The End of World War II. Officially, the long-awaited end of the European phase of the war (that which most closely affected England) happened on May 8th, 1945, when Germany surrendered to the Allies days after Hitler committed suicide. 

After years of bombings across England (the Nazi Blitzkrieg had leveled more than great swaths of London), shortages and privation, including food rationing, would continue for yet another nine years in the United Kingdom, so it wasn’t a burst of euphoria followed by an immediate Return to Normal. Peter Grimes, an intense examination of life in a simple fishing village on the English coast where Britten had grown up, was written while the war was still raging. It would be premiered only a month after the Germans surrendered. Its success gave English music lovers hope in the future of English music.

Then, now that the war was over and they had survived six years of constant hardships, Britten focused his creativity on new works with no doubt a sense of relief and hope. 

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Purcell’s influence manifests itself primarily in the 2nd String Quartet’s last movement, clearly the most significant of all three movements, clocking in at around 18 minutes, more than twice the length of the other two movements combined. The opening of the quartet, marked calmo, creates a sense of space as well as peace. Keep in mind, this will be heard for the first time a little over six months following the long-awaited end of The War. The tension created by the build up to the rhythmic outburst about three minutes in seems like an inevitable flash-back and these two elements, the calm and the tense, become like “contrasting themes” in a traditional sonata form. 

The scherzo is fast and brief, barely four minutes long. The quartet plays with mutes which gives it an eerie sound, a bit like Bartók’s “night music” but frenzied, though it may have more in common with the scherzo in Bartók’s 4th String Quartet, written in 1928. It had also been described as a tarantella, a folk dance inspired by the bite of a tarantula: the only way to overcome the poison was to dance madly about. The music’s frequent shifting between duple and triple meter and sharp contrasts gives it an air of instability as well. 

The forensic musicologist in me wants to point out the weird scherzo in Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” of 1926 and remind listeners the 19-year-old Britten shocked his friends and family by wanting to go to Vienna to study with Alban Berg, a student of Arnold Schoenberg who was, at this time, developing "serialism," a process of composing with all twelve notes. When his mother was told Berg “would not be a good influence” on the boy, Britten later assumed she took it to mean “morally,” not necessarily “musically,” the advice coming from a friend who had, Britten said, “an almost moral prejudice against serial music.” Berg would die two years later, as it happened, but still it does make one ponder… 

Now comes the “crowning glory” of the quartet. Britten labeled it “Chacony,” the 17th Century English equivalent of the French chaconne or the Italian ciaconna, the work's first homage to Purcell. 

Unlike the famous Chaconne in D Minor of Bach – again, a finale that’s half the five-movement suite’s entire length – Britten takes his structural inspiration from Purcell’s use of counterpoint and different variation techniques, particularly his love of what we call “ground bass variations” where a motive or short theme in the bass repeats over-and-over, while he composes his variations over it in the upper voices. 

By way of introduction, listen to this six minute “Chacony,” Purcell's single movement Trio Sonata in G Minor (Z.730):

  

Listen first to the cello part, but then notice how the upper strings weave their variations often completely independently, frequently overlapping the harpsichord’s barely audible harmonic progressions. 

In Britten’s structural solution, he creates an 18-minute span with 21 variations based on the opening “theme” of 9 measures presented by all four players in unison. These are subdivided into three groups of six variations each with an additional three at the end. Each group is set off by a solo cadenza, an almost operatic recitative, first for the cello, then the viola, and finally the first violin. 

Britten, in his initial program notes, pointed out each group of variations “reviews” different aspects of the theme: first, its implied harmony; the second, its rhythms; the third, with new superimposed melodies. The final group of three variations examines “formal aspects”, not that, as a listener, you need to follow all of this precisely to appreciate the tight-knit structure of the movement: basically, follow the strongly accented opening idea’s jagged, descending intervals and be aware how, as the variations unfold, lines and intervals change from descending to ascending. The theme may be in the foreground, at other times in the background (as happens in the third set), but it is always present. The final set builds up to the ending’s slashing chords, all four instruments repeating four-note C Major chords against the last statement of the theme.  

(For anyone interested in following one of those score videos, click on this link.) 

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Another context follows the composer’s chronological trajectory leading up to this work. What came before it? What was going on in the composer's life that would eventually be revealed in it?

Preparatory work on Peter Grimes had started as early as 1941 while Britten and his life-partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were in America. They had left England in the spring of 1938, hoping to find new paths for their careers and a climate more in keeping with their pacifist views. Homesick before he’d even finished the crossed, one thing would have more impact on Britten’s future than all the excitement and potential they would discover during their stay in the United States: ever on the look-out for literary texts for songs or a new opera, he happened upon a copy of George Crabbe’s The Borough which describes the events that eventually became Peter Grimes.

Koussevitsky, director of the Boston Symphony, had graciously offered to commission the work for a premiere at Tanglewood but when the festival was canceled in 1942 for the duration of the war, Britten and Pears decided to return to England, hoping to arrange for the premiere of the opera there. After having some of his manuscripts confiscated by customs authorities in New York (fearful his music could contain coded messages for the enemy!) You would think this was a joke, right? But one of the sketches was for a new clarinet concerto he had started writing for Benny Goodman! Britten instead occupied his time during what proved a harrowing crossing (they traveled on “a rather decrepit old boat” as part of a convoy amidst the threat of Nazi torpedoes) by writing A Ceremony of Carols (speaking of compartmentalizing your creativity from your reality) while Pears worked out a scene-by-scene outline for the new opera’s structure. 

They were much affected by seeing the impact of The Blitz on London. Eventually, they decided to settle in Britten’s home area Suffolk on the North Sea coast, finding an old mill in Snape which became their permanent home. This, of course, was Crabbe’s country, the place and people he wrote about in The Borough. Having grown up in Lowesoft, 28 miles to the north, Britten now felt he was home. 

It was a challenge re-establishing themselves into English life both socially and professionally and it didn’t help that, while in London, Britten came down with measles in March of 1943 and had to be hospitalized (“isn’t this a major bore? – and at my age, too!”). 

Actual composing on the opera didn’t begin until January 1944 and, despite serious doubts in June, thinking “my bloody opera stinks and that’s all there is to it,” he finished scoring the complete work on February 10th 1945. 

So, while in America trying to find himself, Britten instead found a copy of a work that would inspire the opera set in a location close to where he was born and where he would eventually set up housekeeping, a work that would make him internationally famous and establish him, at 31, as one England’s leading composers. 

Amidst the reshaping of English Life after the war and the re-establishing of his professional career, Britten was talking to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin who was going to undertake a tour through post-war Germany and Britten, who had been “casting about for some commitment to the human condition whose terrible depths had been so newly revealed,” begged to go along as his pianist. One of their stops was on June 27th, at Belsen, the site of one of the worst Nazi concentration camps that had been liberated only four months earlier. Writing home to Pears, we “spent the night in Belsen and saw over the hospital – & I needn’t describe that to you…” Pears explained, shortly after Britten's death, how “that experience had colored everything he had written subsequently.” 

After the quartet's premiere, he wrote to Mrs. J. L. Behrend, the dedicatee, how “to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made & altho' it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on a new line.”

Returning deeply affected after the experience of this German tour in August, Britten began composing a new song cycle, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, with its final "Death Be Not Proud" presenting its argument against the power of death. These songs, to be premiered by Britten and Pears on November 22nd, were completed on August 19th. 

Next, he was commissioned to write a string quartet that would be premiered on the anniversary of Henry Purcell’s death 250 years ago, November 21st. It would be finished on October 14th. And so we’ve come full circle. 

One personal insight: Britten was sitting in on a rehearsal at the flat of the Zorian Quartet’s first violinist who was the wife of the music critic John Amis. Amis recalled how they only had four chairs in the whole apartment, which were needed for the quartet, so that meant Amis and the composer had to sit on the floor. When Amis, as the curious music critic, pointed out how “'oh, I see... this new tune is really the old one upside down,' ...Ben would look hard at his score and say ‘Oh, is it? Fancy that!’ and then wink at the musicians.”

After the premiere, Britten donated his commission fee to famine relief in India. He soon began work on his next commission, music for a film about the instruments of the orchestra which would be a set of variations with a climactic fugue based on a theme by Henry Purcell, usually known as “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” which he finished on New Year’s Eve. 

In October of the following year, the Zorian Quartet recorded Britten’s 2nd Quartet on seven sides of a four-disc set of 78rpm records (anyone remember those?). The eighth side was taken up suitably by Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note, generally considered a kind of novelty piece. It consists of four independent parts while the “one note,” a Middle C, plays like a drone throughout the whole piece. In this arrangement, it's played by the second viola. 

