Classical Music | Music for Quartet

Recorded on 07/13/2005, uploaded on 02/18/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

String Quartet No. 12 in c minor,  D703 "Quartettsatz"       Franz Schubert

Schubert composed the Quartettsatz-a title that simply means quartet movement-in December 1820, when he was just a few weeks short of his 24th birthday. He had apparently planned to write a standard four movement quartet, but completed only the first movement and a 41 measure fragment of what would have been an Andante second movement. No one knows why he set aside such a promising work, but the surviving movement is significant enough to stand as a satisfying whole.

Listed as the twelfth of Schubert's fifteen string quartets, the Quartettsatz is generally acknowledged as the first of his mature quartets. The first eleven had been written as Hausmusik for a quartet made up of members of Schubert's own family: his brothers played the violins, his father the cello, and the composer the viola. Because he was writing for amateur musicians in those quartets, Schubert had kept the demands on the players relatively light-his cellist father in particular was given a fairly easy part in those quartets. But in the Quartettsatz (and in the three magnificent final quartets) Schubert felt no such restrictions. This music, of enormous technical difficulty, was clearly intended for professional performers.

The key relations are one of the most remarkable aspects of the quartet: it begins in C minor with the first violin's racing, nervous theme, which quickly gives way to the lyric second idea in A-flat major, which Schubert marks dolce. The quiet third theme-a rocking, flowing melody-is in G major.  As one expects in Schubert's mature music, keys change with consummate ease. Surprisingly, the opening idea does not return until the coda, where it puts in a brief appearance in the closing moments of the movement.     The Formosa Quartet

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.