In the final years of his short life, Schubert moved far beyond the prodigiously inventive facility of his teenage years. His last three string quartets—D. 804 in A Minor (“Rosamunde”), D. 810 in D Minor (“Death and the Maiden”), and D. 887 in G Major—exhibit increasing emotional complexity and subtlety of expression. Considering that Schubert also wrote his great Octet for strings and winds in the first few weeks of 1824, it is apparent that his capacity for concentrated inspiration remained undiminished despite the debilitating bouts of depression and financial worries that plagued him since he contracted syphilis in late 1822.
In March 1824, Schubert told his friend Leopold Kupelwieser that he had “tried my hand at several instrumental works ... two quartets ... and an octet, and I want to write another quartet; in fact, that is how I want to work my way toward composing a grand symphony.” The late chamber masterpieces, in their outsized proportions and elaborate thematic structure, were indeed important milestones on Schubert’s symphonic path. But progress was hampered by the composer’s unpredictable mood swings. In the same letter to Kupelwieser, he described his state of mind using the words from his song “Gretchen am Spinnrade”: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I can never find it again.” Schubert’s music, like the man himself, vacillates between elation and despair. In the A-Minor Quartet, the composer’s boyish exuberance and optimism consort with a pervasive sense of resignation and the loss of childish innocence.
The Allegro ma non troppo opens dreamily with the first violin’s long-breathed melody floating above a restless ostinato accompaniment. This lyrical, wistful theme reappears throughout the movement, each time in a different variant or tonal context. Further harmonic riches abound in the Andante, which borrows its lilting theme from the incidental music that Schubert wrote in 1823 for Hermine von Chézy’s play Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern (Rosamund, Princess of Cyprus). The Menuetto begins with a repeated figure in dotted rhythm lifted from Schubert’s 1819 song “Die Götter Griechenlands” (“The Gods of Greece”). Just as Friedrich Schiller’s poem evokes the glory of ancient Greece—“Schöne Welt, wo bist du?” (“Fair world, where are you?”)—the minuet is likewise permeated with a sense of yearning that is only partly offset by the buoyant confidence of its A-major trio section. The final Allegro moderato sets off in a crisp, dance-like gait. The opening is simplicity itself, but Schubert soon takes us into a more tangled landscape that features imitative textures and offbeat accents, along with taut, nervous rhythmic figures.
Schubert’s youthful appetite for chamber music—he was barely 13 when he wrote his first string quartet—was nourished by the happy circumstance of having a family quartet under his own roof. His brother Ferdinand fondly recalled the “uncommon pleasure” of playing first violin to young Franz’s viola, while their brother Ignaz and their father rounded out the ensemble. There was no question of who was in charge: “Whenever a mistake was made, were it ever so small, [Franz] would look the guilty one in the face, either seriously or sometimes with a smile; if Papa, who played the cello, was in the wrong, he would say nothing at first, but if the mistake was repeated, he would say quite shyly and smilingly: ‘Sir, there must be a mistake somewhere!’ and our good father would gladly be taught by him.”
The comparatively modest demands made by the dozen or so string quartets that Schubert wrote in his teenage years presumably strained neither his father’s instrumental technique nor domestic harmony. But when the composer returned to the quartet medium in December 1820 after a hiatus of about four years, his musical language had evolved far beyond the capacities of the average amateur musician. Indeed, Schubert himself seems to have been somewhat overwhelmed by his newfound range and intensity of expression. After completing the first movement of his C-minor quartet and drafting some 40 bars of a slow movement in A-flat major, he either set the score aside temporarily or abandoned it altogether. The Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) remained a tantalizing torso, unpublished for more than four decades after the composer’s death. The compression of this orphaned Allegro assai is unusual for Schubert, and may offer a clue as to why he left the quartet unfinished.