Aside from the Purcell association, I think if you follow the score (you may need to enlarge it to full screen to be able to read it), watching (and listening) for lines “ascending and descending” and how the tempo seems to change between segments with varying shorter or longer note values before returning to the original “slower” tempo (“diminution and augmentation”), you’ll have an idea how Britten found some inspiration in Purcell’s music to write the chaconne that concludes his string quartet on this program.  

By the way, in the Zorian’s recording, the second viola part was played by Benjamin Britten. 

– Dick Strawser

The Terra Quartet Steps In with Schubert & Britten: Part I, Schubert's "Rosamunde" Quartet

You've heard of "changes in the program" before, substituting one piece for another, whatever the reason. Sometimes it's a personnel change, somebody who's indisposed or has left the ensemble and been replaced. But this time, it's not only the whole program, it's even all the performers. 

The Galvin Cello Quartet was planning on returning to open our 45th Season this Thursday at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom, but with weeks to spare, it turned out in late-September they would have to cancel their entire October tour!

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"Due to the recent changes to the practical training work authorization rules for foreign students, one of the Galvin Cello Quartet members is not allowed to tour with the ensemble, forcing the group to cancel all upcoming performances including our opening concert. 

"While we regret this development, we are thrilled to announce that the Terra String Quartet, winner of last year's Naumburg Chamber Music competition, as well as a prize winner of both Wigmore Hall and Bordeaux string quartet competitions, has graciously agreed to open our season.  

"If you have already purchased tickets for the opening concert, they remain valid for this performance. Alternatively, you may apply your tickets to any other performance this season. If you prefer a full refund, please contact Ali at akoch@marketsquareconcerts.org or at 717-221-9599."

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The Terra Quartet, based in New York City, consists of graduates from Juilliard, New England Conservatory, Harvard, and Curtis. "Known for their sincere storytelling, commitment to artistic excellence, and versatile approach to repertoire, TSQ strives to foster conversation and genuine human connection through their performances and pedagogy." 

On Thursday, Oct. 8th, (7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom), they will be performing the String Quartet in A Minor, D.804, the "Rosamunde" Quartet by Franz Schubert, and Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 2 in C Major. 

The Terra String Quartet (not with their usual mode of transportation) -- Sophie Kaye, photographer

This post will focus on the Schubert. Check back soon for the Britten...

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When you listen to a piece of music, you are creating a context: maybe you’re at a concert and everyone around you is (hopefully) quietly and intently listening; maybe you’re playing the video in this post while you read the background information about it. In one case, you’re absorbing the music as it’s being performed (with any luck, the way the composer intended it); in the other, you’re just “hearing” the music – call it “passive listening” as compared to the concert-goer’s “active listening.” 

Of course, you can read the text of this post and then listen to the video actively. Your reaction to it could be different depending on your experience: as a trained musician and a composer, I would tend to listen differently than a person who enjoys classical music but doesn’t know much about it. But there are times when I’m not really paying attention to it because something else is in the foreground: I have the CD player on but I’m getting dinner ready. 

Perhaps you listen “analytically” – “that must be the main theme – now it’s in the cello… and the viola is playing something contrasting to the theme…” (it may be funny, but Peter Schickele’s “sports-style commentary” to Beethoven’s 5th is not that far-fetched). 

And of course it isn’t necessary for the listener to know what key we’re in or how a harmonic progression creates dramatic tension to be able to enjoy the music: every level of understanding helps with our overall appreciation. Perhaps you listen “aesthetically” – which basically implies “for the pleasure of the moment.” Does the music present a mood to you, a color, an image? 

The opening of the Britten is expansively calm – are you thinking “sunrise”? – and then it becomes rhythmically and harmonically agitated – are you thinking “storm-clouds on the horizon”? Does it become the background music for a scenario you begin to develop in your mind (not difficult for anyone raised on Walt Disney’s Fantasia or MTV) and you might tell someone after the concert “I particularly liked that bit where everyone’s arguing about who picks up the check.” 

Or perhaps you’re not connecting with the music or the performance at all, thinking “I’m glad I’m recording ‘Dancing with the Stars’ tonight…” 

Everybody’s experience is unique and everybody’s perception is different. 

As an example: it was a dreary December morning in 1976 and I’d just turned on the radio. I had no idea what I was listening to, some string quartet – and I didn’t really have time to pay attention to it, getting my day started. All I knew was I didn’t recognize the piece and didn’t have time to play “Guess the Composer.” Primarily, it didn’t grab my interest and besides, I’d only heard maybe five minutes of it. 

