Program
Arnold Schönberg
String sextet Verklärte Nacht, ор. 4 (1899)
Franz Schubert
String quartet № 14 Der Tod und das Mädchen, D 810 (1824)
Performers – musicAeterna orchestra soloists:
Dmitry Borodin, violin 1
Ivan Subbotkin, violin 2
Grigory Chekmarev, viola 1
Dinara Muratova, viola 2 (viola in Schubert’s quartet)
Vladimir Slovachevsky, cello 1 (cello in Schubert’s quartet)
Maxim Akchurin, cello 2
Duration – 70 minutes, intermission – 15 minutes.
Details
The new programme of the soloists of the musicAeterna orchestra combines two chamber ensemble compositions – Schönberg’s string sextet “Verklärte Nacht” and Schubert’s string quartet “Der Tod und das Mädchen”. Both masterpieces belong to the so-called Absolute music, but they both conceal implicit programmes.
Arnold Schönberg composed a string sextet inspired by his love for his teacher’s – Alexander von Zemlinsky – sister Matilda and the poem “Enlightened Night” (to be more precise – “Transfigured Night”) by Richard Dehmel. The piece in one movement consists of five sections – in accordance with the number of stanzas in the poem. In later years, the composer directly pointed out the correspondence of specific musical phrases to the lines of the text – a dialogue between a woman and a man in the forest at night: a woman confesses to a man that she is pregnant with another man’s child; a man replies that their mutual love transforms everything, and her yet unborn baby becomes his child. Musically, the transfiguration is accomplished in a late Romantic style: Schönberg starts from the symphonism of Brahms and Wagner, employs the principle of developing variations of the former and the complicated harmonic language of the latter and creates an innovative work that foreshadows and directly prepares the atonal future of music in the 20th century.
Franz Schubert wrote his String Quartet No. 14 in March 1824 after many months of serious illness, which made him come near to death. He did not give his composition a programmatic name, but the theme of his song “Death and the Maiden” (1817) set to the verses by Matthias Claudius, which became the basis of the second part of the quartet, has been perceived as the theme of the entire work. Researchers – and, of course, generations of listeners – have built a coherent narrative around the dialogue of the suffering maiden and the Death that came for her. In the first part of the quartet, a tense Beethovenesque picture of the protagonist’s struggle with inevitable fate unfolds. The second part – a set of variations on the song’s theme – is a lullaby of Death in the form of a funeral march. The third part, a scherzo, is a demonic dance with an unexpectedly peaceful trio. Ultimately, the finale, a tarantella could be perceived as a dance macabre, a typical dance of death. One could recall that this image / thematic complex has been widespread in the European visual arts and music for many centuries, as well as the picturesque narrative about the death and a maiden.