1826: In Fairer Worlds – I

Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828): String Quartet in G Major D887

In the spring of 1826 Franz Schubert was experiencing a serious slump. He was in low spirits, short of money and most worryingly, struggling to write any music. In desperation he made one of his sporadic attempts to find steady employment, applying for a musical directorship at the Vienna Court Chapel. But such work would never have suited his temperament, something his would-be employers also guessed, and he was turned down for the role.

Feeling there were few other options left to him, he blamed the weather. “I am not working at all”, he wrote to a friend in despair, “the Almighty seems to have forsaken us altogether for the sun simply refuses to shine. It is May, and we cannot sit in any garden yet. Awful! Appalling!! Ghastly!!! And the most cruel thing on earth for me.” His lack of funds also meant he couldn’t escape to sunnier climes for a holiday.

Franz Schubert was just 29, but in many ways already seemed much older than his years. He had been suffering from a serious illness – thought to be syphilis – for much of the past four years and it had shaken him to the core. For several months he had moved back to his family home in order to be taken care of. Then he had languished in hospital for a time. All of his hair had been cut off after a large, painful rash had formed on his head, and he was forced to wear a wig. Thankfully his distinctive curly locks would eventually grow back.

Even as his illness fell into remission, it left him weakened and further stalled his already stalling career. Schubert had few illusions about his situation. “I am fairly well”, he said at the end of 1823. “Whether I shall ever quite recover I am inclined to doubt”. The period of remission for syphilis was thought to be about a decade, after which it could move into its final, deadly phase. There was absolutely no cure for it in the early nineteenth century. Schubert knew he was on borrowed time.

Friends and acquaintances found Schubert a changed, less carefree figure after his ordeal. “Think of a man whose health can never be restored”, Schubert lamented to one such friend in 1824, “and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and from from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better… every night I go to sleep hoping never to wake again, and each morning reminds of the misery of yesterday.”

He also wrote some poetry at around this time, including the lines:

It is not hard to spot some of that agonizing despair in Schubert’s later compositions. But the vision of “life in fairer worlds” is one that would equally consume him and find its own striking symbolism in his music. Even if he was not a conventionally religious man, growing up in a pious, Roman Catholic household had left its mark. Schubert was a kind of spiritual agnostic: outwardly skeptical, but still moved by the ceremonies and aesthetics of religious devotion (he would write several beautiful masses), and still quietly yearning for something redemptive from the forces of the universe.

His musical parameters had notably expanded since the onset of his illness. As he himself poignantly observed: “pain sharpens the understanding and strengthens the mind; whereas joy seldom troubles about the formers and softens the latter and makes it frivolous.” In some way, he recognized his own suffering as being an integral part of his development as an artist.

Schubert’s late music has a vast emotional and psychological range. It can alternate sublime beauty, existential despair and otherworldly serenity often within the space of just a few bars. It also has a striking way of being relatable. Countless listeners have attested to the peculiar intimacy of Schubert’s musical language, almost as if he is at that very moment telling you exactly what he is thinking and feeling.

It is probably this very “human” element to Schubert’s music that has stopped him from ever being canonized or regarded as a musical martyr. Poor and overlooked he may have been in his lifetime, but he was never one to adopt a monkish outlook. He still chased pleasure whenever he could. He still had his circle of admiring friends, made up of Bohemian artists in and around Vienna (they even called themselves “Schubertiades”). They held regular soirées, with Schubert seated at the piano, playing his latest compositions, holding court and usually the centre of attention.

Above all, Schubert was sustained by his insatiable love of composing. At around this time he observed that while “one kind of beauty should hold a man’s enthusiasm all through his life… the glow of that enthusiasm should light up everything else.” Perhaps he hoped that could be true for himself.

Even in these later years he was still capable of almost superhuman bursts of creative energy. While staying with his old friends, the aristocratic Esterházy family, he would once compose, on request, a ten-minute song for four voices and piano between breakfast and dinner. He was a man who “shook the most glorious things out of his sleeve” according to one of those who had witnessed this feat.

There was little stopping Schubert when he got into the zone with his latest composition. A friend recalled that when you popped in to see the composer at such times, he would great you with “hullo, how are you? – good!” and then, according to the friend, he “goes on writing, whereupon you depart…”

The spring of 1826 had been one of the most challenging periods yet since the onset of Schubert’s illness. But then the weather finally improved, and he was able to rouse himself during the last ten days of June to write a monumental new string quartet lasting almost an hour.

