Franz Schubert wrote "Der Tod und das Mädchen", D. 531 (Death and the Maiden) in 1817 on a text by Matthias Claudius. The tolling bells of the piano’s opening theme announce the ominous scene illustrated in the poem, made more so by the song’s eery, ambiguous ending in a sunlit D major. In this respect, the song recalls Schubert’s setting of “Erlkönig” from two years earlier, which also chronicles a sinister force behind a saccharine guise.
Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden” takes its name from the ceaseless tolling of that same death knell from the earlier song, now droning inexorably throughout the second movement’s variations. This unrelenting sense of dread infects all four movements—all in the minor mode—from the alternately snarling and trembling Allegro, to the angular, disturbed Scherzo, to the panicked, galloping tarantella of the finale. The oppressively grim orientation of the Quartet as a whole coincides with Schubert’s confrontation of his own mortality; he wrote the piece in 1824, racked with what was likely tertiary stage syphilis and convinced that he was dying.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden” takes its name from the ceaseless tolling of that same death knell from the earlier song, now droning inexorably throughout the second movement’s variations. This unrelenting sense of dread infects all four movements—all in the minor mode—from the alternately snarling and trembling Allegro, to the angular, disturbed Scherzo, to the panicked, galloping tarantella of the finale. The oppressively grim orientation of the Quartet as a whole coincides with Schubert’s confrontation of his own mortality; he wrote the piece in 1824, racked with what was likely tertiary stage syphilis and convinced that he was dying.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest