The last few months of Schubert’s life have been microscopically studied, with scholars leaving no stone unturned in their quest to pin down the cause of the composer’s untimely death. No amount of documentation, however, can adequately account for the miraculous burst of creative energy that Schubert experienced in the early fall of 1828, even as his syphilis-wracked body was wasting away. At the beginning of September, heeding his doctor’s advice, he moved out of his apartment in Vienna and took up residence with his brother Ferdinand in the supposedly more salubrious suburbs. There, despite his steadily worsening condition, he labored to complete his last three piano sonatas, several of the songs later published under the sentimental title Schwanengesang (Swan Song), the effervescent concert aria “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” (“The Shepherd on the Rock”), and the String Quintet in C Major—his last, and arguably greatest, piece of extended chamber music.
The string quintet—with its rich, quasi-orchestral sonorities—had been a popular alternative to the string quartet since the late 18th century. Schubert’s interest in the genre dates from his early teens, when he wrote the Overture in C Minor for two violins, two violas, and cello. (Later, in the process of polishing his skills as a quartet composer, he arranged that work for a conventional foursome.) In 1824, Schubert became acquainted with Mozart’s great double-viola quintets in the form of arrangements made by a composer named Josef Hugelmann. Schubert scholar Martin Chusid speculated that his decision to score the String Quintet in C Major for two cellos rather than two violas sprang from a desire to avoid invidious comparisons: The only double-cello quintets with which Viennese audiences in the 1820s were likely to be familiar were the comparatively lightweight specimens by Luigi Boccherini and George Onslow.
Sadly, there is no evidence that Schubert ever heard a performance of his valedictory masterpiece. Six weeks before his death, on October 2, 1828, he wrote to publisher Albert Probst in Leipzig to inquire about the publication of his Piano Trio in E-flat Major. In the same letter, he mentioned the new String Quintet, as well as three piano sonatas that he had composed during the months of August and September. “The sonatas I have played with much success in several places,” Schubert reported, “but the Quintet will be tried out only during the coming days.” Apparently, the tryout never took place; Schubert, who was by this time acutely aware of his declining health, was forced to conserve his strength for other endeavors.
In neither form nor content can the String Quintet in C Major be described as lightweight. Clocking in at just under an hour, it is a work of epic proportions and surpassing intensity, wedded (as always in Schubert) to an irrepressible lyrical impulse. The first half of the opening Allegro ma non troppo might be likened to an extended song, with each melody merging organically into the next, and an astonishing variety of accompaniment figures. (Listen for the magical passage in which the first violin and viola play the melody in canon, while the second violin and first cello carry on a dialogue in interlocking 16th notes, and the second cello beats out a steady walking pattern in the bass.) A sharp sforzando chord leads into darker harmonic territory, the music growing increasingly stormy and dramatic until the air suddenly clears and we are back where we started, basking in the sunny, uncomplicated warmth of C major.
The radiant E-major Adagio is one of Schubert’s most sublime and searching creations. Against a backdrop of silky, slow-moving chords in the inner voices, the first violin’s tentative queries are answered by the plodding bass-line pizzicato. The extreme polarity of registers is extremely effective in purely musical terms, but it may also suggest the gulf between flighty innocence and down-to-earth experience. A sudden modulation to F minor sets off a surging wave of turbulence that gradually subsides, revealing a transfigured image of the movement’s first section. Schubert restores our high spirits in the rambunctious triple-time Scherzo, only to dampen them again in the slow, mysterious, brooding Trio midsection. The exuberant finale—with its foursquare, Hungarian-flavored rhythms and lilting syncopations—steadily gathers momentum as it wends its way toward a breathtaking climax.
Widely regarded as the foremost British composer of his generation, Thomas Adès rose to prominence in 1997 with his powerfully eloquent Asyla, written for Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Subsequent works run the gamut from small-scale chamber pieces to the Ivesian symphonic grandeur of America: A Prophecy; from concertos for violin and piano to The Exterminating Angel, his acclaimed operatic takeoff on Luis Buñuel’s classic surrealist film. Adès’s voracious musical appetite makes him hard to pigeonhole. The only aesthetic movement with which he associates himself is surrealism (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, his mother Josephine Adès’s specialty as an art historian). Speaking as both a composer and a highly accomplished concert pianist, he once described the act of making music as “completely surreal. You are sort of sculpting in air, which gives you complete freedom to do what you want.”
Wreath for Franz Schubertis a single-movement work for string quintet. The central string trio of violin, viola, and cello play arco throughout, a gradually unfolding “lifespan” of entwined “blooms.” The outer violin and cello outline them in pizzicato. The players are loosely coordinated, but within specific boundaries, so that within certain limits no two performances are the same, and the duration is flexible: between 15 and 30 minutes, depending on the players, or maybe the weather.
The inescapable relation to Schubert’s double-cello quintet will be clear, especially to its slow movement. At a recent (devastating) performance of it, I was fascinated over again by the role of the second cello—at once lead singer, commentator, and umpire.
I am most grateful to the great Danish String Quartet for giving me the time and encouragement to realize and develop this new path in my work.
—Thomas Adès
Like Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) of 1823, Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) is usually labeled a song cycle, a genre that came to maturity in the early 19th century in works such as Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Schubert composed the 24 lieder in two batches of a dozen each, in February and October 1827. Taking some 70 minutes to perform, Winterreise was conceived on a scale that invites comparison to Schubert’s symphonies and operas. Also like Die schöne Müllerin, it’s not merely a set of independent, thematically linked lyrics but a cohesive psychological monodrama, related and experienced by an unnamed protagonist. The journey that Winterreise relates is at once physical and spiritual, an exploration of what musicologist Susan Youens calls “the geography of the psyche.” The anonymous traveler is evidently suffering from disappointment in love, but the source of his profound grief and restlessness remains obscure. All that the poet Wilhelm Müller and Schubert tell us is that he feels alienated from his surroundings and is compelled to set out, like many another “wanderer” in Romantic literature, in search of something unknown and possibly unknowable. In the penultimate song, “Die Nebensonnen” (“The Mock Suns”), the singer resigns himself to his solitary fate as he prays for the setting of the last of three suns he sees in the sky.
—Harry Haskell