Schubert was no novice at writing quartets. He had already clocked up fourteen on his CV, and his two most recent efforts in A Minor D804 and D Minor D810* (both from 1824) had shown a new dramatic reach and maturity. But his latest (and as it would turn out his final) String Quartet in G Major would push the boat out even further – in fact, Schubert wrote few other pieces quite like it. It clearly anticipates a new creative phase, never fully released. The work is both avant-garde and visionary for its time.

*Perhaps his most famous quartet, also known as Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), with its slow movement a set of variations on a song setting with the same title from 1817.

Whereas the likes of Haydn and Beethoven had wanted to build the purest and most equally shared polyphony into their own, much-celebrated string quartets, Schubert wanted to further explore the acoustical possibilities of the four instruments and use them in new and startling ways. One recurring feature of the G Major Quartet is its extensive use of quick, repeated notes (always idiomatic for string players), often shaped into repetitive ostinatos which drive the music forwards. Sometimes the quick, recurring notes even become tremolos (rapidly moving the bow back and forth across a single note to create a shimmering effect). Schubert was equally alive to the effects of pizzicato (plucking the strings), another hallmark of the piece.

Aside from pushing the instrumentalists to their limits, the G Major Quartet is also notable for its ambiguous tonal centre, with Schubert creating an obvious tension between G Major (its tonic) and G Minor from the very outset, a major-minor conflict which then hardly lets up for the rest of the piece. It is evident from the very first chords which open the quartet – a long-held G Major triad, swelling in volume before exploding into a flurry of G Minor centered chords. The passage is then repeated on the dominant triad, with D Major making a similarly explosive transition into D Minor.

Then follows a magical passage, with fragments of melody shared between the violin and ‘cello while the other players accompany with a very soft tremolo. The music seems to evoke certain passages from Weber’s Der Freischütz (which Schubert knew and greatly admired), but with Weber’s large, colourful orchestra reduced to just four string players. After this, the opening major/minor motif is re-introduced, now canonically split between the two upper and lower instruments, creating the most sublime, overlapping waves of sound.

One feature conspicuously lacking so far has been any real melody – Schubert has given us only tiny thematic fragments. In fact, the nearest we ever get to a “theme” in the entire movement is the dance-like motif, with its curious, off-kilter rhythms, which appears several minutes in. Solemnly harmonized, it sounds almost like a syncopated hymn or spiritual. Gradually it is embellished, with both major and minor key inflections, sometimes accompanied by pizzicato chords, at other times by fast triplet figurations spreading across all four instruments.

Schubert also allows this section to run on for several minutes, as if entirely unconcerned about what comes next. Up to a point, he is conscientious about keeping this long and complex movement to a basic sonata form structure. But in other ways, he treats the classical framework as little more than a vast space to fill in any manner he wishes. Throughout the movement there is little of the usual sense of progression, and few of the usual signposts or goals. The music moves, as if of its own accord, towards deeply uncertain ends, with Schubert finding new and highly individual ways to create his own musical logic. The movement does finally conclude in the place it started, with G Major alternating with G Minor chords, before the former wins through.

The second movement, in E Minor, is more outwardly tragic. It leads with an exquisite, elegiac theme on the ‘cello, accompanied by solemn chords in the higher instruments, with Schubert judging the acoustical distance between melody and accompaniment almost to perfection. The music then takes a distinctly wild turn into the middle section, as if keen to let off steam – with brutal, hard-edged rhythms, demisemiquaver flourishes, jarring dissonances and tremolo chords (the latter again bringing some of the darkest scenes from Freischütz to mind) threatening to run out of control. The main theme finally returns to restore order, but is now shared between the various instruments, with Schubert skillfully moving the players between accompaniment, melody and counter-melody, in what is a stunning piece of contrapuntal writing.

The third movement, a scherzo in B Minor, is fleeting and yet still unsettling, its tension created by an uncertain tonal centre and its constantly shifting keys. By contrast, its middle section – in G Major – is shaped like a musical ländler and full of cheerful melodies, as if recalling happier, simpler times. It is one of the few unambiguously sunny moments in the entire work,

The finale is a fast, relentless tarantella, less monumental than the first movement but just as complex in its own way. Once again G Major (light) is vying for supremacy with G Minor (darkness), with neither key prevailing until the end. The first passage with any settled tonal centre isn’t G Major but B Flat Major, and over the course of the movement it’s as if Schubert wants to maintain the tonal instability to the end, setting passages in just about every known key.

Although the movement finally resolves (after a long, grueling, syncopated passage) into its tonic of G Major right at the end, the moment isn’t triumphant in any Beethovenian sense, but rather soft and resigned. It’s a reminder that Schubert did not necessarily believe in happy endings. As the pianist Paul Lewis once put it, with Beethoven “there is a sense of rising above or resolution”, whereas with Schubert “you end up with more questions, a sense of something hanging in the air.”