Franz Schubert was born into a 
musically inclined family, one 
that was attuned to signs of his 
exceptional talent. When he 
was eight years old, he received his 
first violin lessons from his father (a 
schoolteacher), and at about the same 
time he began instruction in organ, 
counterpoint, thoroughbass, and 
singing from the organist of his local 
parish in Liechtenthal, which was then 
a Vienna suburb but was later annexed 
into the city proper. The organist 
reported, “Whenever I wished to impart 
something new to him, he always knew 
it already.”

Music-making was an 
indispensable pastime in the family’s 
household, and our composer heard 
and participated in chamber music—
especially string quartets—from 
an early age. The family ensemble 
typically comprised two of his older 
brothers, Ignaz and Ferdinand, playing 
violins; Franz playing viola; and their 
father, Franz Theodor, handling the 
cello part. From 1813 to 1826, Schubert 
would compose 15 string quartets (not 
counting lost or incomplete works). Of 
these the last three—in A minor (D.804, 
Rosamunde), D minor (D.810, Death and 
the Maiden), and G major (D.887)—are 
universally acknowledged as crowning 
achievements of the repertoire, to the 
extent that they (along with his single 
movement C-minor Quartettsatz) 
almost entirely eclipse the quartets 
that preceded them. The first ten are 
more impressive in select moments 
than overall, but everything clicks 
in his Eleventh, from 1816. Here he 
experiments with texture, sometimes 
grouping the instruments in contrasting 
pairs to striking effect—especially in the 
first movement and in the Trio section 
of the Menuetto. He subtly unifies the entire
work by taking a prominent 
motif, first heard about 30 seconds into 
the opening movement (and much 
thereafter), and revisiting it, with its 
tempo doubled, as the main theme of 
the finale

Felix Mendelssohn’s highly charged 
F-minor Quartet is marked by volatile 
contrasts, unanticipated turns of 
phrase, and agitation that borders on 
the combustible. Biography may help 
explain what is going on. In late 1846, 
his correspondence increasingly dealt 
with the deepest concerns of the artist, 
including the shallowness of public 
acclaim and even mortality itself. He 
gave up public appearances in the 
spring of 1847. At the end of a visit to 
England that spring, he was so depleted 
that he told his friend Karl Klingemann, 
“Another exhausting week like this and 
I’m a dead man!” Returning to Germany, 
he was struck with horrific news: his 
beloved sister Fanny died suddenly. 
She succumbed to a stroke, just as their 
father and grandfather had years before. 
Felix was bereft; they had been closest 
friends since infancy. In the aftermath, 
he headed to Switzerland, where he 
remained several months, composing 
the F-minor Quartet. He returned home 
to Leipzig in mid-September, and within 
a month he was dead, felled by three 
strokes a few days apart.

The first movement opens with 
bristling tremolos, above which the first 
violin utters a terse theme initially on 
the tonic, then on the subdominant, and 
yet again a third time, on the leading 
tone. Fractured dialogue ensues; the 
tremolos give way to a high-pitched, 
almost shrieking gesture in the first 
violin, which is then assumed by the 
lower strings. At the movement’s end, 
Mendelssohn injects an explosive 
crescendo and a coda replete with 
brash octave writing, sharp dotted 
rhythms, and biting staccato attacks.

The second movement is a bitter
tasting scherzo that hardly resembles 
the fleet-footed movements that were 
Mendelssohn’s hallmark in earlier years. 
The Adagio is an expressive elegy, 
at once peaceful and mournful, but 
restlessness returns with the relentless 
drive of the agitated finale.

César Franck was a brilliant pianist 
and organist, but he nonetheless spent 
much of his career in relative obscurity, 
teaching at public schools and religious 
institutions, serving as organist 
at various Parisian churches and, 
beginning in 1872, as organ professor at 
the Paris Conservatoire. In the second 
half of that decade he experienced a 
flood of inspiration that gave rise to 
such passionate masterworks as his 
Piano Quintet, Violin Sonata, String 
Quartet, and D-minor Symphony.

The Piano Quintet clearly reveals 
Franck’s artistic lineage, which derives 
in large part from the Germanic tradition 
of Bach. His style is precise in its 
contrapuntal writing and its expressive 
notation, calling repeatedly for the 
broadest possible range of dynamics, 
from pianississimo to fortississimo. No 
previous work in the French chambermusic repertoire had come close to the 
torrid emotional power of this piece. 
In typical Franckian fashion, themes 
wend their way through the cyclic 
unrolling of this piece, evolving through 
ingenious transformations to take on 
ever new characters. For example, 
following a slow introduction, the body 
of the first movement gets underway 
with a pair of themes, the second of 
which—a sequence of varying intervals 
above a stable bass note—reappears, 
in a series of disguises, in both of the 
ensuing movements. The generally 
serene slow movement comes across 
as an uncomplicated sort of song. 
The finale opens with a rather lengthy 
prologue, separate from the body of 
the movement proper, which might be 
taken as analogous to an independent 
movement, though an abbreviated one. 
In the agitated finale, a motif first heard 
near the end of the second movement 
resurfaces as an important theme, and 
in the coda the Quintet’s overriding 
theme returns—now transformed 
into triple meter—to round off the 
proceedings into a unified whole.