The Aizuri Quartet Opens The Season, Part Two: Meet the Schumanns

The Schumanns, 1846

This is a sequel to the previous post about a program featuring four works by two Mendelssohns and two Schumanns in which we met Felix Mendelssohn and his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel. The Aizuri Quartet will perform the opening program for Market Square Concerts' new season, Wednesday at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg. 

So now it's time to meet the Schumanns.

In 1828, a teenager named Robert Schumann arrived in Leipzig to study piano with one of the more acclaimed teachers of the day, Friedrich Wieck. He was, according to his family, supposed to study law, but he had already dropped out of school, traveled to Munich (where he met Heinrich Heine) and decided he wanted to write novels or compose music (or both). Wieck turned out to be a difficult master – Schumann had already given up law after a brief attempt to focus on “something practical” – but he also had a pretty and quite talented daughter named Clara who, at 14, had already begun work on writing her own piano concerto. Young Schumann volunteered to help her with the orchestration (not the kind of “pick-up line” most guys can get away with...).

It's a long story. Friedrich was not keen on losing his daughter – more importantly, losing control of his daughter and her future income. Since 1837, the two young lovers considered themselves engaged, but her father, rather nasty piece-of-work that he was, put every obstacle in their path he could manage. In turn, Robert and Clara sued Wieck in court, the judge sided with Schumann, but Wieck counter-sued that Schumann would be an unfit husband (he had, after all, no career and would be unable to perform as a pianist due to a hand injury) because he was “a habitual drunkard.” When proof of this was not forthcoming, the case was dismissed, and the wedding finally took place in a small church near Leipzig on September 12th, 1840, the day before she turned 21.

Clara, Summer, 1840

Clara composed her setting of Heinrich Heine's Ich stand in dunkeln träumen at Christmas, 1840, part of a collection of six (the rest were written between 1842-43). It was a Christmas gift for her new husband, just three months after their wedding.

Heine's poem, published in 1826 as part of a collection called Das Heimkehr (The Homecoming), describes a young man who, staring at his beloved's portrait, imagines she has smiled at him; but with a tear, he realizes, alas, he has lost her.

Perhaps an odd choice of text for a Christmas present – though it might certainly reflect the long period of anxiety prior to their wedding – but several other composers have set Heine's poem as well, including Schubert (as “Ihr Bild,” one of his final songs, in Schwanengesang, written in 1828), Grieg, Hugo Wolf, and Amy Beach, among some 92 others mentioned in one on-line song archive's “not exhaustive” list!

As their struggles to get married dragged on through 1840, Schumann, who'd composed mostly only solo piano pieces before, suddenly turned to writing songs.

Among the 138 or so songs he composed that year, 20 songs were written in the last week of May, including Dichterliebe (Poet's Loves), and in two days in July, Frauenliebe und -leben (Women's Loves and Lives). But a month after the wedding, Schumann began something new, something Clara had always been kind of badgering him about: he wouldn't be a serious composer unless he composed some symphonies (because that's what most composers did in those days). In October, 1840, he began sketches for what would become his 1st Symphony, the famous “Spring” Symphony, eventually composed over a period of four days in January (hardly spring-like weather, that) and orchestrated by the end of February, 1841.

A year before the wedding had taken place, Wieck had left Leipzig – presumably to get away from so many of Schumann's friends – and re-settled in Dresden, not all that far away. So the Schumanns chose to base themselves in Leipzig which, one of the leading musical centers of Europe, had a very fine orchestra led by Felix Mendelssohn who'd taken on the conductorship in 1835, sharing his time there with a busy touring schedule and official duties in Berlin as court composer for Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV which included writing incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1844.

Schumann in 1839

It was Robert Schumann who uncovered the lost manuscript to Schubert's “Great C Major” Symphony which he promptly sent to Mendelssohn who premiered it with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in March, 1839. And in March of 1841, Mendelssohn premiered Schumann's “Spring” Symphony – an auspicious first performance for a first-time symphony-composer – but, truth be told, the premiere was sort of overwhelmed by the appearance of the piano soloist, Clara Schumann, making her first public appearance in her home town as Mrs. Schumann.

At the time, the Schumanns, now newlyweds, lived in a 2^nd floor apartment of an imposing apartment block (see photo and map of Leipzig in the previous post) where Schumann composed his first two symphonies and a “Fantasy for Piano & Orchestra” which a few years later became the first movement of his famous Piano Concerto in A Minor – all in 1841. And then three string quartets, the Piano Quintet and Piano Quartet all during the summer and fall of 1842. It was here the Schumanns received guests like Mendelssohn, Berlioz (who visited twice in 1843) and Wagner who'd moved to nearby Dresden in 1843 with the premiere of his first lasting success, The Flying Dutchman.

Clara w/Marie, 1844

Meanwhile, a year after the wedding, Clara gave birth to their daughter, Marie, the first of their eight children. Two weeks before Marie's birth, Clara read through Robert's new Fantasie for Piano & Orchestra (not yet the Concerto) during a rehearsal; and then a month later, she performed solo works on the first half of a concert in Weimar with Robert's new Symphony on the second half. Between January and the end of April, she gave 15 concerts on tours through Germany and Denmark.

After several weeks on the road, Schumann became uncomfortable not only with the constant traveling but also realizing he was essentially regarded as “Mr. Clara Schumann.” He returned to Leipzig as she took off for Copenhagen – he had responsibilities with the magazine he'd founded, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834 – but was instead challenged by bouts of melancholy, drowning himself “in beer and champagne,” and unable to compose. He filled his time with the equivalent of “creative crossword puzzles,” filling notebooks with technical exercises in counterpoint and fugue (the composer's equivalent, at the time, of a pianist's scales and arpeggios). Before they'd left on the tour, he'd been “visited by quartet-ish thoughts” and so began studying string quartets by first Mozart and Haydn, then Beethoven. Meanwhile, Papa Wieck was spreading rumors that the loving couple had already broken up, their marriage on the rocks.

When she returned home in late-April – talk of an American tour was put on hold – Clara joined in with Robert's studies, and then on June 2nd, he began what he called “quartet essays.” On June 4th, he began work on an A Minor Quartet and even before it was completed, he'd begun sketch a new quartet on the 11th, completing the A Minor on the 22nd. After finishing the 2nd Quartet – and becoming involved in a “a libelous onslaught” with a long-time rival which earned him no less than 6 days in jail!!! – he sketched out a third quartet between July 8th and the 22nd. After a short August vacation (which his nerves no doubt needed) and after hearing a run-through of all three quartets on September 8th, he then completed a new Piano Quintet by the end of the month, and a new Piano Quartet, begun after “constant fearful sleepless nights,” completed in November. There was also a piano trio completed in December which, along with another work, he was dissatisfied with and set aside to rework them later.

The first of Robert's string quartets shows the fruits of his studies, both of Bach's counterpoint and of the Classical Quartets of his predecessors. It opens with a slow, mysterious evocation of Beethoven's late style with a good bit of imitation between the different instruments (a.k.a. counterpoint), but otherwise the first movement is the expected traditional “sonata form” except for one peculiar digression: it's in the wrong key. (This has always puzzled me: in a realm that was careful to play by the rules, it seems an odd slip to make; but then, what does it matter when it's so pleasant to listen to and otherwise does everything required of it?)

The second movement is a scherzo (usually reserved for third place in the overall scheme of things) and in this case, clearly a bow to the elfin style of Mendelssohn's fleet-footed scherzos like those in the Octet or the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this case, I would say it's a very conscious hommage given Schumann ended up dedicating all three quartets to his friend and champion.

No one can fault Schumann's gift for melody. Perhaps it was having written all those songs two years back. Regardless, whether a skill or a naturally honed talent, this third movement is only the first of a series of “romances” to be written that year, climaxing in the gorgeous slow movements of the Piano Quintet and the Piano Quartet of only a few months later.

The last movement, then, opens in a burst of drama quickly scurrying off with the same kind of kinetic energy that propels the finale of Mendelssohn's Octet, an energy that isn't even dampened by the rustic stamping in the cello's drone. Surprisingly, this turns out to be an even more standard “sonata form” movement than the first movement, except this time, Schumann introduces something new for the “coda” (literally, “tail”) which wraps it up: while the country dance is never far away, suddenly we have a passage reminiscent – drone and all – of a musette or hurdy-gurdy (in this instance played without vibrato to heighten the impression). An even odder passage is a simple harmonic progression, all in whole notes, that brings the opening energy down to a sense of suspended animation, before returning to the main motive, bringing everything to an affirmative and certainly energetic conclusion.

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(you'll need to click on the square-ish icon in the lower right corner to view it full-screen in order to see the score)

  (though uncredited, a comment indicates it's performed by the Cherubini Quartet)

(my apologies if you've gotten hit by the gauntlet of YouTube ads that pop up in the most annoying places, sometimes in the middle of a phrase. Reminds me of that childhood "interrupting cow" knock-knock joke...)

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Aside from the obvious references, stylistically, to Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as well as the legacy of his recent studies of Mozart and Haydn quartets, consciously or not, the forensic musicologist in me also hears certain turns of phrase that distinctly belong to one of the most frequently performed composers of the day, Ludwig Spohr, though now largely forgotten and rarely performed. Spohr wrote over 30 quartets and you can, if interested, check them out with a search on YouTube.

It's also interesting to immediately go and listen to all three quartets in quick succession – binge-listening, for lack of a better name – to get a feel for Schumann's writing all of them in the space of only six weeks. Here's the 2nd String Quartet in F Major (a friend of mine, hearing it for the first time, said Schumann was “clearly ripping off Brahms,” except Schumann wouldn't meet Brahms for another 8 years and Brahms wouldn't be the composer we'd know, worth ripping off, for a few more years after that); and the 3rd Quartet in A Major.) 

The progress he'd made in his composing in general, from a technical standpoint, but his string quartet writing specifically is amazing. Somewhere, with the finale of the 1st – which presumably he hadn't written yet when he began the 2nd Quartet – the music begins to sound more effortless, more “sincere” for lack of a better subjective term. Most of all, the counterpoint sounds less self-conscious. The opening of the 2nd has an ease about it: perhaps, having broken the ice with this first “essay in quartet-writing,” he'd overcome whatever fear he'd felt, approaching his first piece of chamber music and discovered he really could do this. There's a self-assuredness with the 3rd Quartet that leads directly to the two chamber pieces with piano – he could now write something specifically involving his wife in the performance.

And is it too much to point out, recalling that summer vacation taken before he embarked on the Piano Quintet and the Piano Quartet, that nine months later, their second daughter Elise was born?

But then, after these heady months of intense creativity, suddenly he'd become exhausted by the effort; that and his creativity seemed to lose some of its steam as the months of activity wore on. He became ill and completely unable to work.

This set up a pattern that would eventually grow into one of the saddest stories of “tortured creative genius.” It has been called “manic depression” but more recently became classified as “bipolar disorder,” where periods of creative inactivity were followed by bouts of incredible and often “violent” activity – seriously, writing the rough draft of his 1st Symphony in four days?? – which, then leaving him exhausted, led to another extended period of depressive inactivity. He often found himself unable to engage in conversation, often sitting in a room, silent and withdrawn.

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In 1843, the year after Schumann's explosion of chamber music, Felix Mendelssohn began planning a new Conservatory for Leipzig, and Robert Schumann became involved in many of the preliminary discussions. However, it was Mendelssohn's energy and organizational skills – the extrovert to Schumann's introvert, perhaps – that established the school. Schumann was initially engaged to teach composition as well as piano and score-reading; Clara, despite being pregnant with their second child, was still busy with concert tours, and would become involved later, teaching when she could maintain a “more regular schedule.”

Unfortunately, Robert, given Clara's “distance” (both emotionally as well as physically), was often in a “melancholy state” as he described it, finding it difficult to speak, and students complained he would sit through a lesson or rehearsal rarely saying a word. In December, 1843, however, his recently completed oratorio, Paradise and the Peri, was ready for its premiere and he reluctantly agreed to conduct it, something he'd never done before. Remarkably, with Clara as the rehearsal pianist, he got through it satisfactorily enough though he was not entirely an effective rehearsal technician.

Schumann, 1844

Then came another tour, this one to Russia begun in January of 1844. Clara thrived on the adventure and dealt remarkably well with the typical Russian weather. Robert, instead, suffered from colds, fevers, aches, and various pains, as well as the usual fits of anxiety and melancholy, diagnosed by a Russian doctor as “nerve fever.” Clara described him in letters home as being “weak, sick, sad, and angry.” By the time they arrived in Moscow, he was dealing with bouts of vertigo and, temporarily losing his vision, afraid he was now going blind. When they eventually returned to Leipzig, Robert took to his bed; Clara, now back in the domesticity of hearth and home, missed the excitement and glamor, the constant accolades and money her performing brought in – oblivious of how superfluous her husband felt – realized something had to be done.

In June, Robert resigned from the editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift and in August, Clara officially joined the faculty at Mendelssohn's conservatory. But soon Robert had a complete mental breakdown, so weak he could barely walk across the room. He now had pains, trembling and weeping, and was often unable to sleep. This time, pregnant with their third child, Clara canceled a concert tour and stayed home. Visiting Dresden, only a few hours away by train, they eventually decided, rather suddenly, to leave Leipzig behind and in December, 1844, moved into a new apartment in the Saxon capital.

