Schubert Quartettsatz in C minor, D. 703

Franz Schubert was born at Vienna, Austria on 31 January 1797 and died in Vienna on 19 November 1828.  The Quartettsatz D 703 was completed in December 1820 and was meant to be the first movement of a multi-movement string quartet.  Schubert stopped work on the quartet after writing a forty-one-bar fragment of a slow movement.  The Quartettsatz received its premiere on 1 March 1867 in Vienna and was first published in 1870.

For Schubert, 1820 was in the midst of what some musicologists have termed “years of crisis,” partly because they are littered with promising but unfinished compositions including the C-minor quartet as well as the opera Sakuntala and sketches for a seventh symphony and two movements of the Symphony No. 8, the “Unfinished”.  

Schubert’s primary instrument was the violin, and he began writing string quartets at the age of 13 or 14. The existence of a family quartet with Schubert’s brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand on violins, his father playing cello, and Franz himself on viola undoubtedly provided incentive for Schubert to compose for the medium.  The influences of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven are readily apparent in Schubert’s quartets written up to 1816. It was another four years before he produced the first movement of a quartet in C minor, the Quartettsatz, which was, according to musicologist Robert Winter, “a work of furious intensity that heralded Schubert’s maturity as a composer of instrumental music. Its concentration and variety of texture and register paved the way for the three great quartets of Schubert’s last years”.  

Indeed, it seems that Schubert has left behind the aesthetic of Hausmusik behind in this piece.  The technical demands of the Quartettsatz imply that Schubert had professional players in mind.  Melvin Berger also conjectures that the dramatic style of composition found in this work is partially a result of Schubert’s association with the radical poet Johann Senn and is a response to the official reprimand that he received as a result of that friendship.

The Quartettsatz is composed in sonata form.  The first theme is introduced by a rustling sixteenth-note figure in the first violin which is then reiterated by the other three voices of the quartet in staggered entrances.  This first theme gradually gives way to a lyrical second theme which, in terms of “standard” sonata form, is in the “wrong” key (Ab as opposed to the dominant key of G) which adds a sense of searching to the theme.  This searching seems to end when another theme that is in the key of G is initially introduced by the viola and then reiterated by the cello, although the brevity of this theme does not really give us a feeling of respite.  The cello repeats a figure based on the opening theme which leads to the end of the exposition.  Then a sudden outburst in Ab takes us into the development in which even more key areas are explored.  The recapitulation starts with the second theme of the exposition in the “home” key of C.  We are then led to a restatement of the first theme which dramatically frames the movement.

-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña