Schubert: String Quartets Nos. 10 And 13

Description

Franz Schubert (1797- 1828) String Quartet No.13 in A Minor, D. 804 String Quartet No.10 in E Flat Major, D. 87 Franz Schubert was born in 1797, the son of a Vienna schoolmaster, and had his education as a chorister of the Imperial Chapel at the Staatskonvikt. Both at school and at home he had an active musical life, as a player and as a composer, and when his voice broke and he was offered the means to continue his academic education, he decided, instead, to train as a teacher, thus being able to devote more time to music. By the age of eighteen he had joined his father in the school room, while continuing to compose and to study with the old court composer Antonio Salieri. In 1816 he moved away from home, sharing rooms with a friend and the following years found him generally in the company of friends, with an occasional resumption of teaching, an avocation for which he had no great talent, at least in the classroom. Schubert's brief career continued in Vienna, and while there were occasional commissions and some of his works were published, there was never the opportunity of the kind of distinguished patronage that Beethoven had had and still enjoyed, nor the possibility of an official position in the musical establishment of the city. It was February 1828 before Schubert was able to have a concert devoted to his work, an event that proved both successful and profitable, but by the autumn his health had weakened, the consequence of a venereal infection contracted six years earlier. He died on 19th November. As a composer Schubert was both precocious and prolific. Over the years he w rote some five hundred songs and a quantity of piano music and chamber music, including fifteen string quartets, with larger scale works for the theatre and for orchestra, although he never had a professional orchestra regularly available to him, as Haydn had had by the nature of his employment as a princely Kapellmeister, or as Beethoven had had through the good offices of his rich patrons. In 1824 Schubert seemed to have recovered to some extent from the more serious effects of the illness that had kept him in hospital the previous year. He was still depressed, however, realising that he would continue to suffer the recurrent results of the infection. He resolved to work towards greater symphonic works through chamber music, and this year wrote not only the A minor Quartet and the Death and the Maiden Quartet, but also the Octet, the Grand Duo for violin and piano and the Arpeggione Sonata. In the A minor String Quartet, the first complete attempt at the form since 1816, the music is now in a mood that echoes in feeling and motif that of his setting of schiller's nostalgic poem Die Götter Griechenlands, with its thoughts of a happier, golden age in Schöne Welt, wo bist du? The first movement opens with an ominous accompanying figure from viola and cello, while the second violin weaves another accompanying pattern, to be joined by the first violin, which