I admit, though, I was “shocked” when the host back-announced the piece as the String Quartet No. 2 in C Major by Benjamin Britten. 

At the time Britten was probably my favorite living composer. I’ve been familiar with a lot of his music over the years since I first heard his opera Peter Grimes when I was in high school, thanks to the record collection of the Harrisburg Public Library. But that my first reaction to this piece was “dislike”? How was that possible? 

The radio host continued: “...who died earlier this morning at the age of 63…” Consequently, I have always felt guilty about my response to this particular work: was it the performance? Or, more likely, my level of inattention? 

So I started checking out other recordings and found that it was not the music at fault because, after a few more outings with it, it became something I liked very much, and eventually, one of my favorites. 

Over the years, I’ve learned if you hear a performance of Beethoven’s 5th and you don’t like it, it’s the performers’ fault (maybe the orchestra’s playing or the conductor’s interpretation). You’re not likely to change your mind about Beethoven’s 5th as one of the Great Symphonies (however over-played it might be). 

But if we hear a new work, perhaps by a composer we don’t know, and we don’t like it, we tend to blame the composer. Isn’t it possible the musicians are struggling to play the notes? Is it possible they haven’t made sense out of the piece, how it gets from Point A to Point B? Usually, the first response of a new listener is not “I need to hear this again.” 

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Franz Schubert, one of the Most Beloved of the Great Masters, would most likely not suffer from such a reaction: most members of the audience, if not familiar with the “Rosamunde” Quartet, have at least heard several other pieces he’d written in his short life: most likely the Quartettsatz or the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, and certainly the famous “Trout” Quintet. 

Even if Schubert is new on the listener’s menu, the whole style of the period he lived in would be familiar, somewhere between Mozart-and-Beethoven and Schumann-and-Brahms. His harmonies might be more adventuresome in some cases but not startling enough to be disconcerting to the novice-listener. Plus he has tunes – and no tune is more memorably Schubertian than the lovely stretch of lyricism in the second movement that gives the quartet its nickname, taken from his Incidental Music for a play called “Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus.” 

In addition to the listener’s personal context, each piece of music has its own individual context: the composer’s life-and-times, specifically the time it was composed and what else maybe have been going on in the composer’s life which I usually call the work’s “biographical background.” Then there’s the “brick-and-mortar” context of the piece itself, how it’s put together (and the extent one cares to go into this can be more technical than the average listener needs in order to appreciate it). 

In this performance, the Escher Quartet (who’ve been in Harrisburg before with Market Square Concerts), recorded at the La Jolla Summerfest in 2015, perform Schubert’s String Quartet in A Minor, the “Rosamunde” Quartet. It’s in four movements: the opening Allegro ma non troppo; the slow movement, the Andante that gives the work its subtitle; the minuet, Allegretto; and the finale, Allegro moderato.

  

In 1823, Schubert told his friend Moritz von Schwind the violinist Ignaz von Schuppanzigh had asked him for a new work he and his quartet could perform the following March, obviously a sign of Schubert’s acceptance in Vienna’s musical sphere considering this was the ensemble who’d premiered Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets and would be entrusted with the impending Late Quartets. 

On March 6th, 1824, Schwind wrote to Franz von Schober, a former roommate of Schubert’s who now lived outside Vienna, that Schuppanzigh’s quartet was rehearsing the new quartet and they were quite enthusiastic about it, the rehearsals going particularly well. The premiere took place on March 14th, in the prestigious hall of the famous Society of the Friends of Music (the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde). 

Again, Schwind wrote to Schober, “Schubert’s quartet has been performed, rather slowly in his opinion, but very purely and tenderly. It is on the whole very smooth but written in such a way that the tune remains in one’s mind, as with all the songs, all feeling and thoroughly expressive. It got much applause, especially the Menuetto which is extraordinarily tender and natural.” Not all reviews were as cordial. A Viennese critic wrote: “New Quartet by Schubert. This composition must be heard several times before it can be adequately judged.” 

A critic from Leipzig wrote it was “not to be despised as first born,” under the assumption this was Schubert’s first quartet – he had composed at least a dozen beforehand, most of them to be played by his family’s quartet for their evening musicales – it was merely the first one to reach a larger, general public. 

In September, he sent it off to his publishers and was paid £4. 

Now that you’ve heard the piece, what was going on in Schubert’s life when he composed it? First of all, Schubert tended to compose almost constantly and “with such concentration,” as one friend reported how Schubert, working on either the Octet or the “Rosamunde” Quartet at the time, “continued writing at his desk, saying only ‘Hallo, how are you? Good!’ without even looking up.” Schubert, who stood all of 5’1’’ tall – his friends called him “Schwammerl” (Little Mushroom) – had just celebrated his 27th birthday at the end of January with a party where he ended up passed out drunk. 

Between early February, 1824, and mid-March, he completed the Octet in F Major, an hour-long work in six movements, and this A Minor String Quartet. Once that was done, he immediately began his next quartet – he was planning three of them – the D Minor Quartet which, however, he apparently put aside and didn’t come back to to finish it in January, 1826 when it was premiered (did he revise a first draft?). The G Major Quartet, the third of the planned set, wasn’t written until the end of June, 1826, but even then it was completed in ten days. 

The previous year had ended with the production of a new play – Rosamunde, the Princess of Cyprus by Helmine von Chézy – for which he’d written an hour’s worth of incidental music he’d begun in late-autumn (some of the ballet music didn’t arrive until four days before the premiere on December 20th). It turned into one of those classic disasters that resulted in the play being pulled after a second performance. At least someone thought enough of the music to keep the instrumental parts in the theater’s library; no one has ever found a copy of von Chézy’s actual play, so you can draw your own conclusions there (speaking of “who’s to blame, the author or the performers?”, this turned out to be a case of “both”). Comments about the music, however, were at least favorable. 

Most biographies of composers focus on what they wrote when: but at this time what was going on in Schubert’s life outside of his composing? 

The first symptoms of syphilis had already appeared by November of 1822. He had just completed… well, let’s say he composed two movements of what was supposed to become a Symphony in B Minor, beginning work on the full score on October 30th. It is of course one of the great mysteries of classical music, “Why is the ‘Unfinished Symphony’ Unfinished?” He did sketch the opening phrase of a scherzo, so the argument that “he thought it was complete with just two movements” is clearly wrong. 

The other thing to consider is, Schubert was now beginning to think, like Beethoven, he wanted to write larger scale works (Beethoven had not yet written his 9th Symphony, and he’d only begun working on the last set of string quartets in November of 1822) – the question was, how do you do that? The scope of this B Minor Symphony is certainly on a grander scale than any symphony Schubert had completed before this (and the B Minor is not, incidentally, his first unfinished symphony). 

Perhaps writing some string quartets would help him get a handle on expanding the traditional forms of each individual movement. 

But then, he became ill. He dealt with various treatments for a disease that he knew was likely going to kill him eventually - it would not be a pleasant life, physical deterioration, possible deafness, likely insanity, a horrible death - along with periods of depression during which, incidentally, he wrote the “Wanderer Fantasy,” a much more dramatic, even demonic-sounding work than we usually associate with the amiable Schubert. 

As 1823 began, things apparently improved, but a few weeks after he’d returned from a summer’s holiday, these symptoms became serious enough he needed to enter a hospital. By this time, he had begun composing some of the twenty songs for his song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin, even writing several of them while in the hospital. 

How long he was being treated there is unknown, but as soon as he finished the songs, he began work on music Mme. von Chézy urgently needed for her new play, barely completing the last of it in time for the premiere. 

But with the New Year, he had a relapse shortly after his birthday which required another round of treatment which involved a diet alternating between schnitzel and panada (a cooked flavored meal of bread and water) along with copious amounts of tea and frequent baths. Still, Schubert was focused on composing: the Octet first, then immediately on to the A Minor Quartet. 

Moving ahead to a couple of weeks later, having started work on the next quartet, the D Minor (perhaps even finishing a first draft of it), Schubert wrote to his friend, Leopold Kupelwieser, who’d recently left Vienna to study painting in Rome. “Of songs I have not written many new ones, but I have tried my hand at several instrumental works, for I wrote two Quartets for violins, viola and violoncello and an Octet, and I want to write another quartet, in fact I intend to pave my way towards [a] grand symphony in that manner…” 

That is the news about his new works, but he also added “In a word, 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 ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have come to nothing, to whom the joy of love an friendship have nothing to offer him but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm… for all things beautiful threatens to vanish…” He then quotes the opening lines from Goethe's poem which he set to music in one of his earliest songs, Gretchen am Spinnrade – “‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore. I shall never find it, never again.’ I may well sing every day now, for each night, I go to bed hoping never to wake again, and each morning only tells me of yesterday’s grief.” 