But that would begin another chapter.

The remainder of this post takes the story of the Mendelssohns and the Schumanns a bit beyond the biographical coincidence of this program's music. Consider it “extra-credit” (there will be no quiz following the concert, however). I've also written other posts about both Mendelssohns and Schumanns which you can read here: Mendelssohn's Sister and Her World and Mendelssohn's Life, Mendelssohn's Death (both from a project for high school students); The Extraordinary Life of Clara Schumann; and And Schumann at the Close. 

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Felix Mendelssohn was 38 years old when he died in 1847 – file under “Composers Who Died Young” (why does that sound like a “Jeopardy” topic?). We often think of Mozart, dying at 35, and Schubert, at 31, but we tend to overlook Mendelssohn wasn't that much older. In fact, his sister Fanny, four years his senior, was only 41 when she died following a stroke that occurred during a rehearsal of Felix's Walpurgisnacht cantata, planned for an upcoming family Sunday musicale (yes, the family still gave them and, yes, they were still attended by many friends and visitors, just like their parents had done decades earlier). Taking the news of Fanny's death hard, Felix was often ill and distraught, taken off to a spa in Switzerland to recuperate and grieve. He struggled to complete a string quartet, his sixth, in the dark key of F Minor which is often referred to as his “Requiem for Fanny.” Not much later, he too had a stroke and died only six months after Fanny.

The Schumanns, 1850

Schumann was one of the pallbearers at Mendelssohn's funeral, but his health, meanwhile, had continued to deteriorate, occasionally alternating with intermittent bouts of creative activity that still produced some of his best works – like the last two movements of the Piano Concerto in 1845, the C Major Symphony in 1846. Living in Düsseldorf on the Rhine where he had, perhaps inadvisedly given his past experiences, taken the post of orchestra conductor, he wrote the “Rhenish” Symphony (his last symphony but published as No. 3) and the under-appreciated Cello Concerto both from 1851. But as he began to exhibit more concerning “symptoms of insanity,” a work like his D Minor Violin Concerto, written in the autumn of 1853 (completed just two days after a 20-year-old composer named Johannes Brahms showed up at the Schumann's front door) was considered “a disappointment” as a result of his health and, suppressed by Clara and its dedicatee, the young violinist Josef Joachim, never published.

Clara in early-1854

It was the next February when, in the throes of a series of “demonic visions” and other hallucinations, some of them brought on apparently by what would now be diagnosed as tinnitus, Schumann threw himself off a bridge into the Rhine River. Rescued and taken home by some boatmen who'd witnessed this, Schumann asked to be taken to “a lunatic asylum” (as they were called in those days) in Bonn. Before he left the house in Düsseldorf that last time, he requested to take this photograph of Clara (see left) with him, and kept it in his room at the hospital.

After he was taken away that evening, Clara, already pregnant with their last child, a son who would be named Felix (in honor of their friend Mendelssohn), never saw her husband again until late-July of 1856, two days before he died at the asylum outside Bonn. He was 46. She was 38.

Meanwhile, now, Clara was forced to support herself and her children – and later, after the deaths of two of them, several grandchildren she now raised – returned to the concert stage, touring frequently until arthritis and neuralgia made it more difficult even to practice on a daily basis much less perform. Among her final performances was Robert's Piano Concerto in 1885 with her half-brother, Woldemar Bargiel, a composer and conductor – as the son of Clara's mother by her second husband, this makes one wonder if Friedrich Wieck could take, as he did, all the credit for creating the genius that was Clara! – and then, at her last concert, Brahms' Variations on a Theme of Haydn in 1891.

As a composer, it might be understandable, looking at the number of children Clara was raising and the husband she was looking after, not to mention her performing and teaching career – and don't forget, she had been unable to use the piano to write or practice while Robert was composing his own works – it's not surprising she'd never had the “serious time” required to become a composer on a regular basis. Her last works to be published were a set of variations on a theme by her husband and the three Romances for solo piano written for his birthday in 1853.

Lenbach's portrait for her 60th Birthday

She would later write, "I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?"

Her husband also expressed concern about the effect on her composing output: “Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.”

(Not, one could add in modern hindsight, that he ever seemed to offer some way to help her work this problem out...)

Clara Schumann died in Frankfurt in 1896 at the age of 76, following a stroke. Brahms, who'd received the telegram about her death too late, barely made it to the funeral in time, following problems with train schedules and mistaken directions, only meeting the procession on its way to the grave site. Brahms himself would die within a year at the age of 63.

Then finally, Clara was laid to rest beside her husband in a cemetery in Bonn.

- Dick Strawser

The Aizuri Quartet Opens the New Season: Meet the Mendelssohns

 

The Aizuri Quartet

Welcome to the New Season! Our first concert takes place at Temple Ohev Sholom on North Front Street in uptown Harrisburg this Wednesday at 7:30pm, with the Aizuri Quartet, the latest recipient of the coveted Cleveland Quartet Award which includes a concert-tour of various venues around the country. In addition to Harrisburg and Market Square Concerts, it will take them to New York's Carnegie Hall and presenters in Buffalo, Detroit, Urbana (IL), Kansas City, Austin (TX) and the Freer Art Gallery in Washington DC.

Known for their advocacy of new music since their founding in 2012, the Aizuri's program here of four 19th Century works might seem rather tame. Yet pairing Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny with Robert Schumann and his wife Clara – or, if you prefer, given the program order, Fanny Mendelssohn with her brother Felix and Clara Schumann with her husband Robert – examines creative relationships as well as personal relationships outside the immediate sound of the music. And it offers us a chance to explore the role of “Composers Who Happen to Be Women” before the mid-point of the 19th Century as well as more challenging and often more uncomfortable issues like Anti-Semitism with the Mendelssohns and the delicate balance of Creativity and Mental Health with Robert Schumann.

These are four works written within a span of nine years. Fanny Mendelssohn's rarely heard String Quartet from 1834 (once could just as easily say “rarely-heard Fanny Mendelssohn and her practically unknown String Quartet”) and one of Felix Mendelssohn's shorter works for quartet, written in 1843, form the boundaries of this program's world. While Felix wrote several quartets of his own, they get performed frequently enough, so lets, for the moment, focus on Fanny.

Clara Schumann, who for various reasons, wrote little music and no string quartets, will be represented by an arrangement of one of her songs. Not just any song: despite its ominous sounding title, “I stand in darkness Dreaming,” it was written at Christmas as a present for her new husband. They'd been married just a few months earlier and had just moved into a new home together, finally, after a long and traumatic courtship (and in this post we'll briefly meet one of the more notorious Stage Fathers in Classical Music, Friedrich Wieck, who opposed his daughter's marriage and fought them in the courts). Robert, missing his wife while she was away on tour in 1842, found a creative outpouring on her return that resulted in a set of three string quartets – his only published quartets – which were first performed in a private reading on his wife's birthday. He'd also dedicated them to their friend, Felix Mendelssohn – the previous year, Mendelssohn conducted the world premiere of Schumann's 1st Symphony – and there any many instances in the piece, particularly the second movement, which show Mendelssohn's stylistic influence. It's seems odd, considering Mendelssohn is only a year older than Schumann, but Mendelssohn was, at this point in his life the better known and more productive composer, not to mention an extrovert to Schumann's introvert.

Most music-lovers may not realize the composers whose music they're listening to lived in Real Time and Space and may well have known each other in professional as well as social contexts. (This in turn makes me think of the first time I ran into one of my elementary school teachers in the grocery store and thought “wow, she eats food?), that they have lives outside of being marble busts or names emblazoned on concert programs and music appreciation textbooks.

And given the way my imagination tends to work, I started imagining all four of these composers, who were at one time or another all in Leipzig at the same time, in a setting kind of like “Friends.”

Before I get too carried away, I should point out, first of all, Felix Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny, remained in Berlin where she and her younger brother had grown up and began their careers, even if hers was confined to the music room of the family home while Felix wandered the length and breadth of Europe as a much celebrated conductor and composer. While Felix was the conductor of Leipzig's famous Gewandhaus Orchestra since 1835 (he was 26 at the time), he did not live permanently in the city, commuting from Berlin or wherever he might have been touring at the time. (What would you call a mid-19th Century jet-setter...?)

Robert and Clara Schumann, recently married, were 30 and 21 years old respectively in 1840 when they moved into their new apartment in a building now known as “The Schumann House”, today currently a museum. But with Robert's health rapidly deteriorating and Clara's international career making demands on their domestic life, they moved out at the end of 1844 to settle in Dresden.

The Schumann House on Inselstrasse, Leipzig

Felix Mendelssohn, finally, moved to Leipzig full-time in early-1845, finding a 2nd floor apartment in a comparable building now known as “The Mendelssohn House,” but only lived there for the not-quite three remaining years of his life. It too exists as a museum today.

The Mendelssohn House on Goldschmidtstrasse, Leipzig

Regardless, Clara concertized with Mendelssohn and the Gewandhaus Orchestra frequently in the 1840s, and Mendelssohn premiered several works of Schumann's at the time, including his 1st Symphony in 1841 They occasionally held “read-throughs” (try-outs) of each other's newest compositions, including the set of three string quartets Robert composed earlier in 1842, a private reading intended to celebrate Clara's 23rd birthday and which he dedicated to Mendelssohn. And they were all involved, one way or another, in the founding of a new music conservatory – well, all except Fanny, back in Berlin...

Here is a map of modern-day Leipzig with the Schumann House and the Mendelssohn House marked, only 0.6 of a mile apart. It would be pleasant to imagine them making the 11-minute walk back and forth for a social evening now and then.

Still, the imagination (or at least mine) was fueled by seeing a restaurant two blocks south of Mendelssohn's home, just beyond the edge of the map, called “The Blue Zebra” which made me think of Brahms' favorite hang-out in Vienna, a tavern called “The Red Hedgehog” – except the Zebra is a modern pub specializing in African cuisine (complete with take-out). Well, if we're engaging in time-traveling, what would it be like to stop at the Trattoria Amici around the corner from Mendelssohn's – on the way to the Schumanns' – for a pizza? Sitting nearby, you might overhear them discussing, say, news from their latest tours and performances, or gossip from that immoral cesspool of Paris about Chopin and his affair with George Sand (“it's said she even wears men's clothing!”) or just trading anecdotes about the raising of toddlers in a home where you're trying to compose!

The stuff, perhaps, of Historical Fiction if not exactly Musicology: in actuality, Mendelssohn moved into his new apartment only months after the Schumanns moved out of Leipzig. Still, they had ample opportunities during the early-1840s to meet whenever Mendelssohn was in town; and then Dresden was only a short train-ride away whenever the Schumanns had reasons to be in Leipzig, professionally or socially. 

Mendelssohn's new place was conveniently located just a few blocks from the hall where his orchestra performed, the famous Gewandhaus. But Leipzig is also a city haunted by Bach who'd spent most of his career at the St. Thomas Church, located about a mile from the Gewandhaus as the crow flies. Just beyond the church is the famous Mendelssohn Monument, its statue erected in 1892 but pulled down and destroyed by Nazi sympathizers in 1936. It was only replaced by a modern replica in 2008. But that is, alas, one of the more horrible aspects of the History of Art and Humanity which would only make this post even longer and more complicated than it is.

With that, let's move on and Meet the Composers.

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Fanny Mendelssohn, long overshadowed by her little brother Felix, was born in Hamburg in 1805. Their father, a successful banker, running afoul of Napoleonic politics, returned to his native Berlin in 1811, two years after Felix was born. There, the two children both showed considerable musical talent and both were supported by their parents. It is often said that Mendelssohn was one of those rare creative artists who grew up in economic luxury, unlike the poverty or economic uncertainty that influenced many other famous composers' early careers.

One advantage certainly was the regular Sunday musicales the family presented for friends and visitors at their rather substantial house which benefited both Felix and Fanny, including the “gift” of a string orchestra hired to perform not only concertos with the brother and sister as soloists – Fanny as pianist, Felix as both pianist and violinist (he even wrote a concerto for violin and piano for them to play with the orchestra) – but also the thirteen “string symphonies” which proved to be Felix's real “on-the-job training” as both composer and conductor. There are reports of him standing on a chair to conduct so the players could all see him.

They studied composition and counterpoint together but apparently the little orchestra was only for Felix: during these years, 1821-23, when Felix was 12-14, Fanny (16-18) wrote nothing beyond her usual songs and short piano pieces except for a Piano Quartet in 1822. Initially, the parents considered Fanny the more musical of the two but their father changed his mind about music as a suitable career for Felix when he began to show not just an increased talent but a dedication to the work it would take to become a professional musician.

And then, as if from nowhere, Felix wrote his Octet for Strings in 1825 when he was 16 and, a year later, the “Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Many music-lovers are surprised to learn these works, clearly the work of a mature genius and often considered some of the most perfect pieces in the repertoire (admittedly a subjective reaction), were written by a boy in his mid-teens! (I remember one teacher telling me, when I was a student, “amazing works for a boy his age”; and I said, “amazing works for a man any age!”)