Even today, the untamed dramatic power of Schubert’s music is profoundly unsettling. Like Beethoven, he felt driven to push vigorously against the envelope of the classical style that had defined his earlier quartets. Although the Quartettsatz observes the conventional classical proprieties, with its two complementary themes—in darkling C minor and burnished A-flat major—and the pleasing symmetry of its almost mirror-image halves, the shifting chromaticism of the development section effectively negates a clear sense of tonal balance. Rhythmically, too, the music simmers with a repressed, pulsating energy that periodically explodes but never quite reaches a full boil. The ending is as enigmatic as it is electrifying: The taut, swelling tremolos of the recapitulated opening theme are abruptly cut short, leaving the listener hanging on tenterhooks. The three monumental quartets of Schubert’s brief maturity lie just around the corner.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material. It is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow. Her “detailed and powerful” (The Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, the Nordic Council, and the UK’s Ivors Academy.
Thorvaldsdottir’s music is widely performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras and ensembles, such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble intercontemporain, and BBC Proms. Portrait concerts with her music have been featured at several major venues and music festivals that include Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center, London’s Spitalfields Music Festival, Münchener Kammerorchester’s Nachtmusik der Moderne series, Miller Theatre, Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Brooklyn’s National Sawdust.
Thorvaldsdottir is currently based in the London area. She is composer-in-residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and this summer, she will also be in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. She holds a doctorate from the University of California San Diego.
my music emerges as a stream of consciousness that flows, is felt, sensed, shaped, and then crafted, it does not emerge from a verbal place — but when a piece is completed I often spend quite a bit of time finding ways to articulate some of the important elements of the musical ideas or thoughts that play certain key roles in the origin of the piece — with Rituals however the accompanying text needed to be left impressionistic and unfiltered
as with my music generally, the thoughts and ideas associated with the origin or development of a piece is not something I am trying to describe through the music — it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere, and material of the piece
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repetition in atmosphere — going through motions, the same motions, but it is never the same — with every repeating breath is a new feeling, new vision, new life, new being, same life — the same but always different — various perspectives of ritualistic feelings, sensations, explorations, from the hymn-like Ascension to obsessive percussive materials … from parts that move like a rigorous engine to others of flowing atmospheric ether — but all have in common the ritualistic approach to the material — rituals in lyricism — rituals in hope — rituals in repetition — rituals in song — rituals in material — rituals in prayer — rituals in obsession — rituals in life — rituals in being — rituals in harmonies — bending rituals — rituals in difference — ritual as an escape — ritual as peace — ritual as continuation — ritual as burden — ritual as hope — ritual as obsession — ritual as being — ritual in harmony — each part is its own ritual and together the eleven parts form one ritual
—Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Schubert was 14 years old when he wrote his first song, a rambling but vividly dramatized biblical narrative entitled “Hagars Klage,” in 1811. “Die Taubenpost” and “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” his valedictory masterpieces in the lieder genre, date from a few weeks before his death in 1828. During the intervening 17 years, he turned out some 600 songs, of which “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”) is among the most widely beloved. Schubert’s voracious appetite for poetry took in everything from light verse and sentimental doggerel to the greatest lyrics of the age. Like many of his lieder, “Gretchen” is in essence a tonal drama—in this case based on a scene from Goethe’s early-19th-century verse tragedy Faust, a landmark of Romantic literature.
Gretchen is the innocent young girl whom the scholar Faust has seduced as a result of his ill-considered pact with the devil. “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy,” she sings as she distractedly operates her spinning wheel. The ostinato undulations of Schubert’s piano part mimic the wheel’s incessant cycling, which in turn mirrors the obsessive revolutions of the lovesick maiden’s mind. The music modulates from D minor to F major as Gretchen fantasizes about Faust’s “noble form” and the “touch of his hand,” climbing to an erotically charged climax on the word “kiss.” Then she falls back down to earth and the wheel of fate resumes its inexorable motion, presaging the tragedy that lies in store for them both.
—Harry Haskell