The earliest sketch for this quartet is dated 9 March 1907 and the work was completed in the summer of 1908. It was written at a turbulent time in Schoenberg’s private life – his wife Mathilde was having an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl – but the finished work was dedicated to her. The first performance was given at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna on 21 December 1908. The occasion was recalled by the composer almost thirty years later, when he wrote that it caused ‘riots which surpassed every previous and subsequent happenings of this kind.’ He went on to admit that the riots were ‘a natural reaction of a conservatively educated audience to a new kind of music.’ This was a work Schoenberg identified as an important turning point in his creative development: a move away from reliance on traditional keys. As Schoenberg himself put it in a 1949 lecture – choosing his words carefully – the quartet marked ‘the transition to the second period, this period which renounces a tonal centre and is falsely called atonality.’ The composer’s irritation with the use of the ‘atonal’ label is understandable: as he pointed out in the same lecture, in every movement of the quartet ‘the key is presented distinctly at all crossroads of the formal organization.’ Even so, it was a work which shocked early audiences – and at the premiere the second, third and fourth movements were all interrupted by audience jeers and laughter until the coda of the fourth movement, which was heard without disturbance. As Schoenberg commented, ‘perhaps even my enemies and adversaries might have felt something here?’  

As well as its harmonic innovations, perhaps the most startling aspect of this work is the addition of a soprano voice in the third and fourth movements, which are settings of two poems by Stefan George. The first movement is loosely in sonata form with five thematic ideas, all of them related to each other. Beginning clearly in the home key of F sharp minor before moving away into remoter harmonic territory, the movement eventually finds repose on quiet F sharp minor chords. The second movement is a kind of Scherzo marked Sehr rasch (very quickly) in D minor, but with frequent changes of tempo – and a Trio section which quotes the Viennese folk song ‘O du lieber Augustin’. The third movement, ‘Litanei’ (Litany) – the first of the two song settings – is loosely in E flat minor though highly chromatic. Schoenberg’s own account of the last movement, ‘Entrückung’ noted that it ‘begins with an introduction, depicting the departure from earth to another planet.’ From this literally other-worldly opening, the voice and instruments in this movement develop the music with a brilliantly imagined and highly expressive array of unusual sonorities before finally arriving on a sublime and radiant chord of F sharp major. 

Nigel Simeone © 2024