The year 1824 was dark time for composer Franz Schubert—marked by illness that brought him close to death, financial distress and a general despair that would lead him to write a friend:
"Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast vanishing; and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy."
Schubert, despite precarious health, poverty, and depression, would perservere, and, against this backdrop would return to the form, which, aside from a single short movement in 1820, he hadn't explored since his teens—the string quartet. He would pour all his passion into these works, first in his "Rosemunde" Quartet (based on earlier incidental music to a play of the same name), completed in March of 1824, and, following just a few weeks later, the remarkable D Minor opus, whose slow movement he based on his 1817 song-setting of the poem by Matthias Claudius, "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden").
The "Death and the Maiden" Quartet was, according to some accounts, premiered in a private performance at the Vienna home of amateur violinists Karl and Franz Hacker, with Schubert himself on the viola on January 29, 1826. This afternoon, on Classical Music with Foley Schuler, we'll hear—on the 200th anniversary of that first performance—this riveting work that continues to enthrall and has taken its place as a cornerstone of the chamber music repertoire.
You can hear Foley Schuler's musical selections—and stories behind the music—every weekday afternoon from 1 until 4 on Blue Lake Public Radio.