But already in 1820, Abraham Mendelssohn had written to his daughter, "Music will perhaps become his [Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament."

She herself did not receive any public notice as a composer until 1830 when John Thomson, who had met her in Berlin the previous year, wrote in a London journal praising a number of her songs Felix had shown him. Her public debut at the piano, one of only three known public performances... came in 1838 when she played her brother's Piano Concerto No. 1.

Between 1824 and 1830, Felix published 12 of Fanny's songs under his own name, part of various sets of songs he'd had published. Today, this smacks of plagiarism, but “back in the day” its was the only way Fanny's music was going to be professionally published and made available to a public audience, with or without recognition. When later visiting London and meeting Queen Victoria in London, she told the composer she would sing for him her favorite piece of his, the song Italien. Whether she was amused or not, Felix was delighted to tell her that one was actually by his sister, Fanny; he was delighted to inform Fanny of the anecdote.

In 1846, having been approached by two different publishers in Berlin, Fanny decided, without consulting her brother, to publish a collection of her songs as her Op. 1, using her married name, "Fanny Hensel geb. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy." In mid-August, then, Felix wrote to her "[I] send you my professional blessing on becoming a member of the craft... may you have much happiness in giving pleasure to others; may you taste only the sweets and none of the bitterness of authorship; may the public pelt you with roses, and never with sand." Two days later, Fanny wrote in her journal "Felix has written, and given me his professional blessing in the kindest manner. I know that he is not quite satisfied in his heart of hearts, but I am glad he has said a kind word to me about it." She also wrote to a friend, "I can truthfully say I let it happen more than made it happen, and it is this in particular which cheers me ... If they [the publishers] want more from me, it should act as a stimulus to achieve. If the matter comes to an end then, I also won't grieve, for I'm not ambitious.”

Her diaries curiously lack much reference to her musical life, especially her composing and certainly not in the context of her being frustrated at not being published, a sense I suspect often the result of more recent attitudes and assumptions (“how would you feel...?”) Today, we bristle at comments like her teacher writing to his friend Goethe, already acquainted with young Felix's accomplishments, that Fanny “plays [the piano] like a man.” In those days, it was considered a compliment and something, I guess, extraordinary.

Still, a friend of Felix's wrote, not long after her death: “Had Madame Hensel been a poor man's daughter, she must have become known to the world by the side of Madame Schumann and Madame Pleyel as a female pianist of the highest class."

(Keep in mind, along the lines of artistic context, Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the masculine pseudonym, Ellis Bell; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, as Currer Bell; and their sister Anne Brontë, Alice Gray, as Acton Bell, each in the year 1847, the year both Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel and her brother Felix Mendelssohn died.)

While Lucy Miller Murray's program notes include a familiar portrait of Fanny Mendelssohn, painted in 1842 by a family friend – that would be the year before Felix composed the “Capriccio for String Quartet” on the program – for the blog, I've chosen Wilhelm Hensel's sketch, drawn in 1829, the year he and Fanny were married after an 8-year courtship (they met when she was 16).

Technically, I suppose, we should refer to her as Fanny Hensel or, at least, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel. Given other traditions of the day, she would not have legally retained her maiden name after having married.

It was in 1829 that she composed two piano sonatas – or at least part of them. The second, listed as a fragment and sketched in early November, a month after the wedding, was in E-flat and may be incomplete or the last movement may just have been cut out of the notebook. Regardless, two of the three “sketches” for this sonata were later recycled into the finale of the String Quartet of 1834.

This work, No. 277 out of the 466 known works listed in a numerical catalogue, was written between August and October, and signed “F. Hensel.” It's in four movements: an opening Adagio, followed by the scherzo marked Allegretto (not too fast), a Romanze in the manner of a song but very “romantic” in more ways than one, ending with a lively finale in a traditional “bring-down-the-curtain” vein. While it may not strike one as a “great work waiting to be discovered,” it's certainly more accomplished than the work of a modestly talented amateur. However, after hearing a few too many lackluster performances on YouTube, this one, I think, is committed enough to present a compelling case for programming it. And besides, considering this is the only one we know of that she completed, think how her “on-the-job training” might have evolved into a higher level of achievement had she had the support of family and society inspiring her to compose several more?

= = = = = = = – performed by the Selini Quartet 

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It's interesting to imagine how one of the projects they discussed in their correspondence might've turned out. In 1840-41, they contemplated turning the old Norse legends about the Nibelungen Ring into an opera – Fanny thought “the hunt with Siegfried's death would make a splendid finale for the 2nd Act.” Richard Wagner, who'd begun The Flying Dutchman in 1841, only began putting together some ideas for what ultimately became his Ring of the Nibelung in 1848.

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Little needs to be added about the musical life of her little brother, Felix. Long considered one of the leading composers of the 19th Century, his career was, despite the “lap of luxury” he grew up in, not all that easy due to the rampant anti-Semitism of the day and the ensuing purge in the 1930s of the Nazi's attacks on what they considered “decadent music” (both anything too modern for their conservative tastes and anything created by a Jew).

While in this post I'm more interested in the interconnected lives of the Mendelssohns and the Schumanns, the role of Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann as “women composers” is something of a contrast considering we wouldn't usually refer to Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann as “men composers.” Only in the fairly recent years I'd worked in the classical music radio business, we've gone from calling them “women composers” to referring to them as “composers.” At the time, Fanny Mendelssohn's and Clara Schumann's music (indeed, any music by a woman) would likely be dismissed by those who shared Samuel Johnson's 18th Century attitude toward the Lady Preacher, with the quip “no woman has yet matched the level of Shakespeare or Beethoven” to which I'd respond “indeed, few men have achieved that, either!”

Granted, given the opportunity of recognition and a career, Felix Mendelssohn wrote a lot more music we're aware of today. I'd already mentioned two of his teenaged accomplishments, the Octet and the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, but I also like to point out to music-lovers that one of his most popular works, his “Italian” Symphony – another work I consider close to perfection – was something he never published during his life time. Why? Because he didn't think it “good enough yet”!!! He kept meaning to get around to making some more revisions. Remember the old adage, “There's always tomorrow”? Well, and then one day, there isn't...

So what was Felix Mendelssohn writing when his sister was working on her String Quartet in 1834? In 1833, fresh off one of his many travels, this one to Italy and a stay in Rome where, among other things, he would go drinking and shop-talking with Hector Berlioz then working on his Symphonie fantastique (as Felix wrote home, he felt the need to wash his hands after handling the score). His own experiences became the inspiration for his “Italian” Symphony, the first draft written in 1833 (btw, his 4th Symphony was written after his 5th Symphony, the “Reformation” of 1832, like the 4th also published posthumously; his “Scottish” Symphony, written in 1842, officially the last symphony he wrote, was published as his 3rd Symphony – confused yet?)

