A Recital by the Brentano Quartet
Marathon, 1848 (encaustic on stone) by Carl Rottmann. Neue Pinakothek Munich/Wikimedia Commons.
Franz Schubert
String Quartet in A minor, “Rosamunde,” D. 804
This quartet, one of the few performed in public in Schubert’s lifetime and the only one published, marked the composer’s return to quartet composition after three years in which he composed nothing for the medium. He was probably moved to take up quartet writing again by his acquaintance with Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the leader of a famous quartet. (It had premiered many of the Beethoven string quartets.) Schubert wrote the A-minor quartet in the first months of 1824, and the Schuppanzigh ensemble played it on March 15. The public response must have been favorable, since it was in print as early as the following September.
At the time he composed the quartet, Schubert was suffering from syphilis—had been, in fact, for almost two years. The disease was widespread in Vienna at the time, and its progression was all too familiar. Vienna was filled with medical “specialists” who claimed to treat the disease, but of course no actual cure existed for more than a century. Schubert began to feel that his health might be “beyond repair.”
About the time he was writing the A-minor quartet, Schubert indicated his mood of depression by noting that he might as well sing every day the words “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy”—the opening of his great song Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel. It is one of his very few songs that opens with a constant reiteration of an accompaniment that does not change its harmony. The opening of the string quartet is very similar in character, though the poignant melody is different. Could Schubert have been evoking, even in passing, one of his greatest and most tragic songs?
The quartet seems infused with the spirit of song. The very opening bars sound for all the world like accompaniment to the song of the first violin, but instead of remaining discreetly in the background, the accompaniment takes on progressively greater significance. The melody, meanwhile, droops sadly at its beginning, though it becomes more assertive later.
The Andante is adapted from music that Schubert had already composed for the play Rosamunde. The production had failed immediately, so he could have every reason to suspect that the incidental score would never be heard again, and only his closest friends would have heard it even the first time. (It was not until forty years later that George Grove and Arthur Sullivan, while hunting for missing Schubert works in Vienna, located the lost music to Rosamunde and many other important works, sparking a real Schubert revival thanks to which this Andante melody will be familiar to many listeners.)
For the Menuetto, Schubert quoted the opening of an 1819 song, Die Götter Griechenlands (The gods of Greece), a setting of Schiller’s lament on the disappearance of that colorful Classical world in which an Olympian god might be observed behind any tree or atop any mountain or riding the clouds of a thunderstorm. The song begins “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?” (Beautiful world, where are you?) (The writer Sally Rooney has recently used this very line as the title for a bestselling novel.) In making use of its material in his string quartet, he takes only the piano accompaniment, not the entire melody, as he did in the “Trout” Quintet. It is rare for a minuet movement to echo so utterly the mood of the work as a whole, but here Schubert’s sense of impending loss is evident.
The finale, which makes no use of earlier musical material, turns to A major for a movement we might expect to be entirely cheerful throughout. But this rondo is not an unbuttoned romp; it offers a slight lifting of the sadness inherent earlier, with perhaps some rays of hope. — © Steven Ledbetter
The Cello Player, 1910 (black crayon and watercolor on brown paper) by Egon Schiele. Albertina, Vienna.
Anton Webern
Five Movements
The line between the Western musical methods called “tonality” and “atonality” is fuzzy. The music of Mozart and Haydn, for instance, is clearly tonal. At any time, it features a pitch called the tonic that is more firmly rooted than the others, the basis of a scale of seven notes that are the primary source of the work’s chords and melodies. Atonal music, which arose in the early twentieth century, does away with the hierarchy of tones implied by the presence of the powerful tonic note, and instead places equal importance on all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
Between the solidification of tonality in the Classical era and the invention of atonality in the twentieth century, many composers pushed the limits of the tonal system, with key culprits being Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, whose 1899 string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) was rejected by the Vienna Musikverein (a hub of the city’s musical life since the time of Beethoven) for featuring an unclassifiable chord. Schoenberg was Anton Webern’s teacher, mentor, and friend, and in the last movement of his Second String Quartet (1908), the music slides over the boundary from tonality to atonality for arguably the first time. Unusually for a string quartet, and belying its name, the work’s last two movements feature a soprano who sings the words of the Symbolist poet Stefan George to emphasize this new development: “Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten” (I feel air from another planet).
Webern would have come to know Schoenberg’s Quartet well while playing cello in the rehearsals coordinated for soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder. Webern’s first atonal works—the Lieder Opuses 3 and 4—also featured the words of Stefan George; the poet’s way of creating cohesion out of a swirl of images and emotions provided a useful analog for both composers. Along with Schoenberg’s 1909 Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11, Webern’s Five Movements for string quartet of the same year is therefore among the earliest atonal pieces written for instruments alone, without texts to guide them.
The work was not entirely abstract, however. Webern had a close relationship with the string quartet, saying that “quartet playing is the most glorious music-making there is,” and one of his previous efforts in the medium, the Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) of 1905, had been spurred by the first feelings of love for his future wife. Writing to his friend and fellow Schoenberg pupil Alban Berg, he cited the Five Movements as one of a series of works related to the death of his mother.
Webern’s works are known for their concise expression, with movements frequently lasting a minute or less or covering only a page or two of sheet music. The first movement of this piece breaks that mold, being relatively expansive; it harkens back to older forms, mimicking the opening of a Classical string quartet by setting out clearly contrasting ideas and themes, then returning to and expanding them.
Having dispensed with the weighty history of the string quartet form, Webern then creates the next three movements with a focus on particular sonorities. The second movement has the instruments muted, using the veiled but warm character of chords on their lower strings to contrast with bright melodic fragments rising above. The third passes in a quicksilver flash, with the players bowing sul ponticello, close to the end of the strings’ length, to generate a glassy sound, and plucking the strings or using the wood of the bow to create piquant effects. The fourth is a dark mirror of the third, using very similar techniques on the instruments, but stretching the sounds out over slow melodies.
The fifth movement most clearly expresses the work’s emotional core of grief. The opening cello melody ruminates on three pitches, and the higher strings sigh in sympathy; the rest of the movement murmurs disquietingly, with flashes of anger bursting out, and ends without any resolution. — © Joel Rust
Brahms with the Fellinger Family, 15 June 1896 (photograph) by Maria Fellinger. Meininger Museen. One must imagine Brahms happy.
Johannes Brahms
String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat major, op. 67
Brahms had been hesitant to publish string quartets early in his career; the powerful example of Beethoven was simply too overwhelming. Not until his fortieth year (1873) did he bring out the two quartets of Opus 51, and then only after having worked on them for many years—and after having reportedly destroyed some twenty other quartets that didn’t meet his high standards. The intense effort that Brahms put into the string quartet occasionally revealed itself in a sense of striving for effect, attempting perhaps more than the quartet medium allowed.
Surprisingly different, then, is his last string quartet, Opus 67, completed in May 1876 and published later the same year. For this quartet, Brahms turned to Haydn, the progenitor of all string quartet writing, and produced a work of wit and charm. His good friend Clara Schumann wrote to him after hearing a private performance:
I am especially pleased with the third and fourth movements and I cannot decide which delights me the more, the melodious viola solo in the third or the charming theme with its delicate tracery in the fourth. The theme with its playful ending is a pure joy.
On the whole, playfulness is not a quality normally associated with Brahms, and Schumann’s comment highlights one of the striking features of this work. When it was performed privately at the home of Brahms’s physician friend and correspondent Theodor Billroth in June 1876, a notice appeared in one of the Vienna papers: “The new work is said to be very tuneful and easy to understand.” This was something new and different for Brahms—at least as far as the general public went. The newspaper also recounted that the composer was to receive 3,000 marks for the piece from a foreign publisher. The lighthearted tone of the music must have infected the composer’s own sense of humor, for when he wrote to his publisher, Simrock, in October—before providing them his manuscript—he was unabashedly whimsical: “You are unbearably slow! The Quartet not yet printed!”
The quartet opens with a rollicking 6/8 theme that could almost stem from Haydn himself. By the time the first phrase is repeated, however, the violins and later the cello shift the rhythm to 3/4 against 6/8 —and we know at once that we are in the world of Johannes Brahms, for all his homage to the past. The key relationships are also purely Classical; the second theme is in the dominant key of F rather than some more distantly related key, as had become common by the late nineteenth century. Brahms intensifies the contrast by rhythmic rather than harmonic means, shifting to 2/4 time for the secondary material and making clever use of this rhythmic opposition throughout the movement.
The slow movement, by contrast, is a broad aria with a dramatic middle section. The D-minor scherzo is remarkable for its passionate viola solo, which the three remaining instruments accompany while muted.
The finale, in the variation form at which Brahms excelled, also summarizes the entire work. A late variation turns into the opening theme of the first movement. Reminiscences of other parts of the Quartet appear in the coda against an augmentation of the varied theme.
— © Steven Ledbetter
With a career spanning over three decades, the Brentano Quartet has given concerts throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. Known for its unique sensibility, probing interpretive style, and original programming, the Quartet has performed across five continents in the world’s most prestigious venues and festivals, thus establishing itself as one of the world’s preeminent ensembles. Dedicated and highly sought-after as educators, the Quartet has served as artists-in-residence at the Yale School of Music for the past decade. They also lead the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and appear regularly at the Taos School of Music. The Quartet previously served for fifteen years as ensemble-in-residence at Princeton University. In the 2025–26 concert season, the Quartet will tour throughout North America, giving concerts in New York, Boston, Chicago, Vancouver, Detroit, San Francisco, and Denver. They will perform the complete Mozart Quintets with violist Hsin-Yun Huang in Philadelphia. Further afield, they will tour Spain in November 2025 and elsewhere in Europe in March 2026. Formed in 1992, The Brentano Quartet has received numerous accolades, including the prestigious Naumburg and Cleveland Quartet Awards. Their most recent recording features the K. 428 and K. 465 (“Dissonance”) Quartets of Mozart for the Azica label. The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” the intended recipient of his famous love confession.
