Franz Schubert
String Quartet movement c minor D 703
Schubert’s composition of a new string quartet begun in December 1820 was, alas, never to get beyond the first movement; the heavily reworked autograph breaks off at the outset of the second movement. But the fragmentary work that later came into the hands of Johannes Brahms from Schubert’s estate, delighted its new owner so much after its premiere in 1867 that Brahms had the first movement published three years later as Schubert’s “Posthumous Work” – thus paving the way into audiences’ hearts for this little gem. Schubert’s autograph manuscript features such numerous divergences in dynamics and articulation that editor Egon Voss suspects it to be one of Schubert’s experiments with variations. This is why in his Urtext edition he proceeds with extreme restraint in issuing additions and changes with respect to parallel passages ¬– thus making Schubert’s diversity of ideas comprehensible for performing musicians. For all who want a peek inside Schubert’s workshop, the few measures of the second movement are included as a bonus!
About the Composer
Franz Schubert
He is not only the inaugurator of the art song and its most important composer in the nineteenth century, but he also realized a compositional concept in his instrumental works that opposed Viennese Classicism. Underlying the “heavenly length” of his works is a configuration of time that does not function according to the principle of motivic development, but addresses the notion of lingering; modifications occur mostly not in continuous unfolding, but through sudden eruptions. His ornate songs contradict the ideal of simplicity in the Lied aesthetics of his time, and provide the basis for the art song of the nineteenth century, regarded as they were as exemplary by subsequent generations of composers; they are defined by complex harmonies, an integration of the idioms of instrumental music, semantic models, and a new relationship between text and music in which the poem as a whole is interpreted through the composition, rather than just through word painting. His immense oeuvre in spite of his brief life comprises 600 songs, including his two famous song cycles; seven complete and several unfinished symphonies (including the “Unfinished” in B minor); other orchestral works; numerous pieces of chamber music; fourteen complete and several unfinished piano sonatas as well as other piano pieces; dances for piano and four-hand works; six masses and other sacred compositions; numerous pieces for choir or vocal ensemble, especially for male voices. Although he also contributed to every genre of music theater and his friends predicted a career for him in opera, only two of his ten finished operas were performed during his lifetime, as was the incidental music to “Rosamunde.”
About the Authors
Egon Voss (Editor)
In 1969 Voss became a scholar at the Richard Wagner Complete Edition in Munich, since 1981 he has been its Head. From 1989 to 1990 he was the dramaturg at the Théȃtre la Monnaie/de Munt Brüssel, and from 1996 to 2002 a lecturer at the post-graduate programme “Textkritik” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Voss is a member of the advisory board for the edition “Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe” as well as the journals “wagnerspectrum” and “The Wagner Journal”. He has published
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Further editions of this title
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