Reprintable only with permission from the author.

Schubert Quartet in a minor

Despite having no connection to it in time or topic, there may be no better description of the essence of Schubert’s music than the following passage from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written during his incarceration at Reading Gaol:

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is themost sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought towhich sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf oftremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparisoncoarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

Schubert: the wounded, the lonely, the poet of memory, most especially the memory of that which is irretrievably lost, or that which has only ever existed, or dared to be hoped for, in imagination. The Quartet in a minor, D804, sings of sorrow and memory throughout. Perhaps the most piercing such evocation is in the third movement, a minuet. Often minuet movements, innocently or cheekily dancing, provide a foil to more weighty and profound movements that surround them. Occasionally one encounters strong and defiant minuets. But the minuet in this quartet well may be the single instance in musical history of a tragic minuet. Situated in the past, or in a future that will certainly never come to pass, the fragile dance is an emblem of loss and lack.

The movement is bookended by a haunted and haunting oscillating figure, almost a “once upon a time,” summoning the attention toward a remote, forsaken, spectral dance, and then, at the movement’s close, suggesting its evaporation, never having been able to take hold as reality. This figure is a quotation from a song of Schubert’s, with a text by Schiller, Die Götter Griechenlands, where the text asks “oh beautiful world, where are you?” This figure also comes midway through the minuet, in a remote key, hollow and comfortless, possibly one of the most painful moments in any piece. Schubert, acutely attuned to beauty, expelled from an Eden to which he can never return, suffers with a fragile hypersensitivity. Contemporaneous with this quartet is a letter to his brother, in which he writes “it is no longer that happy time in which every thing appeared to be surrounded in a youthful glory, rather the unpleasant recognition of a miserable reality, which using my imagination (thank God) I try to beautify as much as possible.” The countryside ländler of the contrasting middle section, arrived at through a transformation of the opening figure, is destined to remain an unfulfilled wish, an abandoned opportunity.

Schubert shares a spiritual kinship, dissolving the boundaries of a century’s distance, with the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who adored Schubert’s music, and often accompanied himself at the piano while singing his songs. The a minor quartet can be felt as a pre-echo of the later artist’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a broken-spirited 69 year old man listens back, on his birthday, to tapes of himself narrating his own thoughts on birthdays past, when his younger self still had frangible hopes and dreams and brief possibilities for happiness, all of which have come to naught. All of time is present at once, and the juxtaposition of potential and actuality lacerates the heart. In the play there is no resolution, no sense of drama, only memory and its attendant contusions of the soul. (Schubert, of course, never even reached the age that Krapp is in the majority of his recorded thoughts, 39, but his was an ancient soul from the start.) The play is permeated, as is this quartet, with grief and its seeming inevitability, failure as destiny.

Krapp listens to himself narrate a memory of a romantic interest from his youth, a girl in a punt, that represents a glimmer of the prospect of contentment, extinguished by time, yearning that cannot be disentangled from the vacuum of emptiness to which it, inevitably, leads. He muses over the word “viduity,” the state of being widowed; he needs to look up its definition when he hears his younger self use it. Loss piles atop loss until the meaning of that loss falls out of reach, forever bound to the hope it shatters.

The opening texture of the Schubert quartet evokes, in the vacant open fifth intoned by the viola and cello, the final song of the composer’s great song cycle, Die Winterreise, in which a lonely wanderer, at the end of his journey through the unforgiving landscape, encounters a likewise solitary organ-grinder. In the quartet, this interval gets held out until it dissolves in a shudder, while the second violin weaves and wends like a frigid stream. When the first violin enters singing, its first three notes, a falling sigh, echo the notes in the aforementioned Die Götter Griechenlands where the singer asks “where are you?”

This melody feels infinitely sad, forlorn, in the minor mode. Yet soon enough it is heard in major, notably absent any sense of having been transformed in its core. One of Schubert’s most terrifying songs is Der Doppelgänger, the final stanza of which reads “O you Doppelgänger! you pale comrade! / Why do you ape the pain of my love / Which tormented me upon this spot / So many a night, so long ago?” Seduction and torture prove twinned, here as elsewhere in Schubert. Both versions of the melody are contained in one another, just as the earlier versions of Krapp on his tapes are a sort of doppelgänger for him, or the organ-grinder for the lonely wanderer. The same theme is heard, as well, in a draconian, merciless version that feels fateful and unyielding. Even with the contrasting theme of the movement, which dares to reach upward toward the heavens, the accompanying figure is so closely related to the opening texture that no listener can imagine it as a true reprieve. All versions are ghostly doppelgängers of each other. Krapp speaks of a “farewell to love;” so does Schubert, and the farewell is felt as both liberation and devastation. What entrances also, inevitably, destroys.

Krapp remembers a book he wrote, with only seventeen copies sold, “of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas.” Schubert, too, knew commercial failure, which pained him. In his case, his theatrical works met with no success, including both operas and incidental music for the play Rosamunde. One of the movements from the Rosamunde music is taken verbatim as the material heard at the start of the second movement of this quartet. Though the play is now lost, there is a fragmentary draft version extant in which Rosamunde exclaims, right at the start, “blessed childhood, vanished like a dream!” Eerily (pre-) reminiscent of Krapp’s Last Tape. Krapp speaks of being “drowned in dreams and burning to be gone,” one of the most poignant lines in the play. And here, with Schubert, we have memory and dream and failure and hope all tightly intertwined, suspended within some of the most radiantly lovely music imaginable.

And there is further lovely music in the final movement of the quartet, always heavily shadowed by darkness around its periphery. This movement is written in the style hongrois, the music of the Romani people, made apparent by the profusion of anapests, spondees, and asymmetrical phrases of five bars at a time (rather than the more traditional four). Schubert would have found that the situation of these people in Vienna, reviled and excluded from society as they were, paralleled his own inner state. He uses their music in solidarity, dancing in the face of exclusion and isolation. And, in the end, the music dances away as if into the great beyond. Even the final cadence is far from valedictory, with the motion in the bass not the traditional close that represents true finality and conclusion, but rather a weak cadence drawn from the dance itself, powerless to wrest itself from the curse of eternal repetition. At the close of Beckett’s play, Krapp’s tape is allowed to play on to the end of his 39 year old self’s soliloquy, in which he shares his belief that what he would accomplish in the future will make up for his failure to find happiness, which we can observe now has been painfully repudiated by the unsparing passage of time. Both works flow into a future which can never redeem us, we who live with regret andvulnerability. And both enrich us deeply by providing companionship and the beauty of honesty and truth alongside our isolation and loneliness.

Note by Mark Steinberg