Schubert composed the Quartettsatz–that title, which did not originate with Schubert, means simply “quartet movement”–in December 1820, when he was just a few weeks short of his 24^th 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 so promising a work aside and left it unfinished, but–like the “Unfinished” Symphony–the surviving movement is significant enough by itself to stand as a satisfying whole.

Curiously, the Allegro assai opening movement of this quartet is similar to the first movement of the “Unfinished” Symphony: both feature the same sort of double-stroked opening idea in the first violins, both are built on unusually lyric ideas, and both offer unexpected key relations between the major theme-groups. In fact, the key relationships are one of the most remarkable aspects of the quartet: it begins in C minor with the first violin’s racing, nervous theme, and this quickly gives way to the lyric second idea in A-flat major, which Schubert marks dolce. The quiet third theme–a rocking, flowing melody–arrives in G major. As one expects in Schubert’s mature music (and the 23-year-old who wrote this music was a mature composer), keys change with consummate ease, though one surprise is that the opening idea does not reappear until the coda, where it returns in the closing instants to hurl the movement to its fierce conclusion.

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 the three magnificent final quartets Schubert felt no such restrictions. The Quartettsatz makes enormous technical demands (including virtuoso runs for the first violin that whip upward over a span of three octaves) was clearly intended for professional performers.

String Quintet in A Major, Opus 39
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV
Born August 10, 1865, St. Petersburg
Died March 21, 1936, Paris

Glazunov was one of the most prodigiously gifted of composers, and his long career spanned an important era in Russian music. His First Symphony was premièred when he was sixteen; he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and became friends with Liszt, Borodin, and Scriabin; and late in life he was an ardent supporter of the young Shostakovich, whose tuition he helped pay. He composed a vast amount of music, including eight symphonies (a ninth remains in piano score), five concertos, seven quartets, two ballets, and much more. It might be said of Glazunov, however, that he fulfilled the promise of his youth but not of his maturity. Virtually all his music was composed before he was 40: there is almost nothing from the final thirty years of his life, when he was overwhelmed by his administrative duties as director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, by a lack of sympathy with the new directions music was taking, by a difficult relation with the new Soviet government, and by problems with alcohol.

The String Quintet in A Major, though, dates from the heady days of Glazunov’s youth: he composed it in St. Petersburg in 1891-2, when he was 26. The cello quintet has proven a rare form–though Boccherini wrote over a hundred during the eighteenth century, the form almost vanished thereafter. Schubert’s magnificent Cello Quintet, composed in the last months of his life, is the one great example written after Boccherini, and Glazunov may well have had Schubert’s Quintet in mind when he wrote his own, for both works are marked by an unusual melodiousness and richness of expression. Glazunov played both violin and cello, and the writing throughout his quintet is graceful and idiomatic–and sometimes very imaginative.

Glazunov’s Quintet takes much of its character from the very opening, where the viola’s long melody rocks along smoothly on its 9/8 meter. Glazunov marks this rising-and-falling figure dolce, and its general shape will reappear throughout the quintet. The second subject, announced by the first cello, is also marked dolce and cantabile: this will be a movement based not on drama or conflict but on an agreeable lyricism. Though Glazunov changes meters frequently, the music never grows tense or conflicted, and a full-throated coda propels it to a close on a unison A.

The Scherzo is an exceptionally attractive movement. Glazunov combines the sound of bowed and pizzicato strings in the outer sections, and while the trio moves to D minor, it retains the relaxed character of the entire quintet: the marking again is dolce and cantabile. The cello restates the quintet’s general theme-shape in the introduction to the Andante sostenuto, and the first violin extends this into a flowing main melody marked dolce ed espressivo. A more active middle section leads to a return of the opening material and a coda that makes imaginative use of harmonics.

Glazunov was sometimes accused of cosmopolitanism by his countrymen, who felt that his music was not sufficiently Russian, but the last movement of the quintet has a distinctly Russian feel. It opens with a vigorous eight-bar tune that sounds as if it must have had its origin in Russian folk-music, and Glazunov then treats this in many ways, including some vigorous fugal writing. The episodes in this rondo-like movement are quite varied, and the coda drives the quintetto a quick close on another unison A.

String Quintet in C Major, D. 956
FRANZ SCHUBERT

Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, universally acknowledged as one of the finest creations in all chamber music, dates from the miraculous final year of that composer’s brief life, 1828. That year saw the revision of the “Great” Symphony in C Major and the composition of the three final piano sonatas, the songs of the Schwanengesang collection, this quintet, and the song Der Hirt auf Dem Felsen, completed in the weeks just prior to Schubert’s death on November 19. The date of the Quintet is difficult to pin down, but it was probably composed at the end of the summer–on October 2 Schubert wrote to one of his publishers that he had “finally turned out a quintet for 2 violins, 1 viola, and 2 violoncellos.”

Many have been quick to hear premonitions of death in this quintet, as if this music–Schubert’s last instrumental work–must represent a summing-up of his life. But it is dangerous to read intimations of mortality into music written shortly before any composer’s death, and there is little basis for such a conclusion here–although he was ill during the summer, Schubert did not know that he was fatally ill. Rather than being death-haunted, the Quintet in C Major is music of great richness, music that suffuses a golden glow. Some of this is due to its unusual sonority: the additional cello brings weight to the instrumental texture and allows one cello to become a full partner in the thematic material, a freedom Schubert fully exploits. Of unusual length (over 50 minutes long), the quintet also shows great harmonic freedom–some have commented that this music seems to change keys every two bars.

The opening Allegro ma non troppo is built on three theme groups: the quiet violin theme heard at the very beginning, an extended duet for the two cellos, and a little march figure for all five instruments. The cello duet is unbelievably beautiful, so beautiful that many musicians (certainly many cellists!) have said that they would like nothing on their tombstone except the music for this passage. But it is the march tune that dominates the development section; the recapitulation is a fairly literal repeat of the opening section, and a brief coda brings the movement to its close.

Longest of the four movements, the Adagio is in ABA form. The opening is remarkable: the three middle voices–second violin, viola, and first cello–sing a gentle melody that stretches easily over 28 bars; the second cello accompanies them with pizzicato notes, while high above the first violin decorates the melody with quiet interjections of its own. The middle section, in F minor, feels agitated and dark; a trill leads back to the opening material, but now the two outer voices accompany the melody with runs and swirls that have suddenly grown complex.

The third movement is a scherzo-and-trio, marked Presto. The bounding scherzo, with its hunting horn calls, is fairly straightforward, but the trio is quite unusual, in some surprising ways the emotional center of the entirequintet. One normally expects a trio section to be gentle in mood, sometimes even a thematic extension of the scherzo. But this trio, marked Andante sostenuto and in the unexpected key of D-flat major, is spare, grave, haunting. Schubert sets it in 4/4 instead of the expected 3/4, and its lean lines and harmonic surprises give it a grieving quality quite different from the scherzo. The lament concludes, and the music plunges back into sunlight as the scherzoresumes.

Many have heard Hungarian folk music in the opening of the Allegretto, with its evocation of wild gypsy fiddling. The second theme is one of those graceful little tunes that only Schubert could write; both themes figure throughout the movement, until finally another cello duet leads to a fiery coda ingeniously employing both main themes.

The Quintet in C Major is one of the glories of the chamber music repertory and one of Schubert’s finest works. Yet he never heard a note of it. It lay in manuscript for years and was not performed until 1850, twenty-two years after his death.