During his short life, Schubert was not unknown, but he never really gained stature in public musical life. He died just 16 months after Beethoven, but he inhabited a different Vienna. Although he had some influential friends, Schubert received no support from wealthy families and lived mostly as a lower-class Viennese with a simple lifestyle that might be called “bohemian.” With friends, he attended concerts and admired famous musicians, especially Beethoven, from a distance.
Death and the Maiden was first performed in January 1826 in the home of two amateur musicians, Karl and Franz Hacker. This beautiful quartet, exciting for its rhythm and scope, was not initially successful. In fact, Ignaz Schuppanzigh (first violinist of the famed Schuppanzigh Quartet, which premiered many of Beethoven’s quartets) had trouble playing the part because of his advanced age. He remarked to Schubert, “Brother, this is nothing at all, let well alone: stick to your Lieder.” Yet Schubert, who wrote 15 string quartets, composed one more after this one. The publisher Schott rejected it and requested “something less difficult in easier keys.” The quartet was not published until after Schubert’s death.
The long, restless, sonata-form first movement, Allegro, demonstrates great power and is both dramatic and tragic. In it, Schubert displays his mastery of modulation and includes many ideas; critic Paul Griffiths indicates that a triplet figure shapes many of the thematic motives and links one musical thought to the next. Schubert diverged from classical structures, quite innovatively extending the second subject material so that both the theme’s exposition and recapitulation encompass large scopes, and the exposition of each includes some of its own development. The actual development, therefore, is unusually brief, taking the listener to the coda before the movement’s quiet end.
Schubert used theme and variations for the second movement, Andante con moto, which suits his expressive purpose admirably. The quartet takes its subtitle, Death and the Maiden, from this theme, a slightly altered version of the piano introduction to his song of the same name, written in 1817. The Matthias Claudius text is a dialogue in which the maiden begs Death to pass her by. He replies, “I do no harm. Come, sleep peacefully in my arms.” (While Schubert was being interred only a few yards from Beethoven, a small band of wind instruments played these five variations.) Grief and desolation are most evident here, but Schubert was prompted in his choice of thematic material by a request from friends who loved the melody, rather than, as some commentators contend, because the composer was contemplating his mortality.
The last movement, Presto, brings the quartet to a stormy, galloping close. This finale joins the characteristics of the tarantella, a Neapolitan folk dance, with elements of rondo and sonata form. Interpretations of this movement have also focused on its being a dance of death, but music historians have no evidence that suggests such intentions here. Less controversial is the fact that the modulations and dynamics indicate its Romantic character, and the tonality binds together the quartet as a whole.
Musicologists have suggested that Schubert may have had a more powerful influence on Mahler than even Beethoven did, and that Mahler’s first masterpiece, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) was heavily influenced by Schubert’s late song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, an influence that was strong and evident through Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. The influence Schubert exerted again became prominent in Mahler’s final works, Das Lied von der Erde and Symphonies Nos. 9 and 10. Although Schubert was only 31 when he died, the works he composed in the last years of his life are often referred to as his “late style” because the feeling of leave-taking in almost all of Schubert’s last works is similar to that musicologists have also noted in late Mahler.
Mahler had planned on creating string orchestra versions of the works he felt to be the greatest in the string quartet literature. To that end, he had created string orchestra versions of two of Beethoven’s quartets: the “Serioso” Quartet, Op. 95, and the Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131.
Mahler’s arrangement of Op.131 is lost. Thus, no one knows if he had completed it. Only the Op. 95 was ever performed in its entirety in its string orchestra version, but there was so much disturbing booing when it was being played that Mahler sent two orchestra members into the audience to ask the most strident objectors to leave the hall. Critical reaction was also negative, so Mahler cancelled a scheduled performance of Beethoven’s Op. 131 and never conducted it again.
In 1896, Mahler began, but eventually abandoned, a project to transcribe Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet for string orchestra. Fortunately, he got far enough along for later arrangers to finish the job (he marked up the score of the other movements, but with a paucity of annotations), and he did provide posterity with a late-Romantic version of an early-Romantic masterpiece.
Mahler did conduct his transcription of the quartet’s poignant second movement for orchestra, the one from which the title comes, in a concert in Hamburg. Alma Mahler eventually bequeathed Mahler’s copy of the quartet score to Donald Mitchell. From it, Mitchell and composer David Matthews assembled the first published version of Mahler’s arrangement. While Mahler never finished the transcription of the whole quartet, his work on the second movement is an example of the melding of two great composers’ visions.
Mahler’s grand orchestral arrangement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet showcases the power of two musical giants and is Mahler’s tribute to Schubert, for whom he had much admiration. The arrangement invites listeners to re-experience the quartet’s emotional depth and thematic richness through Mahler’s symphonic lens.
Program notes by © Susan Halpern 2025