By the time Schoenberg wrote this quartet, he had fully conceptualized the 12-tone system, the goal of which (to put it as simply as I can from my own lay-person’s understanding) was to give a cohesive structure to an organization of all 12 tones treating them equally. Think of a tone row as a scale, and so music written with the 12-tone method would be based in a pre-chosen “scale” made up of the 12 tones. The music tends to be dense, and because it is in a soundworld that most people aren’t used to, I think it is unfairly dismissed. The more often I listen to Schoenberg’s music, the more beauty I find in it. The quartet opens with a repeating pattern between the second violin and viola, while the first violin and cello orbit around this ostinato. This motif is used, broken apart, and reused throughout the movement, a nod to both Mozart and Brahms. The mood is very excited, frantic, and anxious, Schoenberg himself saying that he may have been influenced by a fairy tale he heard as a child, “As a little boy I was tormented by a picture of a scene of a fairytale “Das Gespensterschiff”, (The Ghostship) whose captain had been nailed through the head to the topmast by his rebellious crew. I am sure that this was not the program of the first movement of the third string quartet. But it might have been, subconsciously, a very gruesome premonition which caused me to write this work, because as often as I thought about this movement, that picture came to my mind.” While this isn’t a program work, you can feel the sense of dread building in this opening. The second movement is much calmer, and opens with a gorgeous choral, that ends up being the base for a loose set of variations, or at least what feels like a set of developing variations in a slowed down rondo-form. The intermezzo third movement is a nod do the minuet and trio, though the trio pushes into the realm of violence, and later in the movement the music is pushed to the extreme as the violin soars into its highest pitches. The last movement is a rondo that is in sonata form, and it’s based off of the opening melody, a bouncy figure that gives this movement a very upbeat feel. And despite the sudden and relentless rush of energy, the work ends on a quite note, the strings dying off on a restatement of the motif.