Mendelssohn in 1846

The year he composed the Op.81 Capriccio for string quartet, 1843, was the year after he'd completed the “Scottish” Symphony and the year before he composed his Violin Concerto. While there were a lot of smaller works – piano pieces, choral anthems, various songs – there was also a set of incidental music written for the King of Prussia's court theater for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to augment the Overture he'd composed 18 years earlier.

Technically, the four pieces of Op.81 – again, officially a posthumous opus – were not intended to be a single work, a String Quartet in four movements. While the first three pieces (as published) might make a conceivable unit in E Major–A Minor–E Minor, the fourth, written much earlier in 1827, is in “the wrong key” for a finale: E-flat Major. The grouping is merely a convenient way of solving the problem of what do with four separate pieces found among his manuscripts after he died.

The first time I heard this, still a student and not quite familiar with Mendelssohn's personal story, I thought they were playing the wrong piece: what kind of “Capriccio” is this? First, it begins with a slow introduction – odd, for so short a piece – but once the “fast section” kicks in, becoming an intense sweep of hard-driven counterpoint, I realize it's more of a “Prelude & Fugue,” reminiscent of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier which had been such an important part of the Mendelssohns' childhood.

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A year after composing this “Capriccio,” Mendelssohn made a permanent move to a new residence, leaving Berlin, his official residence, to settle in Leipzig. He had been music director of the city's famous orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, since 1835, but spent much of his time touring, mostly as a conductor and usually including his own music. But as duties in Leipzig become more pressing and he was becoming involved with founding a new conservatory there, he decides to move his family into a spacious apartment in what to us looks like it must've been a palace in its early days. I remember seeing this and thinking “this was their house??” But it turns out Mendelssohn, his wife Cécile, and their three (eventually four) children lived in a 2nd floor apartment that included a spacious music room and a private studio where he could compose. It is now a museum, open to the public.

The Music Room in the Mendelssohns' Apartment

Fanny, her husband, artist Wilhelm Hensel, and their son Sebastian, continued to live in Berlin, but occasionally visited her famous and busy brother in Leipzig. There were two visits in early-1847 which included get-togethers with the Schumanns. At one of these, Fanny and Clara sat down and compared notes on their recently completed piano trios: Fanny had recently finished hers; Clara's was completed in Dresden the year before. Imagine what it must have been like for both of them to “talk shop” with another composer who was also a woman!

So now let's meet the Schumanns.

 - Dick Strawser

Summermusic #3: Escher Brings Haydn, Bartók, and Schubert to Town

This Wednesday evening marks the third and last concert of Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2023, a performance by the Escher Quartet, returning to Temple Ohev Sholom on Front Street below Seneca Street. The program includes a quartet Haydn wrote in 1793, the 4th Quartet Bela Bartók wrote in 1928, and one of two quartets Franz Schubert wrote in March of 1824, the one known as the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. The concert begins at 7:30 and tickets will be available at the door.

The Escher Quartet (outstanding in their field)

The six quartets Franz Josef Haydn published in 1793 – two sets of three: Op. 71 and Op.74 – are often collectively referred to as the “Apponyi” Quartets for the same reason Beethoven's Op.59 Quartets are the “Razumovsky” Quartets: Haydn dedicated them to a cousin of his patron, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, named Count Anton Georg Apponyi, a member of an old and powerful aristocratic Hungarian family. A collector of paintings and an avid musical amateur, known as “an excellent violinist,” he would later become a founding member and then president of the famous Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the legendary Society of the Friends of Music, in Vienna. There are some references that in 1795 he suggested Haydn's young student Beethoven ought to try his hand at a quartet.

Haydn in London, 1791

When Haydn first arrived in London on New Year's Day, 1791 – finally: English impresarios had been trying to “catch” him since 1782! – he found himself immensely popular with the music-going public. Even that was something new: before, basically working in isolation for Prince Esterházy between his Hungarian estates and the imperial capital, Haydn was used to writing music for his patron's audiences and while his fame had spread well beyond the walls of Vienna's aristocracy, the fact people in as far away as London could consider him all the rage was astounding to him. Since 1774, concerts where tickets were sold to the general public had become popular in London; since 1782, there was hardly a concert that didn't include a work by Haydn.

Mozart died while Haydn was in London for his first stay. Then, after he received a comparatively cool reception in Vienna on his return, Haydn decided to accept an invitation for a second tour in 1794. This time, during the summer of 1793, he wrote six new quartets specifically for a projected series of London concerts and Count Apponyi was willing to pay 100 ducats (whatever that might be worth in today's dollars) for the dedication, the 18th Century's equivalent of “naming rights.” In previous cases, such patronage involved “performing rights,” a period of ownership that would preclude other music-loving aristocrats (and wealthy merchants, too, like Johann Tost, who'd once been a violinist in Esterházy's orchestra) from being able to have them played at their musicales.

So, with little fanfare, then, Haydn ended up creating the first string quartets written for the paying public, not a wealthy patron. Whatever sense of freedom this may have given Haydn, these quartets exhibited a subtly new approach: biographer Rosemary Hughes wrote, “It is as if Haydn were pushing open a door through which Beethoven was to pass.” Seven years later, Beethoven would present his own set of six quartets, his Op.18. And more than just a new century had begun.

The quartet on the Escher's program, the D Major Quartet, Op.71 No. 2, opens with a brief, four-measure slow introduction setting up the main Allegro. Rather than being a simple melody-with-accompaniment, the accompaniment begins to branch out with a more defined independence with the occasional slip onto an unexpected chord or a switch to the darker minor mode (Haydn was always good for something unexpected, but here they're more subtle: we, used to Beethoven and Bartók, might not even notice them, today). The frequent use of the octave leaps throughout the Allegro might bring to mind the “motivic saturation” of Beethoven's 1st Quartet's opening movement.

The slow movement, one of Haydn's great Adagios, unfolds like a seamless meditation. Presumably in sonata form, Haydn again creates the unexpected by smoothing over the usual formal signposts until, really, while the structure is there, it needn't be so obvious. The third movement, more earthy than elegant as expected, is certainly well on its way to becoming the scherzo Beethoven will later be given credit for. And then its middle section, the standard trio, certainly a contrast, seems to lack a theme at all. (By the way, notice the octave leaps, filled in here, as if left over from the first movement.)

