Program Notes: From Schubert to Silvestrov

By Catherine Case

Franz Schubert’s young life was filled with music. He learned violin from his father (who worked as a schoolmaster), piano from his brother (who he quickly overshadowed) and played viola in his family’s string quartet. As a teenager, he studied composition with Salieri, one of the most prominent figures in Vienna’s musical culture at the time.  

Financially strained, Schubert abandoned his musical studies to work as a teacher in his father’s primary school, living at home to save money. When he received a commission for one of his compositions at age 19, he decided to leave his stable job and try his luck as a full-time composer. Schubert had a devoted circle of friends who provided him with housing and promoted his music throughout Vienna. They regularly hosted private salons for artists, poets and philanthropists to play his newest chamber music and songs. These evenings, which played a large part in disseminating his music to the Austrian public, came to be known as Schubertiades; concerts and festivals dedicated to Schubert still go by this name today.  

The Quartettsatz in C minor was composed in 1820 when buzz around the private Schubertiades was growing and his works were starting to be performed in public concerts. Schubert’s short life — he died at age 31 — spanned the years between the Classical and early Romantic eras. The Quartettsatz marks a compositional turn toward a greater freedom of expression and less adherence to traditional harmonic norms. Schubert was known for jotting down melodies on napkins or scraps of paper, the ideas pouring out of him faster than he could write. Many of his larger fragments, like the “Unfinished” symphony and the Quartettsatz, were abandoned midway through. Reasons for this are up for debate, but it’s likely that other projects sparked his interest, or he felt unable to continue meeting his own high standards.  

Schubert intended Quartettsatz to be a four-movement work and wrote 40 measures of a second movement before putting it aside. The sole Allegro movement opens with a restless, chromatic rumbling in the violin and quickly moves through the quartet with dramatic intensity. After a seamless transition, the second theme appears in a swaying A-flat major melody to lighten the mood. A development section dissects the first theme before Schubert begins the recapitulation with the lyrical second theme, saving his return to the opening material for the movement’s exhilarating final moments.  

Over three days in early March 2022, Valentin Silvestrov fled Kyiv with his daughter and granddaughter, crossing Poland and landing in Berlin, where he now resides. Ukraine’s most famous living composer, Silvestrov is one among millions of refugees and displaced people affected by Russia’s ongoing invasion of his country. During the 1960s and ’70s, Silvestrov challenged the Soviet aesthetics with his experimental avant-garde music. His works, along with his political views, were criticized and his music was banned. While he was silenced at home, his music was performed and awarded prizes in Europe and the U.S., earning him international recognition.  

The String Quartet No. 1 signals Silvestrov’s shift away from the loud, radical sounds of his earlier works and a growing focus on quieter, more introspective sounds. Written in 1974, as Silvestrov was protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the quartet is a solemn chorale full of halting phrases that rarely resolve. Searching melodies are punctuated with dissonances as the ensemble fluctuates between full union and disjointedness. In an interview from Berlin in 2022, Silvestrov spoke of his urge to compose small-scale music as a response to the world around him: “It is now clear how little we appreciate the times when peace reigns, and how fragile civilization is, despite all its magnificence. That’s why the reaction of music to this fragility can’t be powerful [or] pompous. The importance of the small, the little becomes greater.” 

Schubert composed his last great chamber work, the String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, in the summer of 1828, just two months before his death. Although he was battling serious illness, Schubert was extremely productive during this time. In October, he sent the completed quintet along with his last three piano sonatas and some songs to his publisher, who rejected the quintet, believing it wouldn’t sell as well as the songs. Now considered one of Schubert’s greatest accomplishments, the quintet was finally published in 1853. 

Schubert modeled his String Quintet after those of the giants who came before him: Mozart and Beethoven had each composed their own quintets, also in the key of C major. While these earlier quintets added a viola to the standard quartet, Schubert chose to add a second cello, thereby expanding the depth and richness of the ensemble’s sound. 

This monumental work begins with a sustained C-major chord that immediately shifts into destabilizing harmonies, upending any sense of solid ground and setting the stage for a far-flung harmonic journey. The rhythmically energetic opening gives way to an exquisite second theme, a lilting melody in the cellos that soars above the viola accompaniment. This stunning moment of tonal balance is a striking contrast to the fragmented and fraught mood of the opening.  

The Adagio unfolds in a remarkably sustained manner, the middle instruments intoning a chorale-like melody while the first violin hesitantly sings over the cello’s pizzicato bassline. The sublime effect is disrupted by a turbulent middle section but soon returns to the inevitable calm that began the movement, the solemn lyricism evoking a distant hymn full of tenderness and hope.   

The Scherzo breaks the trance with the rollicking thrusts of a country dance and hunting calls. An introspective trio section darkens the mood but maintains a rustic sensibility with a drone accompaniment reminiscent of an accordion or bagpipe.  

The finale continues in the vein of the third movement with melodies inspired by the Gypsy culture that was prevalent in the environs of Schubert’s Vienna. In the quintet’s last minute, the music accelerates headlong into a final C-major chord, but not before a surprising and dissonant D-flat recalls the harmonic fragility that began the whole work.