Schubert: String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 ("Death and the Maiden")

Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, D. 810, is the second of three quartets he composed in the last years of his brief life. It is known as “Death and the Maiden” because he called upon an earlier song he had written to serve as the theme for a set of variations in the second movement. Associations with death are biographically suggestive, as Schubert was in poor health when he wrote the quartet, in March 1824, and would die four years later, at age 31.

Introduction

Schubert made his initial fame composing small-scale pieces to be played at home—primarily songs, dances, and piano music. But his ambitions were much larger. As a teenager he was already writing symphonies, operas, masses, piano sonatas, and chamber music. He seems to have viewed most of these early compositions as training ground for greater things, and he heard most of them performed, usually by school or community groups. By his early 20s, Schubert had accumulated a lot of experience and was displaying new ambitions: he aimed to enter the instrumental realm of composition as defined by Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music he revered.

History

Schubert’s devotion to chamber music spanned almost his entire life, and began at an early age, when he had played viola in the family quartet. He wrote about half his approximately 20 string quartets (a few are lost and others unfinished) for domestic readings with family and friends. Schubert’s three late quartets, however, were the work of a mature professional.

In March 1824, as an illness—most likely syphilis—had taken a severe toll, Schubert wrote a revealing letter informing a close friend that he had composed two string quartets (the A minor, D. 804, and D minor, D. 810) and wanted “to write another quartet, in fact I intend to pave my way towards a grand symphony in that manner.” Such a set of three quartets would obviously invite comparison with Beethoven’s three “Razumovsky” string quartets, Op. 59. However, only the A-minor quartet was published during his lifetime—Op. 29 No. 1, the first of “Trois Quatuors” (as boldly promised on the title page). He dedicated it to the celebrated violinist Ignaz Schupannzigh, Beethoven’s foremost advocate, who also premiered the work. Schubert probably finished the D-minor quartet only a few years later. We know it was rehearsed and played privately on several occasions: at the home of Karl and Franz Hacker in January 1826, and at the homes of Karl Barth and Franz Lachner in February. Although the first documented public performance was by Karl Moser in Berlin in 1833, Schuppanzigh may have performed just the first movement at a concert Schubert gave on March 26, 1828. (This event was on the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death, and the piece was appropriate for the occasion.)

Schubert: Quartet in D minor for Strings, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”

Form and Analysis

All three of Schubert’s late string quartets are in the standard four movements established by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Beethoven (in his early works). His contemporary listeners—whether amateurs playing at home or audiences attending concerts—knew what to expect. The first movement, Allegro, opens boldly, with loud, orchestral chords, although it soon becomes meditative, then agitated. The second theme is lyrical and gentle. The second movement, “Andante con moto,” is the set of five variations on his song “Death and the Maiden” (or, rather, elements of the song: Schubert imported some of the original piano accompaniment, but not the vocal melody, from the second part of the song, when “Death” speaks; the material Schubert used is principally rhythmic and harmonic).

It was usual for the third movement of string quartets to be a dance or scherzo (meaning “joke”). In the scherzo (“Allegro molto”), there is a close resemblance to an earlier piece Schubert had composed for piano, the sixth item from his set of 12 Deutsche (Ländler, or “German dances”), D. 790 (1823): after a delicate trio in the middle, the opening returns. How to end a four-movement work, be it chamber or symphonic, often challenged the early Romantics. The Classical Haydn usually ended his works with a short movement, often light-hearted—a practice which Mozart (to some extent) followed. Beethoven began to shift the weight of his compositions toward the end: the culmination of a longer journey. Schubert followed Beethoven’s path here in a perpetual-motion Presto, which has the character of a tarantella (a dance of death) and accelerates in a breathless “Prestissimo” coda.

The crux of Schubert’s D-minor string quartet is the second movement, based on his Lied “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” D. 531, which he composed in 1817 to a short poem by Matthias Claudius (1740–1815). The song, oxymoronically, is a solo duet in which the singer begins as a frightened maiden and ends as a bitterly cruel, but utterly calm, angel of death. 

Maiden: 
Pass me by, ah, pass by!
Away cruel Death!
I am still young, away, dear one.
And do not touch me.

Death:
Give me your hand, you beautiful, delicate creature.
I am your friend, and come not to chastise.
Be of good courage. I am not cruel;
You shall sleep softly in my arms.

What autobiographical implications might there be in the “Death and the Maiden” quartet, which Schubert wrote in 1824, not long after contracting syphilis? He believed that his health would never be right—that his life was changed forever. In this context, one cannot help but read a deeper significance into his return to Claudius’s poem, as well as the dance-of-death finale.

Critical Thoughts

Many of Schubert’s mature chamber works merge his early accomplishment in song (for which he was already famous by the early 1820s) with his larger compositional aspirations to succeed in the realm of instrumental music, in which Beethoven reigned sovereign. Schubert must have had various musical, professional, and personal reasons for using his earlier songs as the basis for new compositions. To fashion instrumental works, he called upon not only catchy vocal melodies and distinctive accompaniment patterns, but also the structural and harmonic properties of the songs, as well as the wide range of characteristic moods. As his close friend the artist Moritz von Schwind put it, these song-derived instrumental works “stay in the mind, as songs do, fully sensuous and expressive.” Some adaptations also display a shrewd career strategy: Schubert would take one of his popular songs, such as “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”), D. 550 (1816–17), and use it in a theme-and-variations movement of an ambitious chamber work, such as the "Trout" Quintet, D. 667 (1819). Listeners at the time must have loved it—as they do to this day.

Some of Schubert’s instrumental allusions to his songs were less obvious, intended to be recognized only by Schubert himself, or his friends. In his A-minor string quartet, he referenced a song with the words “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?” (“Beautiful world, where are you?”). The inclusion of this phrase takes on special poignancy when we realize that Schubert had been seriously ill for more than a year. When the D-minor string quartet was published posthumously, in 1831, it did not have the title, although the song was known, having been published ten years earlier.

Legacy

Even if unperformed and unpublished during his lifetime, the “Death and the Maiden” string quartet eventually became one of Schubert’s best-known and most beloved compositions. While his Lieder greatly inspired later composers, it took more time for his instrumental music to be appreciated, largely because much of it was not published. Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms were among those most influenced, and were also active in bringing his music to the public. As an important critic, Schumann wrote glowingly about his music, and said of the D-minor string quartet, “Only the excellence of such a work... can in any way console us for the early and grievous death of this first-born of Beethoven; in a few years he achieved and perfected things as no one before him.”

Gustav Mahler loved Schubert’s music, which he often performed, both as a pianist and a conductor. In a copy of Schubert’s string quartets, he annotated possible instrumental enlargements so he could conduct a string orchestra in a large concert hall. In the end, Mahler only conducted a single movement of a single string quartet—the “Andante” from the D-minor, in Hamburg, 1894. Other composers later orchestrated the work as well, and the American composer George Crumb called upon the second movement in his string quartet Black Angels (1970).

The work has also inspired artists outside music—most disturbingly to evoke torture in the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden (1990), which was adapted three years later as a movie, directed by Roman Polanski, as well as an opera, by Jonas Forssell (2008). As with so much of Schubert’s music, the D-minor string quartet has appeared in the soundtracks of various films.

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Article by Christopher H. Gibbs