String Quintet in C

The subtractive test finds resistance at the joints and give in the spans. The Adagio’s F minor middle section cannot go: without it the return of E major is merely a da capo, and with it the return is altered and shadowed. The Trio cannot go: the slow D flat chorale inside the Presto is the work’s second semitone turn, and without it the Scherzo is a hunt with no halt. The first movement’s theme for two cellos in E flat is the work’s emotional source. Length is not charged; repetition the argument does not require is. The first movement’s transitions restate by design, and the Finale’s popular theme returns more often than its material needs. Below Op. 131 at 9.3 for that give.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: the fullest beauty and the threat that undoes it occupy the same time and the same body, and the threat does not leave when the beauty returns. The Adagio makes the claim by form. Its outer sections suspend time, a melody held in the middle voices while the first violin and the plucked bass measure it; the F minor section breaks the suspension; and the returning E major keeps a trace of the disturbance in its accompaniment. The Finale says it again in one stroke: D flat against C in unison. Held a tenth above the gate by the line between mood and meaning: with no words, what the work discloses is a condition felt more than articulated.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Height at the ceiling, and frequent. The Adagio is an elevation by stillness, sustained for minutes, which the F minor section turns to terror before the return. The first movement’s second theme, the two cellos in thirds in E flat, rises by beauty at the point where a sonata usually only contrasts,. The Trio is a second, darker stillness inside the Scherzo’s energy, and the Scherzo’s horn calls and open strings are grandeur of force. Held short of the top on frequency: the Finale is vivid and witty rather than elevated for most of its length, and only its last bars rise again, by violence. A tenth above Op. 131 and Winterreise, both at 9.3, for less time spent in comedy.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The archetype most often heard here is death and its approach: the stillness before the end, the last dance, the semitone that cuts the major. But that reading is largely supplied by biography, a work written in the last months of its composer’s life, and biography is not construction. What the score builds is a recurring figure, the semitone above the centre returning at three structural points, and a passage from song through eruption and dance to a stroke. That is a formal return, and an archetype only by the listener’s naming. The chorale and the horns summon the sacred and the hunt as atmosphere. Myth evoked with great power, and not built. Below the Goldberg at 8.4, whose journey out and home bears weight in its form.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is the Viennese string quintet of Mozart, with two violas, and Boccherini’s quintet with two cellos, whose scoring Schubert follows. The departures are real: the second cello used not to thicken the bass but to free the first as a tenor voice, so that the cellos carry the first movement’s lyric centre; a first movement of symphonic breadth for five strings; harmony governed by thirds and semitones rather than by the dominant; a Trio slower than its Scherzo, in another metre and a semitone higher; an Adagio that buries its melody in the middle. The stake was bounded. The forces were a proven path, the lyric expansion of sonata had been Schubert’s own since the G major quartet and the Octet. The swerve is deep in harmony and texture, modest in form.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the forces and the work loses what it knows. With one cello the lyric centre cannot sit in the tenor while a bass remains below it; the first movement’s E flat theme and the Adagio’s three-layer texture need five players. The Adagio’s ternary form is the instrument of its knowledge: suspension, rupture, and a return that cannot be the same,. The Trio’s slower tempo within a Presto is form as meaning, the dance stopped to hear something else. The semitone turns are placed at the joints of form, not inside the surface, so that the key plan is the argument. Held down by the Finale, whose plan is closer to a container for its popular material, and by the first movement’s transitions, where the form holds more than it needs.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence, and mostly of the last century. The work has been answered again and again in performance by quartets joined by a second cellist, and the answers differ: whether the exposition repeat is taken, the tempo of the Adagio, how the last D flat is struck. Critical writing returns to the semitone relations, to the writing for the cellos, and to the late style the quintet shares with the last three piano sonatas. The questions stay open: whether the ending is catastrophe or defiance, and how far the death heard in it belongs to the work or to the biography. Held below Op. 131 at 9.5 and the Goldberg at 9.4 because the literature on this single work is thinner than theirs, and much of it treats the late Schubert as a group.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Published, and scored on both components together. The intrinsic force is high: the work reorganised what lyric sonata could hold in chamber music, made the string quintet a vehicle of symphonic scale, and showed third and semitone relations bearing a whole design. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is delayed and narrow. The quintet stayed unpublished for twenty-five years after its composition, so its first generation never heard it in print, and its reach since lies chiefly in performance and standing: since the mid twentieth century it has been continuously played and recorded at or near the head of its genre. A line of later composers is diffuse. Delay is credited and discounted. The field is chamber music of the 1820s and its successors.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over about two centuries. The form survives whole: the text is the first edition of 1853 and the editions descended from it, and nothing in the work is missing or in doubt. Presence is wide: since the mid twentieth century the quintet has been continuously performed and recorded and stands at or near the head of its genre. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The cost is in the early record: the work was silent for its first generation and unpublished until 1853, so its public life began a quarter of a century after it was written. Below Op. 131 and Winterreise, both at 9.5, for that silence.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The making bears weight throughout: the five-part texture, in which each player is necessary and the second cello opens a register the quartet lacks; the Adagio’s layering, a melody in the middle voices with ornament above and pizzicato below, sustained without strain; the harmonic control by which third and semitone relations carry a long movement without loss of direction; open strings and doubled stops for sonority in the Scherzo. The charges are small but real: the first movement’s transitions and the Finale lean on sequence and restatement, and some figuration in the outer movements is routine by the standard of the Adagio. Level with Winterreise; two tenths below Op. 131 and the Goldberg, both at 9.7, for those.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements, the Adagio’s suspended E major and the Finale’s popular dance. One law governs them, and its unit is the semitone above the centre, answered by a fall back: E major to F minor in the Adagio; C to D flat in the Trio; D flat to C in the last two sounds. Third relations are the law’s other term: E flat for the first movement’s second group and E for the Adagio, each a third from the home C. The range governed is wide, from chorale to street dance. The tension is in the Finale, whose material is less audibly bound to the law than its ending is; there the law holds by key and close more than by theme. Below Op. 131 at 9.6 for it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The work holds a small number of orders and integrates them: consciousness, in lyric, stillness, terror and drive; mortality, in the Adagio’s rupture and the final stroke; the sacred, in the Trio’s chorale; the outdoor and the social, in the Scherzo’s horns and the Finale’s popular dance; the social in miniature, in five equal voices. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order, beyond the horn calls, do not appear. A wordless chamber work of under an hour holds the world of one mind and its companions; the figure says how many orders that is, a tenth below Op. 131 at 7.3.

Score: 7.2 / 10