String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor

When Schubert composed his String Quartet No. 14 in D minor in March 1824, he was suffering from a syphilitic infection that he knew to be incurable. And a sense of haunted and relentless tragedy dominates the quartet, which is subtitled “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (Death and the Maiden). The heart of this chamber-music masterpiece is its “Andante con moto” second movement. This is a sequence of five variations based on a theme from Schubert’s song “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (D. 531); composed in 1817, Schubert’s setting is presented as a dialogue between a girl pleading for her life, and Death, who assures her that he is a consoling friend in whose arms she will soon rest. Death’s implacable manner is expressed by a slow, dryly hymn-like theme, accompanied by dark minor-key chords, and masterfully elaborated and extended in the variations that follow. The other three movements—an opening “Allegro”, a short “Scherzo” third movement and a concluding “Presto”—are all fast, turbulent and dominated by the work’s main D-minor tonality. The finale is modeled on the southern Italian tarantella folk dance; this originated from the idea that someone bitten by the venomous tarantula spider would dance in a frenzy of delirium induced by the poison. In Schubert’s early-Romantic era, the tarantella had come to symbolise a whirling dance of Death.