The Danish String Quartet, Ozawa Hall, August 1, 2024 Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørenson, violins; Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola; and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello, with guest cellist Johannes Rostramo Franz Schubert, Quintet in C major, D. 956 Thomas Adés, “Wreath for Franz Schubert,” for String Quintet Franz Schubert, “Die Nebensonnen,” transcribed for string quintet Schubert’s C major String Quintet with two cellos is the composer’s final chamber music composition and widely regarded not only as his greatest such work, but as a kind of summa of his entire musical life’s journey. Two months after completing this hour-long musical apotheosis, he was dead.
The Quintet plumbs the heights and depths of human experience, and, along with Beethoven’s late quartets, expands the language of harmony and the dimensions of the forms he inherited from the classical period. In addition, it possesses a richness of texture unique to chamber music for strings prior to the sextets of Brahms. This summer’s performance by the Danish String Quartet (supplemented by Finnish cellist Johannes Rostamo) marks the end of a three-part series called “the Döppelgänger project” in which one of Schubert’s late chamber works is performed alongside a contemporary “response” to that work commissioned for the project.
This year the quartet commissioned English composer and Tanglewood favorite Thomas Adés to create a response to the Quintet, and his work “Wreath for Franz Schubert,” scored for the same ensemble, was included on this program. As in the past, the concert concluded with a string transcription of a late Schubert song, this year’s entry being “Die Nebensonnen” from his final song cycle “Winterreise.” (I regret that they did not include in the project a version of the eponymous “Döppelgänger” itself.
) While the innovative nature of these programs is worth positive comment, I would like to focus here on the way the Danish Quartet created a masterpiece of a performance fully worthy of the music itself. There are numerous fine recordings of this piece: Every important string quartet, supplemented by the best cellists in the world, has performed and recorded it, recognizing the challenge that it offers. And yet, this is the only rendition I have experienced that convincingly solves the huge challenges that Schubert throws at his players.
Schubert’s later music has been both praised and criticized for what Schumann called its “heavenly length.” The vast stretches of time that the composer calls for in his final quartets, piano sonatas, symphony, and trio have either defeated performers or stimulated them to surpass themselves; they can be either exhausting or exalting. Some performers resort to cuts that deform the structures that Schubert created; this is particularly the case with the final movement of his second Piano Trio.
Taking the opposite approach, the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter intensified the challenge in his performances of Schubert’s piano sonatas by taking extra-slow tempi, bringing the music almost to a standstill, and yet magically maintaining a formal tension that carries the rapt listener through the expanded trajectory of the melody, stretching their experience of time just up to but not past the breaking point. That sense of an expanded time-scale can also be found in a few places in late Beethoven: in the last movement of his final piano sonata, in parts of the slow movement of his 14th string quartet (which contains other similarities to the Schubert quintet), and in the slow movement of the ninth symphony. Later it can be found in parts of the operas of Wagner (particularly Parsifal); the slow movements of both Brahms piano concertos; the symphonies of Bruckner (especially Symphony no.
8); and the slow finales of Mahler’s symphonies no. 3, 9, and the final song of Das Lied von der Erde. This sounds like a list of some of the greatest works of the 19th century.
They are all powerful and moving, yet none of them (I suggest) can quite match Schubert’s Quintet for a balance between melodic shape, classical form, and the emotions that they seem to express simply through a natural unfolding of musical materials. Here is my attempt to demonstrate how he does it. (Warning: Technical discussion follows.
) A straight-forward melody (we could say a simple or folk-like one, such as the theme from Beethoven’s Ninth) is usually composed of a number of four-bar phrases, often grouped in balanced pairs; this symmetry makes for a melody that is easy to follow, easy to anticipate where it is going next, and easy to guess when it will come to an end. Another way to say this is that it sets up a kind of “clock” where, when you hear the beats ticking, you can anticipate how long the melody will continue until it reaches the cadence. In the Beethoven example, the first part is two such phrases (A+A), then a contrasting phrase followed by a repeat of the second phrase (B+A).
The preceding eight bars repeat (B+A), leading to a structure of three double phrases, totaling 24 bars, that feels “natural,” predictable, easy to learn, and easy to recognize. Since most of the notes of such a melody are near each other in the scale, it is easy to hear and remember their relationships. Now let’s see what Schubert does in the first part of the extraordinary second movement, marked “Adagio,” or very slow.
