String Quintet in C Major

The last year of Schubert’s tragically short life was also one of his most prolific, with a sequence of chamber, piano and song masterpieces of breathtaking originality and quality. Among these, his final chamber work, the C major String Quintet, completed in September 1828, just two months before his death at the age of 31, is perhaps the finest. Schubert added a cello to the standard string quartet lineup, rather than the viola favoured by Mozart, adding depth to the tonal palette and breadth to the range of possible instrumental combinations. The quintet opens with what sounds like a tentative slow introduction that in fact miraculously turns out to be the basis of an expansive “Allegro”, full of magical moments; the specific scoring comes into its own for the second theme as the cellos join in a meltingly beautiful duet with a plucked viola bassline and violin commentaries that could have come from no other composer. The wonder continues in the ecstatic stasis of the “Adagio”—a stasis that haltingly reasserts itself following the movement’s violent central convulsion, perhaps an expression of the composer’s rage against the condition that he knew would so soon curtail his life. Determined high spirits are restored in the rustic “Scherzo”, while the finale once again flirts with darker emotions before an increasingly hysterical closing section ultimately slams the door with chilling finality.