One of the truly iconic works in the repertoire for string quartet,
Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is named after the song which has
lent its theme to the second movement. At the end of Matthias Claudius’s
poem, which Schubert had set as a 20-year-old in 1817, Death cradles
the Maiden in his bony embrace. And her fear, in the first verse, of
encountering his tomb-cold touch is mirrored by his desire for her in
the second. In Schubert’s
life time, death was a constant presence in everyday life and even a
young person like himself would have encountered it at close quarters –
in fact, his own mother had passed away when he was only 15.
When Schubert returns to the song in 1824 and starts work on the string
quartet, death has nevertheless grown even more real: in the meantime he
has become acquainted with pain and disease during the bouts of the
syphilis that he knows will kill him. He turns the song into a set of
variations, preceding it with a ferocious Allegro, and following it with
a Scherzo and a Finale that have been described as ‘the dance of the
demon fiddler’ and ‘a dance with death’. The acclaimed Chiaroscuro
Quartet performs the work on gut strings, which brings out the
vulnerability and desperation even further. The players then let us down
gently with the youthful String Quartet No. 9 in G minor, a work in
which the minor key offers Schubert the opportunity to play with light
and shadows, rather than full-scale drama.
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