The last movement begins as a gentle Allegretto in the manner of a folk-like dance – not an all-out Hungarian dance, in honor of Count Apponyi – a simple tune that would be out of place in a first movement but fine in a light-hearted finale. It becomes increasingly more active, more dramatic, then breaks out into a sprint for the finish, a brilliant conclusion. An old joke about programming a concert to end with a flourish to spark the applause: “play it faster and louder!” Even though Haydn has only four instruments here, he's already managed to figure out how to get a hearty response from enthusiastic fans.

Performed by the Maxwell Quartet from the UK.

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Bela Bartók in 1927

It's not unusual for a string quartet to program three different quartets from three different historical periods: Classical 18th Century, Romantic 19th Century, and “Modern” 20th Century (what will we call 21st Century works in the grander scheme of things?). In this case, following them chronologically, we have Haydn from 1793; Schubert, 31 years later but a whole world away, in 1824; and Bartók over a century later in 1928 on the verge of a world depression and halfway between one World War and the next.

To many listeners, Bartók still strikes us as “contemporary” despite the 95-year age difference. At his best, he is not exactly easy listening (then, neither is Schubert's Death & the Maiden Quartet by 1820s standards, much less Beethoven's Late Quartets of the same decade). As often happens, people put off by the unfamiliar tend to focus on what's different; if we listen to Bartók and think about what's similar to what Beethoven and maybe even Haydn were doing, it might be easier to become more comfortable with his musical language.

Bartók initially grew out of the “enforced” status quo of the Vienna of Brahms and Richard Strauss. Hungary was long part of the Austrian Empire even if, since the mid-19th Century, it officially became the Dual Monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and Bartók was adamantly Hungarian as a hot-headed youth. His first major work, written in 1903, was a vast tone poem after Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben, inspired by Laszlo Kossuth, the leader of Hungary's 1848 Revolution. He depicted the Austrians with a satirical parody of their national anthem; the crushing defeat of the Hungarians became a funeral march with echoes of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Needless to say, a success in Budapest, it didn't go over too well in Vienna.

If hearing (and meeting) Strauss in Budapest in 1902 was a life-changing event, so was the simple moment in time when, walking through a hotel on vacation, he overheard a nanny, originally (like him) from the Transylvanian region that was then part of Hungary, singing a lullaby that was an authentic Hungarian folk-song, the first real folk-song he'd heard. Up until then, “Hungarian folk music” meant the dance-band music of the gypsies. Brahms would haunt Viennese taverns to hear the gypsies play just as many Americans would hang out at New York speak-easies to listen to jazz. Those tunes Liszt, a Hungarian-born cosmopolitan who lived in Germany, in Paris, in Rome, would quote in his famous Hungarian Rhapsodies were actually the equivalent of “urban pop” music, not the Hungarian folk at all. This was about to change.

With his friend, fellow student Zoltan Kodály, Bartók began a study of this authentic folk music and started quoting them directly into short piano pieces like transcriptions, or using them in his 1st String Quartet completed in 1909. His love of folk music took him on many trips around the Balkans, eventually even to Turkey and North Africa. He (quite literally) wrote the book on Serbo-Croatian folksongs as a result of this life-long research, or at least Part One of it: it was completed posthumously and published in 1951 by his colleague, Albert Lord, at Columbia University where Bartók had been a research fellow after settling in New York at the start of World War II.

This folk music he heard and recorded was not performed by trained musicians but by the people he met in the villages and across the countryside of Hungary. With its particular sense of accent, rhythms, and vocal contours, this music had begun to permeate Bartók's music early in his career and soon he'd gone from quoting actual songs to creating original melodies “in their style.” By the 1920s, he began calling this “imaginary folksong.”

A series of his “mature works” began in the mid-1920s with the 3rd and 4th String Quartets in 1927-1928. To us, they may sound nothing like folk-music, but many of the rhythmic turns, the gestures, the melodic shapes and their narrow spans are all part of this “primitive” style rather than the niceties of a Schubert song or a Beethoven symphony.

Thinking in terms of “motives” rather than tunes, and “gestures” rather than melodic phrases, listen to how many of these take on specific characteristics as the work unfolds, particularly through the opening movement. Complete with supporting sustained chords like a drone, there's an all-out “melody” for the cello in the middle movement, a highly ornamented slow-moving line (in many folk musics, intonation is not based on the Western tempered scale: perhaps Bartók's use of these tight half-step intervals and fluctuating ornaments reflect what more timid American ears might consider “singing out of tune” or using microtonal inflections?)

Unlike the 3rd Quartet which is basically a single condensed movement, the 4th and 5th Quartets are five movement “arch forms,” with two shorter movements on either side of a central movement (the keystone of the arch), then the two outer movements often connected by common motives or rhythms. In the 4th, the keystone is this “night music” with sustained, almost static chords underneath a winding, undulating cello melody, full of surprising shimmers that bring to mind that once, as a student, Bartók was fascinated with his discovery of Debussy's impressionism.

Keeping with the idea of the arch, the 2nd Movement and the 4th reflect one another's hurried, almost frantic mood and their folk-like motives, even if the sound is markedly different. In the 2nd, it's muted almost like a will-o-the-whisp that suddenly erupts in terror, its icy glissandos like spirits in the air. (This movement is clearly inspired by the misterioso from Alban Berg's Lyric Suite of 1926 which Bartók heard in 1927, the year before he composed his 4th Quartet.)

It is not difficult to imagine some of the sounds Bartók asks for from his string players are not something that will sound effective when played “nicely,” especially the pizzicato or plucked passages in the wild 4th Movement, especially the “snap pizz” which rebounds off the fingerboard and became such a trait of his it is still called “the Bartók Pizz.” Not to mention some of the glassy – eerie – sounds in the other movements created by playing near the bridge of the instrument. And sometimes the transition from one “sound” to another can be so startling, some might wonder if they're listening to stringed instruments at all.

Here's a recording by the Keller Quartet with the score: even if you can't read music, you can see the shapes of the different lines moving sometimes together, sometimes in contrary motion, sometimes a repeated pounding accompaniment under a short repeated gesture in the upper parts (or vice versa). It's a different world, Bartók's, and even if you don't understand the language, like listening to a story teller who knows how to use his voice to create an effect where words might fail, you'll still get what's happening.

(A footnote: I remember listening to a rocking new recording of Bartók's 4th Quartet with members of the faculty string quartet where I was teaching back in the 1970s, and after this last movement, the first violinist turned to me and said very matter-of-factly, "So I imagine to a Hungarian that would be real down-home music.") 

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Schubert in 1825; watercolor by a friend

Because Schubert used a theme from one of his songs as the subject for a set of variations in the slow movement of his D Minor String Quartet, the whole quartet is known as “The Death and the Maiden” Quartet. Two things need to be pointed out: the quotation affects only the second movement; while the drama of this quartet, already in the dark key of D Minor (it would later become Brahms' famous “tragic key”), may be powerful and striking – imagine what it would've sounded like to a Vienna used to the classical niceties of Haydn and, more or less, Beethoven who, by 1824, had not yet begun his series of Late Quartets! – but that doesn't mean the entire quartet is “death obsessed” or the result of a focus on dying, given a famous letter I'll get to after the video. We are suspended between the last gasps of the Classical Age – if you listen to what everybody other than Beethoven was writing at the time – and the beginning of the Romantic Age which had already appeared in poems and paintings for decades (the first “true” Romantic opera, Weber's Der Freischütz, premiered in 1821).

1st page of the original MS of Schubert's Quartet, "Death & the Maiden"

I'll get to the story “behind” the quartet after we hear the Escher Quartet perform it in these two videos. Before it even begins, you'll notice it's about 40 minutes long, about twice as long as Haydn's quartet which opens the program. It's in four movements, starting with a dramatic “sonata-form” movement (as was traditional in the Classical Era) – its opening motive may strike you as something similar to the “fate motive” that opens Beethoven's 5th Symphony first heard in 1808 – followed by a slow movement, a set of variations (again, Classical Standard-Operating-Procedure) in which he uses his 1817 song, “Death and the Maiden.” The third movement would normally have been a minuet or (with Beethoven) a scherzo (Italian for joke), but is more brutal than dance-like, even with its graceful middle section. Like many of Schubert's finales, this one is propelled by a repetitive rhythm, creating a powerful momentum before going all out toward its final cadence. This is a far cry from music meant to be pleasant and delightful, part of an evening's after-dinner entertainment. And a long way from music making with amateurs. Schubert was obviously determined to be on his way to becoming a “serious” composer!

If you're not familiar with the song itself, it's interesting to compare the “quartet version” (beginning at 11:37 in the first video) to the original, the song D.531 composed in February, 1817 (Schubert had just turned 20). While he skips the opening vocal lines, the plea of the young maiden faced with the impending arrival of Death, he's not using the “melody” as we might think it, such as it is, what the singer's singing, Death's reply to comfort the young girl: it's the piano accompaniment, with its simple harmonies.

“Give me your hand,” Death sings, “you beautiful and tender form! / I am a friend, and come not to punish. / Be of good cheer! I am not fierce, / Softly shall you sleep in my arms!”

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“It sometimes seems to me as if I did not belong to this world at all.”

It's a famous Schubert quote. Lucy Miller Murray opens her wonderful set of program notes about this quartet with it, and while I've found mentions of it in several on-line essays, I can find no direct reference to when it was written or to whom it was written (in a letter or in his diary?).

Kupelweiser's 1818 watercolor of himself (on a "dandy horse") and Schubert with a kaleidescope

To his friend Leopold Kupelweiser, then visiting Rome, Schubert wrote on March 31st, 1824, “Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast vanishing; and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy.”

This is usually (and frequently) quoted as proof Schubert was depressed, an easy word to banter around in hindsight from a time when many people use the word as a synonym for “sad.” Certainly, after the horrible year he'd had before this, he should be allowed to feel a bit down, to understate it: after all, in 1823, he was ill much of the year – the first symptoms of syphilis (which would eventually cause his death five years later) had just appeared; he had been hospitalized in May – and he was, as usual, having money problems, especially after a disastrous deal with the publisher Diabelli. Plus his latest attempt at an opera was another failure (did you know he started over 20 operas, finished only 11 of them, none of them staged in his lifetime? Who wouldn't find that depressing...). He wrote Fierrabras (to a horrible libretto by Kupelweiser's brother) between the end of May and the start of October, 1823, but due to the failure of a new opera by Weber and the unstoppable rage for All Things Rossini, plans to stage his new work were shelved, then canceled. Not only had he spent four months writing it, he never even got paid for his commission! At the end of December, his incidental music for a “magic play” called Rosamunda, Princess of Cyprus was another unmitigated disaster, again mostly because of the ridiculousness of the play. Small wonder he put operas aside (for a while) to concentrate instead on instrumental works.

What is often overlooked, in that depressing quote from his letter to Kupelweiser, is that he continues talking about just that thing, how he was now finished two string quartets, an octet, “and I want to write another quartet; in fact that is how I want to work my way toward composing a grand symphony.” Hardly the words of a young man thinking his life was no longer worth living!

He had taken a fragment of music from that Rosamunda play and used it as the 2nd Movement for the first of these two string quartets, the one in A Minor listed in Otto Deustch's catalogue as D.804. It was even performed in public by no less than Ignaz Shuppanzigh's quartet (associated with Beethoven's quartets and formerly court violinist for Count Razumovsky), on March 14th, 1824; and even more importantly, published that fall. (Remember, his letter to Kupelweiser was dated March 31st...)

He almost immediately began another quartet, this one in D Minor, D.810, and while we're not sure when it was finished – the second half of the quartet's original manuscript is still missing – it was performed in private on February 1st, 1826. Did it take that long to complete, or did he put it aside, as he had a habit of doing? The “Unfinished” Symphony suffered a similar fate: stumped for a 3rd and 4th movement to stand up to the first two, he left it as it was, incomplete (perhaps, incompletable); and friends who'd been given the score didn't know what to do with it because, after all, it wasn't finished... so they just stored it in a box in their closet until 1860.

There are some twenty or so string quartets, complete or incomplete, in Schubert's output but most of these were “household quartets” (usually dismissed as juvenalia) written for his family's musicales when he was living at home: his brother Ferdinand was a respectable violinist, brother Ignaz not so much, and their father “played the cello,” so by default Franz, an adequate violinist, played the viola (then often looked upon as the “third violin,” where people who couldn't cut second violin parts were sent).

But by late-1820, Schubert – now 23 years old – began to write more “serious” quartets. While there exists 41 measures of a slow movement, all we have of this first new work is known as the Quartettsatz, D.703, and it's from here we can talk about Schubert's Mature Quartets but alas, he completed only three of these: the Rosamunda, the D Minor known as Death and the Maiden, and the last one in G Major D.887 of 1826, the three he mentioned in Kupelweiser's letter.

Yes, Schubert died in 1828 at the age of 31, but keep in mind he also wrote, counting the individual little piano pieces grouped together in some of his dance collections, some 1500 compositions – the Deutsch catalogue numbers his last completed work, the song The Shepherd on the Rock, as D.965.

Imagine, as you listen to the concert, this string quartet is the music of a man recently turned 27 who had his whole life ahead of him. Then, insert the latest edition of the game, “What if...?”, here.

Dick Strawser