The main melody, played by the second violin in close harmony with the viola and first cello, is in two 14-bar phrases, which feel stretched out from an expected eight bars. It is extraordinarily slow and sustained; each bar contains one main note that lasts around nine seconds, followed by a transition figure leading to the next bar. The shape of the basic melody is quite simple and, despite being very stretched out, easy to follow.
The harmonies keep pointing forward toward an anticipated resolution, one that Schubert delays with some surprising arrival points. The notation shows the first half of this melody; its fourteen-measure span is over two-and-half minutes long, and the complete melody is close to six minutes, which is a huge time span for a single melodic structure. In addition to strongly directed melodic shape and harmonies, Schubert impels the melody with purely rhythmic figures echoing around the three central instruments: plucked bass in the second cello on the strong beats and delicate responses in the first violin.
They act like tiny tugboats nudging the almost immobile melody forward, or like a quiet clock ticking down the seconds. The overall feeling is that the melody is moving very slowly, calmly, and inexorably toward something momentous and otherworldly, something immensely comforting. It is not surprising that I have heard several people, including the great pianist Artur Rubenstein, request that this music be played at their funeral.
https://berkshireedge-images.s3.amazonaws.
com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Schubert-Quintet-Adagio-part-1.mp3 The middle part of the movement is in stark contrast: It is in a turbulent F minor, remote from the opening E major, with roiling triplets, but melodically bearing a distant relationship to the first part. It rips the listener out of their near-trance state and into the midst of turmoil and despair.
It lasts 32 bars, slightly longer than the first part, but it is usually played at a faster tempo, so the sections feel balanced. Subsequently, the first part returns, with the same instrumental trio repeating their music, while the outer parts whisper in rustling figures that retain some of the frenetic energy of the middle section in subdued form. This time, the second 14-bar phrase is signaled by the first violin joining the cello in the quiet pizzicato figures of the opening; the clock is ticking just a bit more urgently, and after nine bars, the rustling figures return in the first violin to usher in the final cadence and full resolution.
The entire movement is in a very legible A-B-A form, fully symmetrical and in its own way predictable. But the slowing down of time and the expansion of rhythm carries a tremendous impact; it is easy to imagine that all 1,000 or so audience members were holding their collective breath for its 15-minute-plus duration. Such impact does not happen by itself; it takes performers with an appreciation of the unique character of the music, along with precise technical control, to convey the full effect.
In chamber music, that control has to be supplied in perfect synchronization. Here is where the Danish Quartet achieved its extraordinary result. In almost every quartet, there are subtle differences among the players: either their individual performing styles, the voices of their instruments, or a combination both, create layers of sonority that need to be mediated.
It is one of the inherent virtues of the quartet literature that there is room for each player to stand out as an individual, as well as to merge into a homogenous ensemble. But it is this merging that seems to me the greatest challenge, since it requires that the players know the entire score thoroughly, to be equally familiar with all the parts, and to interpret their own in full cognizance of what their colleagues are doing. This is a fundamental expectation of good quartet playing.
Where the Danish players go beyond this is that they listen to and adjust what they are doing with the ensemble on a micro level: To the listener, that means they are playing as one all the time. The amount of internal listening and mutual adjustment is extraordinary. In practice, that means that their control over dynamics and tone color is breathtaking and, most importantly, always in service of elucidating the structure and beauty of the music.
In Schubert’s adagio, the slow unfolding of the melody is demonstrated by its dynamics. The first four bars were played at a dead pianissimo, absolutely still and unchanging, which is difficult for the three instrumentalists who have to sustain those very long notes lasting around nine seconds each. This was accomplished with bows moving very slowly across strings in perfect synchronization, producing a uniform dynamic (on the edge of audibility) and tone color (cold, almost icy, with no perceptible vibrato), despite the fact that there are three different-sized instruments involved.
The intonation was impeccable and unmarred by audible vibrato. The success of the players in achieving this meant that in less than one bar, a hushed and intensely mesmerizing atmosphere was established almost immediately. It also seemed that their chosen tempo was even slower than what one normally hears.
At the end of the fifth bar (about 30 seconds in), there begins a crescendo lasting through bar six to a forte on the downbeat of bar seven, followed immediately by a one-bar diminuendo to a piano on the downbeat of bar eight, within which there is a subtle swell and further diminuendo returning to pianissimo at the start of bar nine, the point at which the phrase begins to feel “stretched.” Each change is critical to our sense of the slowly unfolding shape of this melodic phrase; each one was executed with complete unanimity by the quartet, meaning that each player fully understood the functions of the dynamic gradations and how to execute them perfectly as a group. Of course, the top and bottom instruments, exchanging the “ticking clock” figures, had to fit into this dynamic scheme as well.
