It is reminiscent of the casting out of Eden and the tenebrous trembling following. Its opening measures could hardly be more stern and forbidding, and are immediately answered by tremulous whispered versions of the same motif, reacting with fear and filled with questioning. One of Schubert’s most beloved chamber music works, written when he was 27, the d minor String Quartet is characterized quite strongly by these qualities. In many ways the traveler of the Winterreise, a lonely soul wandering though a barren, icy landscape, is emblematic of much of this composer’s output. But they appear only in the guise of dreams, representing a wounding optimism.
For the qualities of splendid hopes, of the happiness of love and friendship, of enthusiasm for the Beautiful which Schubert mentions are far from absent from his work. The most tender passages very often have a quality of distance, of a vision of that most dearly hoped for and yet felt to be ungraspable. Schubert’s celebrated lyricism has at its core the suffering of recognizing that which can not be had. Stony, unforgiving musical elements with no sense of malleability demand to be acknowledged, setting up a drama of the vulnerable individual in the clutches of destiny. In no other composer’s work, with the possible exception of Shostakovich, do we find such stark and shattering juxtaposition of the human and the inhuman. So might I sing every day, since each night when I go to sleep I hope never again to wake, and each morning merely reminds me of the misery of yesterday. Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better, think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught, to whom the happiness of love and friendship offers nothing but acutest pain, whose enthusiasm (at least, the inspiring kind) for the Beautiful threatens to disappear, and ask yourself whether he isn’t a miserable, unfortunate fellow. I feel myself to be the most unfortunate, the most miserable being in the world. Schubert was a poet of unfulfillable longing, of human vulnerability, of the excruciating sweetness of the yearning to be at peace. Reprintable only with permission from the author.
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