The supreme string quartet, for me, has long been Schubert’s last, in G major — memorably performed last Friday night by the Danish Quartet at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall.
As one of the quartet’s violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, was on parental leave, his place was taken by Yura Lee – introduced by violist Asbjorn Norgaard as a Korean-American musician from Los Angeles. Norgaard also pointed out that the group’s cellist, Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin, happens to be not Danish, but Norwegian. He was making a point about music, the arts, and mutual understanding. The audience responded with a sustained ovation: a sign of the times.
In fact, the quality of attention throughout (the program also included a new work by Bent Sorensen inspired by the Schubert G major) was extraordinary. Experiencing this concert at this unhinged moment in our American odyssey nearly felt defiant. “A breath of fresh air” would be an under-statement. It was more like finding refuge in an oxygen tent.
Most of all, there was Schubert. Composed in 1826, his G major quartet wasn’t premiered until 1850 – 22 years after Schubert’s death – and first published somewhat later. Even today, it’s not much programmed. The most obvious reason is stamina. A performance can last nearly an hour. And the last movement, the most grueling of Schubert’s perpetual motion finales, is relentless. If ever a string quartet took no prisoners, it’s the Schubert G major.
Exhaustion is here an actual motif. You can’t listen to the slashing accents and hurtling velocity without absorbing the physical demands being inflicted on the performers.
Exhaustion is differently evoked by the quartet’s most unforgettable, most original inspiration. In a sonata form, the recapitulation – bringing back the opening material – is typically a refulgent moment. In the first movement of the Schubert G major, it’s a moment of fatigue and decomposition. The entire movement is a kaleidoscope of heaving chordal formations, dancing lyric effusions, and – most magically – anticipatory whiffs of Bruckner’s existential tremolos. So by the time the recapitulation occurs, all energy is spent: the opening gestures here fall limp. Schubert’s pianissimo residue uncannily calibrates the exertion and argumentative density of everything that has gone before.
Through my wife Agnes, I enjoy a sporadic acquaintance with the violinist Gidon Kremer – who participated in a tremendous Schubert G major performance decades ago at New York’s 92nd Street Y. (The other players were Daniel Philips, Yo-Yo Ma, and Kim Kashkashian.) That performance was released as a recording – can hear it here. Not long after the LP came out, Gidon happened to visit and asked to hear a portion of the first movement. What he wanted to know was whether the exposition repeat (which I dimly recall had not been performed) was inserted in the studio. It was – and Gidon needed to hear nothing more.
I have no strong feelings, in general, about exposition repeats. As often as not, I can do without them. But in the Schubert G major the first movement exposition repeat is vital – only then can Schubert’s exhaustion fully register. It’s an exhaustion that (as in Mahler) inspires fresh spiritual energies. The remainder of the movement is shaded by a newly acquired lyric pathos. Schubert tenderly smooths what had been the tremolo theme. (His sonata-form recapitulations can be surprisingly literal – but not here.) But the wrestling between major and minor modes remains pervasive – and will continue, relentlessly, in the movements to come.
No other composer understood exhaustion as Schubert did. I am thinking especially (of course) of the desperately fraught quietude of his song cycle Winterreise (which I have performed and also written about in this space) – ultimately, a glimpse of existential desolation whose finality somehow consoles. And there are Schubert’s other perpetual motion machines, whose inexhaustion registers terrifying impersonal energies. Of the plunging chromatic scales streaking the finale of the C minor Piano Sonata, Claudio Arrau (in my book Conversations with Arrau) discovered “something skeletal, macabre – without any flesh. Really the work of death.” And there is the Andante of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, whose dire central juggernaut hurtles toward an abyss.
Anyway, the Danish Quartet omitted that exposition repeat. So their terrific reading of the first movement was shortchanged. Otherwise, I marveled at the quartet’s intensity of understanding. It was a highly personal interpretation – the opening tremolo theme, with its Brucknerian amplitude, was daringly slow — that at no point felt self-conscious. I could not help focusing on Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin, a cellist of exceptional subtlety who reminded me that Schubert has here gifted the cello the quartet’s peak lyric inspirations (in movements two and three both).
The players took a deep collective breath before launching the finale – the heaving triple-forte climax of which (Schubert could have marked four fortes, five fortes) summoned a sonorous anguish exceeding every previous expressive peak.
***
Further thoughts on the music of exhaustion:
In Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a perpetual-motion finale tests human stamina. In Schubert, with his “heavenly length,” perpetual-motion (as a music historian of my acquaintance once misguidedly argued) invariably persists “too long”: the stamina is inhuman.
Mahler’s morendo endings to his Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde marry physical exhaustion to spiritual enlightenment. Gradually dissipated energy levitates the endings of Schubert’s Piano Sonatas in D major and G major.
Wagner twice calibrated to exhaust his tenor – in the final acts of Tannhauser and Tristan und Isolde. A fresh-voiced tenorial rendering of either of these two acts (readily possible on recordings) is a false rendering. In a famous (to Wagnerites) exchange of letters, the composer implores his best tenor, the imperious Albert Niemann, not to abridge the finale of Tannhauser act two. So as to conserve his voice for the third and final act, Niemann insists on cutting an outburst — “Erbarm dich mein, der, ach! so tief in Sünden” — which Wagner (correctly) deems essential. Wagner wants Niemann to understand that Tannhauser needs to sound vocally exhausted in act three: “Once more: — sing the second finale as if you were to end the evening with it – and rest assured — only then will you sing the third act entirely to my liking. In a word: I find you far too fresh in the third act, too physically powerful, and I have waited in vain so far for the nuances that I demand. . . . Everything here is calculated to produce a ghostly tonelessness which gradually rises to the level of a touching tenderness, but no further. There is too much physical strength in your rendering of the [act three] narration up to your arrival in Rome: that is not how a man would speak who had just been roused from madness to a few minutes lucidity, a being from whom others shy away when they meet him, who for months has gone almost entirely without food, and whose life is sustained only by the glimmer of an insane desire.”
This desperate advice is not irrelevant to the Schubert G major String Quartet.
For a blog on Schubert and Alfred Brendel, click here.
Your phrase “music of exhaustion” got me to thinking about other examples (there are undoubtedly many) from composers whom we don’t ordinarily associate the term with. Sibelius’s 4th Symphony and Strauss’s Metamorphosen are two such works. There’s no place to go, the energy is spent, the light literally goes out at the end of both pieces.