Today we get to hear more Schubert, specifically, the second (Adagio) movement of his mighty String Quintet in C Major, arguably the single greatest movement he ever composed. Translated into Rachel Rae type language, if Schubert's music is EVO, the Adagio of his string quintet is EEVO!
But for openers, for kicks, let's hear the most famous piece Schubert ever composed: his Ave Maria. There might be more versions of this song on Youtube than videos of kittens being cute.
The other popular version of Ave Maria is by Gounod & J.S. Bach.
(More fun stuff after the bump).
For those not already familiar with our on-going series, just a little re-introduction: In Thursday Classical Music Blogging, we listen to and explain famous works of classical music from a Music Appreciation 101, Music-for-Dummies point of view, with lots of pretty Youtubes. New terms are explained as needed. If you're totally confused, start back with the OPUS 1 edition about Mozart and Sonata-allegro form. Commenters are urged to ask questions, post their own favorite youtubes, or engage in inanities.
One of Schubert's idiosyncrasies which I didn't go into last week (but worth mentioning now, and why not?) is his penchant for mixing minor and major scales in the same melodies. What is major and what is minor? Refer back to our wonderful diary lecture on Major vs. Minor if you need help. We will get a little bit of Schubert's mixing in the Adagio of his Quintet, today; he was more generous with it in some of his other works, including his lieder, and I'm thinking in particular of his Quartet #15. This too-free switching from major to minor makes his music harmonically ambiguous at times.
Major/minor mixing was also a trick Gustav Mahler was fond of using, and it has lead to some comparisons between Mahler and Schubert. For instance, this, the first song in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Mahler's mixing and switching in this example is very obvious, even perverse in its extremity.
An Overview of the Schubert Quintet' Adagio
Those wishing to hear last Thursday's first movement are welcome to surf our CMOPUS archive.
The second movement of Schubert's Quintet, the Adagio, is in a three part A-B-A form. The first part in E major is a series of slow chords: calming, tranguil, almost sacred. So calming, so tranquil is it, that the onslaught of the middle section in F# minor comes as a terrible shock in its piercing anguish. The third/final section returns to the soothing chords of the first part, but they are changed, accompanied by quavering, fragile sounds on the first violin, slightly arrhythmic, like a wounded bird.
We can break down this A part, both at the beginning and the ending into two parts of its own: the same melody but played differently, with a harmonic twist through B minor.
Onward to the music!
And here we go... The Schubert Quintet in C Major, D. 956, second movement Adagio, live at the Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival 2008
Susanna Yoko Henkel - violin
Stefan Milenkovich - violin
Guy Ben-Ziony - viola
Giovanni Sollima - cello
Monika Leskovar - cello
Schubert Quintet in C, D 956 - 2. Adagio from Zagreb kom on Vimeo.
First half of A part (0:00 to 2:10)
The main melody in E major is introduced. Consisting mostly of chords, the first violin plays a very simple melody atop it, a pattern of four notes, Da-dadada. Calm, clear, transcendent, but not simple. The intrusion of the B minor chord at 1:26 darkens it momentarily, but it quickly resolves back to E major.
Second half of A part (2:10 to 3:35)
The second half begins as the same melody. The solo violin melody line is gone, replaced by the even more hushed sound of plucked strings (pizzicato). The harmony seems much the same, but at 2:20, there is a subtle change, a B minor chord substitution that unfixes everything and leads to new tensions. A new flowing melody line arises from the viola (the guy on the right with the beard and glasses).
From 3:35 to 4:15, we have a sort of "codetta" to wrap up the A section. The first violin, the lovely Susanna, plays a short melody-line that leads us out of the A section, firmly in E major.
B section (3:16 to 8:00)
And suddenly, we are launched into F# minor, and the mood is drastically changed, its diametric opposite, as turbulent as the other was peaceful. This is music of pain. Its worth watching the faces of the performers during this section. The first violin and viola sing together, a sweeping, soaring, searing melody, one of Schubert's masterpiece melodies that just spins itself.
And then, at 7:20, a strange thing happens. All this drama, this swirling vortex, comes to a very abrupt stop, like it has crashed into a wall. Into this silence, the cellos play a few disjointed notes. The others try to join, tentatively, uncertainly, and there's no clear sense of the music's direction.
Then, at 8:00, they join together once more in clear concise chords that lead to a cadence in E major setting us up for the return of the A section.
A section returns (8:07 to 11:30)
The melody of A section returns, but it has changed. The harmony is identical to before, but with a rapid, twittering bass-line in the second cello (the woman wearing glasses), out of sync with a similar twittering line from the first violin (Susanna, my love!) the two of them in such different rhythms that it sounds very broken and fragile.
At 10:02, the second half of A with its strange harmonic twist through B minor returns. The twitter is gone, replaced by the Da-dadada that we began the movement with.
At 11:30, the codetta that ended the first A section returns. At 12:24, it modulates to F# minor, leading you to possibly expect a return of the turbulent B section, but it's only a head-fake. It quickly resolves back to E major, ending in great tranquility.
Congratulations.
You have just listened to one of the great pearls of western civilization. I envy you your first hearing! And it gets better with subsequent hearings, and you're a terrible, terrible fool if you only listen to it once. Yes, if you don't listen to it ever again, a guy on a blog named Dumbo just called you a fool.
I'm not going to cover the third and fourth movement of the Quintet. But please feel free and encouraged to listen to them and discuss them in comments as you please. The third movement Scherzo, and fourth movement Allegretto are available on Vimeo at those two links.
NEXT WEEK: I know, my Next Week announcements are laughable for how weak they are at predicting what I will actually do. But I'm quite up in the air at the moment. Will it be one last Romantic composer before we move on? Will it be Brahms Symphony #1 or Dvorak Symphony #7? I'm not sure. But whether it's either or neither, we will soon after that be moving on to another music theory lesson to tool us up for more complicated things to come.