Imagine what is involved in five instruments swelling gradually from pianissimo to forte over six seconds in such a way that at each moment, they were all playing at exactly the same dynamic level. I am sure that the audience, while not thinking about all this granular detail, was in fact fully aware of the concentration, the absolute devotion to Schubert’s vision, and the intense unanimity with which the players were feeling the music. In other words, they were being made aware of the fact that they were listening not only to a masterpiece of composed music, but a masterpiece of a performance.
In fact, you can’t really experience one without the other. The remaining sections and movements of the quintet benefitted from the same kind of super-aware concentration and unanimity. The swelling five-part chords that began the first movement had an evenness of voicing that gave them extra richness; the lyrical second theme was sung by the two cellos like a beautiful love duet from an Italian opera.
The quartet pounced on the emphatic accents of the scherzo that added a sense of determination, even desperation, to music that can seem like a jolly folk dance. By giving it this intense reading, they moved it into an ongoing narrative stemming from the slow movement. This was enhanced by the trio section, marked “Andante sostenuto” and distinguished by stark key-shift (from C to D-flat) and new meter.
As usually played, it seems like a calm interlude to the dance, but here it was performed with the kind of stillness and extra slow tempo (taking the “sostenuto” direction very seriously) that offered a recollection of the otherworldly adagio. Similarly, the Eastern European folk dance quality of the final movement, in the minor key, was played rapidly, with fierce energy and emphatic syncopated accents, underscoring the obsessive quality of its stamping rhythms. This intensity was alleviated with brief intimate moments, such as the lyrical second theme, but even there the apparent moment of respite was disturbed by rustling triplet arpeggios, and before this songful period could fully resolve, the concluding transition figure restlessly developed into a long wandering transition leading back to the opening material.
The second half of the movement followed the trajectory of the first, and in some performances can seem verbose and over-extended (the down-side of “heavenly length”), but the Danish players avoided that pitfall by maintaining a continuously energized forward drive so that when the transition material returned, it built to a gripping climax (Schubert marked it triple-forte) leading to a desperate coda, first “più allegro” (faster) and then “più presto” (even faster). The final bars are marked by an ambiguity of harmony—is it major or minor?—and a final cadential trill (again, triple-forte) on a dissonance built on the lowered second degree of the scale, further destabilizing the harmony. All this was performed with almost brutal energy, leaving no doubt that Schubert’s leave-taking of chamber music did not go “gently into that good night.
” That the audience fully appreciated the extraordinary quality of the performance was well demonstrated by the roar of approval and sustained ovation that followed. The rest of the program paled a bit in comparison (almost anything would). “Wreath for Franz Schubert” is Thomas Adés’s ingenious response to the Quintet, focusing on only a few bars of the extraordinary adagio.
He used the same texture of top and bottom parts plucking while the middle trio plays rising iambic (short-long) motives derived from Schubert’s “ticking clock” figures. As violinist Sørenson explained, the score gives each player the freedom to adjust and respond to the player on his left, creating a circle of connections, or a “wreath” of musical ideas. The result was a rather uniform process full of subtle variations and long slow dynamic trends; unlike Schubert’s adagio, it was hard to feel a larger shape or goal to the musical progress, and the mood was prevailingly elegiac.
There were many beautiful, very subtle details, with extremely delicate dynamics and shadings; the music swelled and subsided in waves that felt cyclical—another way that the music formed a wreath. It was a subtle and touching tribute to Schubert, but in this setting it felt anticlimactic. The transcription of “Die Nebensonnen” felt more relevant.
This is the penultimate song of the “Winterreise” cycle, whose second set of 12 songs were being written at the same time as the Quintet and partake of its atmosphere. The lyrics refer to loss; although three suns appear in the sky (an optical illusion on bright wintry days), two of the poet’s suns have been extinguished, and the third is about to be as well. The song is one of those very simple Schubert pieces that manage, through special touches of harmony, to be utterly heartbreaking.
In order not to leave the audience in such a state, however, the group returned to play another song as an encore, this one by Carl Nielsen, which sounded simple and in folk-song style (see above). It was perhaps the only way to conclude a performance of such transcendent intensity and humanity..
