String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor

Many of the major works of Schubert’s final half-decade, following his first syphilis symptoms in 1823, seem to express fury at a creative life cut short—unstoppable dances of death that rage against the dying of the light. The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor (1824) stands slightly apart from these works, with its air of regret over lost innocence taking precedence over bitterness at an existence blighted by incurable illness. “Do you know any happy music? I don’t,” Schubert is supposed to have said, and the quartet sings a sorrowful song almost from beginning to end. The sighing melody of the opening movement is coloured by the characteristic shiver of the accompaniment and interrupted by defiant forte outbursts. The slow movement borrows its material (and the quartet its nickname) from incidental music Schubert had composed the previous year for a play, Rosamunde, but even this appealing melody is threatened by gathering harmonic clouds. The forlorn “Menuetto”—again based on earlier music associated with the words “Beautiful world, where art thou?”—only briefly admits a note of hope in the major-key Trio; the Hungarian-tinged finale all but fades away before its emphatic closing chords. All four movements open quietly, in contrast with the manic exuberance of the Death and the Maiden Quartet, composed later the same year, but the Rosamunde Quartet is remarkable for the potent symphonic tension with which Schubert invests his essentially lyrical material.