String Quartet No.1 in D minor Op.7 (1904-05)

The first performance of Schoenberg’s String Quartet in D minor, by the Rosé Quartet in Vienna in 1907, provoked several walk-outs, by way of the emergency exit in one witty case, and much hissing. It did, however, have the support of Gustav Mahler, who not only remonstrated with one of the protesters – “It’s not for you to hiss!” –    but also persuaded Richard Strauss to organise a second performance in Dresden. Actually, according to Webern, not even Mahler understood the work, much though he admired it.

If more than 100 years later it is still difficult it is not because of its language, which is scarcely more radical than that of Verklärte Nacht, texturally overwrought though it often is. As Berg put it in 1924 in his article “Why is Schoenberg’s music so difficult?” it is because of the “music’s richness in beauties thematic contrapuntal and rhythmic.” To that he might have added another reason, which is the extent of Schoenberg’s ambition. At not far short of 45 minutes, it is possibly still the longest of all single movements for string quartet. Schoenberg needed the space to complete his grand design, which was to create a sonata-form structure and at the same time to incorporate within it the scherzo, slow movement and finale that would have followed as separate pieces in a conventional work.

Liszt had done much the same in his Sonata in B minor but he had contained it within a comparatively unambitious half an hour. Schoenberg’s structure, which is based on the thrusting violin theme in the opening bars, is more complicated. A vigorous scherzo is introduced during the course of a long development which later makes way, after a long pause, for a slow movement and its lovely melody for viola over a throbbing 12/3 accompaniment from the violins. The recapitulation is also the finale, which is remarkable not so much for its reintroduction of the opening theme, which has never been long absent in one form or another, as for an expressive coda which so beautifully transfigures it.

It is unlikely that anyone who has not put in hours of analytical study beforehand will never lose the place. But in such an eventful and resourcefully scored work as this, introducing string effects never heard in a quartet before, that scarcely matters.   

Gerald Larner © 2010