Composed 1824; 40 minutes

 The image of Death as a companion whose hand gently yet inexorably approaches, caresses, and finally claims a young woman reaches back to medieval times. Schubert encountered it in Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), a poem by Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), which he set as a song in 1817. Its haunting piano accompaniment is built on an insistent long–short–short rhythm, an ominous tread that becomes a rhythmic death motif, heard only beneath the voice of Death itself. Seven years later, that same figure became the emotional heartbeat of the slow movement of a new string quartet. More than that, its presence permeates the entire work, lending the quartet a unity of purpose and design that is unmatched.

Yet the quartet is not, in any narrow sense, “about” Death. It speaks just as urgently about life – as, in its own way, does Matthias Claudius’s poem, with lines sung by the Maiden that Schubert does not include in the quartet. The opening movement is almost without theme: fierce triplets drive the music forward, coaxing melodies into being, but not the long, lyrical lines usually associated with Schubert. The scale is orchestral, the sonorities dark and forceful, the ideas set in stark confrontation. The quiet, bittersweet close of the slow movement gives way to the Scherzo’s driving syncopations in a tightly constructed movement rooted in an unlikely source – a G-sharp minor keyboard dance (D. 790), now infused with the death rhythm to strengthen the quartet’s cyclical unity. The finale returns to ideas from the opening movement, its saltarello-like drive propelling the music with relentless energy. The minor key prevails not only through the slow movement’s five variations, but across the entire work.

— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca