Death and the Maiden

The String Quartet in D minor ‘Death and the Maiden’ D.810, written in 1824- 1826, has become, with the Trout Quintet, one of the most famous and popular works by Franz Schubert. While the Trout Quintet was his first piece of chamber music to be well received in his time, reactions to the String Quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’ were initially mixed. In his Reminiscences of Schubert and Beethoven, written in 1881, Franz Lachner, who was befriended with Schubert from 1822, wrote: ‘This quartet, which now delights the entire world and is one of the greatest achievements in the genre, was hardly received with unanimous approval. After playing it through, first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who by reason of this great age was not up to the task, proposed to the composer: “Dear brother, this is nothing, leave it out and keep to your songs”, at which Schubert silently gathered the pages of music and locked them up for ever in his desk.’ The String Quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’ thanks its name to the Andante, a series of five variations on the song of the same name written by Schubert in 1817 to a text by Matthias Claudius. In the song we hear the intense mortal fear of a young girl and her desperate pleas to the Grim Reaper to let her go. Death, posing as a good-natured friend, attempts to soothe her: ‘Sei guten Muts. Ich bin nicht wild, sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen’ (Be of good cheer. I am not fierce, you shall sleep softly in my arms.)

A Bohemian in America

The music of Antonín Dvorák is deeply rooted in the folk music of his fatherland Bohemia. Even during his American period his homeland was never far away, as we hear in the Cello Concerto and the Ninth Symphony ‘From the New World’. At the time, between 1892-95, Dvorák was director of the recently established National Conservatory of Music in New York. Despite their decidedly Bohemian character, these compositions and the String Quartet opus 96 have become known as the composer’s American works. 4 Dvorák wrote his String Quartet opus 96 in just three days while on holiday in Spillville, a little colony of Bohemian emigrants in Iowa. He stayed there in the pleasant company of farmers, friendly priests and hearty housewives, among whom he could speak his native language. It has been suggested that this may explain the relative simplicity of the work. About his stay in Spillville Dvorák wrote: ‘As far as my new Symphony, the F-major String Quartet and the Piano Quintet (written here in Spillville) are concerned – I would never have written them in this way if I had not seen America’. The themes of the four movements seem to originate from Bohemian or American folk tunes, in view of the fact that they are based on the pentatonic scale F-G-A-C-D. The second movement suggests a melancholic negro spiritual, as if the Bohemian Dvorák is writing to get his own homesickness out of his mind. The sparkling third movement (Scherzo) imitates the rhapsodic warbling of an American bird, the Scarlet Tanager. The quartet closes with a rondo in which echoes are heard of the church music of ‘Bohemian’ Spillville, which Dvorák and his wife regularly took part in. And do we also hear a steam train speeding along in the distance?