This quartet is a beast. At the time of it’s composition, it was considered to be one of the most difficult pieces of music to listen to. Even though it was following traditional tonality, its complexity made audiences at the premiere hiss at it. Mahler looked at the score, and apparently he reacted with something like “I have conducted some of the most difficult opera scores and symphonies, I have written my own symphonies with up to thirty staves of music at a time, but looking at just these four staffs I am lost”. It goes to show that Schoenberg was considered hyper-academic and difficult even before he went toward his infamous 12-tone writing. And I really dislike the term “academic” when talking about “hard” music. It could be used to describe the complexity of the work, and the high-concept music theory going on, but it comes off as an insult. Like the piece was written as an “academic exercise” that doesn’t have the passion of music people would want to listen to. Schoenberg is one of the most passionate composers I know, and this quartet shows how much he loves music, and what you can do with music. I don’t want to get bogged down in the theory behind it, because tonally this piece is hard to follow along, it is very chromatic, and has many “non-triadic” passages, but there are cool things that you can hear he picked up from composers before him. One major influence here is Liszt, because Liszt’s piano sonata is also a work that is written in a complex form and is vey expressive and passionate. Like the sonata, this quartet is written as one long sonata movement, which can be divided into four sections/movements like a traditional quartet, and to top it off, the first “sub-movement” of the larger sonata form movement is also in sonata form. If that’s hard to wrap your head around, think of it as sonata-ception; a sonata inside of a sonata. While the idea of double function form is cool, again focusing on it too much will make the work feel bogged down in the boring parts. It is a very stormy, nocturnal piece of music. It opens up with the main theme over anxious strings wiggling around like anxiety deep in your guts. The introduction here also tosses us around with chromatic harmonies that make you feel like you are getting lost. In the repeat, instead of having it the same, the voices are shifted around, so the main idea is given different material to work with the second time. The middle of the movement has a bit of a pause, longer stretches through this Wagnerian wavering, snippets of the main theme come here and there in the waves, but the strings get restless with frenzied scratching, and a falling chromatic theme comes over a bouncy rhythm, and it becomes rainfall or some violent force over the main theme growling in the cello and viola. We then go into a scary passage where the whole page is dotted with notes, buzzing around like a murmur of insects. The strings come together in unison to play the melody as recapitulation. We get a sultry dance, of all things! But then we get a hectic fugato that leads us into the “scherzo” movement, which opens with a more cheery dance with pretty duets and a folksy type of fun. Here, in my opinion, we see the brilliance of the string writing where we are getting orchestral-like sonorities out of four instruments from the same group. Along with the folk dance, we get the sound of bird calls. But the music turns into the gnarled anxiety of its first part, and again the main theme returns in the midst of it, turning into a second recapitulation. Then, it is broken into smaller segments, a solo cello plays out, guiding us into the slow movement, with chordal passages molding around harmonies. Parts of the main theme are used in suggestion through intervals. Through the slow movement’s bleeding into the finale, we get what feels like a serenade. In the “rondo”, the music keeps up the “hectic” energy, but now it is more cheery, and we are given a fugato [as if this weren’t already densely written] The final section acts as a coda, almost like a lullaby, or maybe, more accurately, a sunrise. The fears of the night are over, now the sun rises peacefully.
