String Quartet No.2 in F sharp minor Op.10 (1907-08)

1 Mässig 2 Sehr rasch 3 Litanei: Langsan 4 Entrückung: Sehr langsam

The rowdy reaction of the audience to the first performance of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in Vienna in 1908 was not a protest against the intervention of a vocal soloist, unprecedented though that was in a work of this kind. It arose from a profound feeling of uncertainty caused by harmonies so fluid that they rarely stay in one place for more than a bar or two at once. Happily, after more than 100 years of exposure to gradually more and more progressive departures from harmonic convention, we can now appreciate the beauty in Schoenberg’s “caterwauling” as one Viennese critic described it.

Strangely enough, the tumult at the first performance died down when Marie Gutheil-Schoder and the Rosé Quartet came to the last movement, which is where Schoenberg loses touch with harmonic reality as the audience knew it at the time. Before the entry of the voice there had been a melodious if feverish first movement in F sharp minor and a fantastically scored scherzo in D minor (which, mysteriously, quotes the Viennese street song “O, du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin” towards the end of the trio section). The participation of a soprano in the slow movement with a setting in E flat minor of Stefan George’s Litanei (Litany) was certainly something new but the composer had prepared for it by basing its melodic material on themes from the first two movements. Then the last movement, which is so far from any recognisable tonality that it bears no key signature, was heard in comparative silence. Perhaps there was a sense that Schoenberg’s disembodied harmonies so accurately reflected the first line of George’s Entrückung, “Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” (I feel air from another planet), that he really was entering another musical sphere – whether they wanted to go there or not.