Overture in C minor D8a (1811)

Largo – allegro

The title and the two-part (fast–slow) construction of the Overture in C minor seem to align it not so much with the chamber-music repertoire as with a standard orchestral form of the day. Even so, and although he had access to the school orchestra at the Vienna Stadkonvikt, Schubert first scored the work for string quintet (with two violas) and, a few days later, arranged it for string quartet – presumably, in the latter case, to make it available to the domestic string ensemble formed by the composer, his father, and his two brothers. Anyway, whatever the strategy behind it, the Overture in C minor is Schubert’s earliest surviving piece of chamber music. It is chamber music, moreoever, not only because it is written for four or five solo strings but also because it has a kind of intimacy not normally to be found in the orchestral overture. It is a deeply serious work with an expressive Largo introduction beginning with a phrase – none other than the baroque lamento motif that was to recur in many of his later works – from the opening of Schubert’s earliest surviving song Hagars Klage. While there is not much to identify the composer in the minor-key passages of the dramatically articulated sonata-form Allegro, the authorship of the second subject, which makes a radiant first entry in A flat major, is unmistakable.