(VI) Chamber music.

Schubert's first instrument was the violin, and he began writing string quartets at the age of 13 or 14. The existence of a family quartet provided the impressionable teenager with a ready made laboratory. Yet the demands of the new medium perfected by Haydn, Mozart and the Beethoven of the Razumovsky quartets took Schubert almost a decade to assimilate fully. The youthful experiment of the quartet in mixed keys (d18) of 1810–11 was succeeded by a progressively more assured series of seven quartets over the next two to three years. In these works the influences of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven are readily apparent. Between 1814 and 1816, years dominated by song composition, Schubert produced only three quartets whose movements are of widely varying quality. In many of these early quartets Schubert resorts, not always successfully, to quasi-orchestral textures.

It was another four years before he produced the first movement of a quartet in C minor, the so-called Quartettsatz (d703) of 1820, a work of furious intensity that heralded Schubert's maturity as a composer of instrumental music. Its concentration and variety of texture and register paved the way for the three great quartets of Schubert's last years. While the poignant, long-spanned theme-and-accompaniment opening of the Quartet in A minor (d804) (the first of a planned set of three) is rooted in the world of song, the movement as a whole reveals a new thematic economy, tautness of development and phrase-by-phrase logic. Schubert borrowed the theme of the Andante from his incidental music to Rosamunde; but the quartet movement is expanded into a more substantial ABAB form, plus a coda based on both A and B (d677). The minuet, which quotes Schubert's Schiller setting Die Götter Griechenlands, resumes the sombre pathos of the first movement. The ostensibly cheerful opening of the A major finale is undercut by a minor-mode second group and an ambivalent final cadence. Schubert followed the A minor immediately by the Quartet in D minor (d810), nicknamed ‘Death and the Maiden’ because the theme of the second movement draws on the song of that name. The first movement uses full, almost orchestral textures with a previously unthinkable power and intensity. Yet there is almost no doubling, with Schubert relying instead on an extraordinary range of widely spaced double and triple stops. The celebrated G minor slow movement takes the chorale-like theme through a series of five variations in which, except for the exquisite variation in the major, harmony dominates melody. The explosive dotted-rhythm scherzo is seemingly modelled on the first few bars of a German dance (d790 no.6). The grimly inexorable sonata-rondo finale is cast as a saltarello, and may have been in Mendelssohn's mind when he wrote his Italian Symphony. Schubert's final quartet, in G major, d887 (fig.10), dates from almost two years later, and is contemporary with Beethoven's last quartet, op.135. Although Schubert's quartet is formally less sophisticated than Beethoven's, it is revolutionary in the way it makes the contrast between major and minor modes the basis of much of the structure. Schubert's harmonic language was fuelled from the outset by the frequent equivocation between major and minor; but during the course of his career local colouring was gradually supplanted by longer-range strategies, of which d887 provides the most far-reaching and disturbing example. The modal interplay is reinforced by contrasts of dynamics, spacing and texture, with a telling use of pizzicato.

Between 1816 and 1827 Schubert composed eight works for piano and a single wind or string instrument. The four sonatas for violin and piano (d384, 385, 408, 574; the first three were published as sonatinas, perhaps to enhance their appeal to an amateur market) are compact, graceful works whose unassuming character conceals an intimate understanding of the medium's conversational potential. In 1826–7 Schubert returned to this same combination for the Rondo in B minor (d895), easily his most impressive work for this medium, and the Fantasy in C, d934. The technical demands of both works are considerable, but equally evident is Schubert's penchant for formal experimentation. Generations of flautists have celebrated Schubert's decision to write his ingratiating set of variations for flute and piano (d802) on Trockne Blumen from Die schöne Müllerin. The Sonata for arpeggione and piano (d821), is often underrated, although its cause is not helped by modern arrangements for various instruments, from the cello to the flute. The arpeggione's soulful, almost speechlike upper register was clearly in the forefront of Schubert's mind when he composed this idiosyncratic work.

Apart from a youthful movement for piano trio, Schubert's three principal works for piano and strings are all products of his last decade. The five movements of the ‘Trout’ Quintet (1819) suggest a looser, divertimento-like structure, while the presence of the double bass gave Schubert the opportunity to exploit open, airy textures. The recapitulation of the opening movement, beginning in the subdominant, is a compressed transposition of the exposition, while the second and last movements make considerable use of transposed repetition, all factors suggesting that the work was composed rapidly. The variation fourth movement is based on Die Forelle, the popular song composed two years earlier, with the song's A phrase repeated to give the quintet theme added weight. In spite of its modest technical demands and accusations that its appeal is only of the surface, the ‘Trout’ Quintet projects a timeless freshness that has ensured its perpetual popularity.

Schubert probably composed, or at least began, both of his expansive piano trios in the autumn of 1827. His recent friendships with the pianist Bocklet, the violinist Schuppanzigh and the cellist Linke may have rekindled his interest in the medium after a gap of some 15 years. In the first movement of the B Trio (d898), Schubert creates delightfully fluid textures, with the strings now playing in unison, now engaged in conversational interplay, while piano accompaniments invariably include thematic elements. The approach to the second group – the emotional centre of the movement – employs a favourite Schubertian device in which a sustained single tonic note (here, A in the cello) is suddenly redefined as the mediant of the secondary key (F). The intensely lyrical but disjunct theme is expanded to ten bars, with the melodic peak reserved for the final statement in the piano. In the ensuing Andante, cast in a free ternary design, the serene A section encloses a volatile central episode. The trio of the Scherzo, a movement of almost symphonic scope, features a sighing stepwise melody that passes from violin to cello before concluding in a poignant duet. Labelled a rondo, the sonata-form finale opens playfully before launching into an ambitious series of thematic developments crowned by a rhythmic transformation of the opening theme in triple metre. A Notturno in E major (d897) was probably intended as the original slow movement of the B Trio. Its turbulently imitative B section, contrasting with the timelessness of the opening, has a volcanic power found in many of Schubert's later slow movements. The sheer length of this ABABA movement may have led the composer to replace it by the present Andante. The E Trio (d929) opens with a triple-time triadic theme reminiscent of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ but soon moves, via virtuoso runs in the piano, to a plaintive second group in the quite unexpected key of B minor. The exposition and recapitulation sustain much of their interest by constantly inflecting the major mode with the minor, enabling Schubert to draw out the descent from B minor to the dominant a semitone below. After reaching a fff climax in the coda, the movement ends with witty and touching piano reference to the second group. The marchlike Andante, based on a C minor theme that derives from a Swedish folksong, employs the same ABABA form as the Notturno but in an even freer fashion. Schubert accompanies the first return of the A theme with explicitly marked tremolandos that lead to a shattering climax in B minor, the key that had played a crucial role in the first movement. The lilting Scherzando, written in close canon, makes one wonder how Schubert could have doubted his own contrapuntal skills. The movement ends with a truncated return of the trio, recalling the final allusion to the second theme in the opening movement. As in the B Trio, the huge finale (totalling 748 bars) frequently changes metre (from 6/8 to 2/2) here to accommodate a hypnotic repeated-note theme. More novel is the varied return of the first theme from the slow movement, creating the kind of cyclic structure that would prove irresistible to composers of the next generation. Perhaps under pressure from friends, Schubert acknowledged the problematic length of his finale and authorized two cuts generally adopted today.

Schubert composed two chamber works for unusual combinations of instruments. The Octet in F (d803; string quartet plus double bass, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) was commissioned by Count Troyer, who played the clarinet at the first performance. The work contains a few orchestral-style tuttis, none of which, however, undermines the work's essential chamber style. Except for passing shadows in the coda of the Adagio and the minuet, the first five movements, which include a set of brilliant variations on a jaunty theme from the operetta Die Freunde von Salamanka, are almost entirely free from the sombre colours found in much of Schubert's later music. Only in the introduction to the finale, with its eerie tremolandos, does darkness fall unexpectedly before evaporating in a breezy quickstep march. An internal impulse seems to have fuelled the composition of what many regard as Schubert's crowning achievement in chamber music, the String Quintet in C (d956), whose genesis overlaps with the late piano sonatas. Schubert's choice of a second cello rather than the second viola preferred by Mozart was prompted by his evident affection for the cello's plangent tenor range and by the increased textural possibilities offered by the extra cello. Unlike Boccherini in his quintets with two cellos, Schubert gave each of the instruments virtually equal prominence. In only a few other works, notably the G major Quartet, does Schubert derive a large-scale structure so cogently from the opening material, heard in the first movement as a deeply felt struggle between minor and major; in a masterly stroke of ambiguity, the apparent slow introduction here turns out to have been in the movement's basic Allegro tempo all along. The achingly beautiful cello duet that forms the intermediate stage of the three-keyed exposition derives much of its poetic effect from the reinterpreted G in the second cello that sinks flatwards to E . Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the movement is its range of textures (including liberal use of pizzicato), with the instruments often grouped into two pairs plus one single voice. Remarkably, the movement seems to expand the sonorities of chamber music rather than veering towards an orchestral style of writing.

The ethereal, disembodied melody of the Adagio creates an illusion of time suspended. Major–minor contrasts continue to colour the harmonic discourse at both the local and structural levels, the latter most evident in the abrupt juxtaposition of the A section in E major with the anguished B section in F minor. With the return of the A section haunted by distant echoes of the earthly struggles in the B section, it is not surprising that musicians such as the pianist Artur Rubinstein – not to mention the writer Thomas Mann – expressed a wish to die while listening to this movement. Extreme contrasts continue in the Scherzo, where the manic energy of the Scherzo itself provides a haunting foil for the wraithlike stillness of the D trio, which, like the F minor episode of the Adagio, is placed a semitone above the movement's main tonality. For his finale Schubert took refuge in the Viennese dance music he had known since a child, all the while counterpoising the pronounced lilt of the main theme with ppp textures of the most transparent delicacy. In a bittersweet, disquieting ending that only Schubert could have conceived, the Quintet ends with the notes D –C, leaving the question of mode as ambiguous as in the opening chords of the first movement.

Schubert, Franz, §2: Works