String Quartet in C major, D.46

Having started writing string quartets at the age of thirteen, Schubert was an old hand at it when, at the age of sixteen, he started work on the second of his two quartets in C major. He had acquired much of the technique by actually playing in a quartet - as viola to the violins of his brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand and the cello of his father - and he had learned something of the art from the Mozart and Haydn scores they performed. It is more than likely that, for example, Mozart’s great Quartet in C major was part of the family repertoire: it is difficult to imagine how the teenage composer would otherwise have been inspired to write the one slow introduction occurring in any of his string quartets and to do it with such harmonic daring.

It is even more interesting that the chromatic theme of the canonic opening Adagio also has an important role in the Allegro con moto . It apparently has nothing in common with the percussive main theme but it is subtly integrated into the second subject when the shapely new melody eventually emerges high on first violin. Although its most prominent reappearance is in the first-time bars at the end of the exposition, even in a performance which omits the exposition repeat its presence is unmistakable - not only at the beginning of the development but also at a crucial point later in that section where it forms an unlikely but convincing alliance with a phrase from the first subject too.

The two middle movements, though attractive enough, are influenced by less radical Haydn models. The Allegro finale, on the other hand, while it clearly owes much to Haydn too, is characteristic Schubert in the charming and enterprisingly varied use it makes of its cheerful main theme.