Keep in mind this was written only a couple of weeks after completing the A Minor Quartet. 

It’s not that these depressing realities were weighing him down as he wrote, as far as we know: some people can create works of art as a refuge from reality, in spite of their reality, where for a period of time, their creativity can take them outside of the reality around them. 

Listeners are often surprised to discover Beethoven, dealing with the first signs of serious deafness and the implications for a composer who lives in a world of sound, wrote his heart-rending “Heiligenstadt Testament” which almost reads like a suicide note at the time he was composing the finale of his 2nd Symphony. I mean, Beethoven knew what he wanted – needed – at this point in his new symphony, and it wasn’t part of the plan to suddenly write a dramatic, indeed tragic conclusion full of emotional outbursts, what other composers might turn into knee-deep self-pity. He would handle Fate Knocking at the Door in his 5th Symphony.

But was Schubert, like Beethoven, able to compartmentalize life from art? It would seem so. 

The quartet’s nickname, “Rosamunde,” comes from the music Schubert used for the second movement, one of the entr’acts salvaged from the ill-fated play. Did Schubert choose it because it was, apparently, a nice bit of music that would otherwise remain unknown (given the play’s demise), or was there some significance to the music that appealed to Schubert’s state-of-mind? 

An “entr’act” is basically a prelude or interlude between scenes meant to fill in the time necessary for a change of the stage setting: what happens in the up-coming scene? Apparently not much: it’s a pastoral scene (Rosamunde is, at this time, a shepherdess, before it’s discovered she’s the rightful princess of Cyprus) which includes rustic choruses for shepherds, then huntsmen. Probably no significant “hidden meaning,” here. 

What is generally overlooked is how often Schubert has quoted some of his own music in new works: not so much that he does this (getting a little extra mileage out of an old piece) but why choose this piece? Is there some significance (for him, at least) behind the selection. Take the famous “Fantasy in C Major,” known as the “Wanderer” Fantasy because a motive permeating the work is taken from a song written six years earlier, “The Wanderer” (D.489). But that’s a song in which this “stranger, an outsider, seeks happiness but cannot find it anywhere: where will he find happiness?” The answer? “There, where you are not, is your happiness.” Remember, at this time, Schubert was dealing with his first diagnosis of syphilis. 

Several writers have commented on the similarity between the opening of this string quartet and Schubert’s famous song Gretchen am Spinnrade, not an exact quote necessarily but playing with the pitches in such a way, they’re obviously similar (there are, of course, only so many notes to go around). 

But remember that line in his letter to Kupelweiser written a few weeks later? “My peace is gone, my heart is sore. I shall never find [peace], never again.” That’s the opening line from Goethe’s poem which Schubert set when he was 16. Does Gretchen’s inner turmoil, spinning along like her spinning wheel reflected in the piano’s accompaniment, have any significance for the composer now, a little over ten years later? 

But fragments of another song supply material for another movement in this quartet, what seems to be a very pleasant minuet. Die Götter Griechenlandes (“The Gods of Greece”), composed in 1819, is a fragment itself from a longer poem by Schiller which described his conception of life and nature in antiquity, to the poet a happy and harmonious age in contrast to the present-day Christian age which he sees as a stage of loss, joylessness, alienation and divisiveness (keep in mind, the poem dates from 1788). 

For Schubert, the point was a longing for the peace of this old world: “only in the fairy tale land of song / That any trace of your magnificence lives on. / ...Oh, that image, so warm with life, / Only a shadow of it now remains.” 

It might be more cumbersome to refer to the Quartet in A Minor, D.804, as the “Götter Griechenlandes” Quartet (or even the “Gods in Greece” Quartet), but perhaps it better reflects what was going on in Schubert’s mind than a pleasant pastoral scene about a Cypriot princess cheated out of her rightful inheritance. 

Or does this, in hindsight, turn Rosamunde into the “outsider” like the stranger in the “Wanderer” Fantasy and her bucolic countryside into the absent and lamented “fairy tale land” mourned with the passing of the gods of antiquity? Didn't Schubert admit to feeling like an outsider himself among Viennese society, suffering from syphilis?

Of course, I’m probably overthinking this, as usual. But then… 

– Dick Strawser