Schubert: String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D. 804, "Rosamunde"
The final years of Franz Schubert’s short life were plagued by the dehumanizing symptoms of syphilis; by the time of his untimely death at 31, he suffered from constant headaches, fever, swollen joints and mercury poisoning (mercury was a common treatment for syphilis), and was unable to retain solid food. Schubert’s syphilitic symptoms first appeared in 1823, five years before his death, and in March of the following year he wrote in anguish to a friend:
“I feel myself to be the most unfortunate, the most miserable being in the world. Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better; think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught, to whom the happiness of love and friendship offers nothing but acutest pain, whose enthusiasm…for the Beautiful threatens to disappear…
My peace is gone, my heart is heavy,
I find it never, nevermore…
so might I sing every day, since each night when I go to sleep I hope never again to wake, and each morning merely reminds me of the misery of yesterday.”
The dismal Goethe referent of Schubert’s letter is lifted from the opening lines of a poem that he set to music ten years earlier, yielding “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. Echoes of that song’s famous perpetual motion accompaniment resonate in the similarly-contoured second violin pattern that threads the first movement of the String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor, D. 804, Op. 29 (“Rosamunde”), perhaps a subtle cue for the emotional context of the work. Indeed, the A minor Quartet received its premiere just two weeks before Schubert dated his pained note, and its deeply personal, melancholic writing seems to reflect a similar sentiment. The Quartet also borrows musical material from another of Schubert’s songs, whose bleak text begins, “Beautiful world, where art thou?”
In spite of the despair that pervades much of the work, it is the rare glimpse of sunlight in the untroubled theme of the second movement that gives the Quartet its nickname. That theme comes from Schubert’s earlier incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and he would later recycle it yet again for his B-flat Major piano Impromptu. The theme’s dactylic rhythmic profile seems a clear nod to the hypnotic dirge of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But whereas that funereal movement in Beethoven represents a solemn turn in the midst of an overall exuberant work, Schubert inverts that affective paradigm by tempering his second movement’s reprieve with the grief of the surrounding music.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
The final years of Franz Schubert’s short life were plagued by the dehumanizing symptoms of syphilis; by the time of his untimely death at 31, he suffered from constant headaches, fever, swollen joints and mercury poisoning (mercury was a common treatment for syphilis), and was unable to retain solid food. Schubert’s syphilitic symptoms first appeared in 1823, five years before his death, and in March of the following year he wrote in anguish to a friend:
“I feel myself to be the most unfortunate, the most miserable being in the world. Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better; think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught, to whom the happiness of love and friendship offers nothing but acutest pain, whose enthusiasm…for the Beautiful threatens to disappear…
My peace is gone, my heart is heavy,
I find it never, nevermore…
so might I sing every day, since each night when I go to sleep I hope never again to wake, and each morning merely reminds me of the misery of yesterday.”
The dismal Goethe referent of Schubert’s letter is lifted from the opening lines of a poem that he set to music ten years earlier, yielding “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. Echoes of that song’s famous perpetual motion accompaniment resonate in the similarly-contoured second violin pattern that threads the first movement of the String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor, D. 804, Op. 29 (“Rosamunde”), perhaps a subtle cue for the emotional context of the work. Indeed, the A minor Quartet received its premiere just two weeks before Schubert dated his pained note, and its deeply personal, melancholic writing seems to reflect a similar sentiment. The Quartet also borrows musical material from another of Schubert’s songs, whose bleak text begins, “Beautiful world, where art thou?”
In spite of the despair that pervades much of the work, it is the rare glimpse of sunlight in the untroubled theme of the second movement that gives the Quartet its nickname. That theme comes from Schubert’s earlier incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and he would later recycle it yet again for his B-flat Major piano Impromptu. The theme’s dactylic rhythmic profile seems a clear nod to the hypnotic dirge of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But whereas that funereal movement in Beethoven represents a solemn turn in the midst of an overall exuberant work, Schubert inverts that affective paradigm by tempering his second movement’s reprieve with the grief of the surrounding music.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest