Schubert: String Quartet No.8, D.112

Introduction

The String Quartet No. 8 (D 112) in B-flat major was composed by Franz Schubert in 1814. It was posthumously published as Op. 168.

Movements

1. Allegro ma non troppo (B-flat major)
2. Andante sostenuto (G minor)
3. Menuetto: Allegro (E-flat major, with Trio in E-flat major)
4. Presto (B-flat major)

That Schubert's earliest chamber music was composed with the instrumentalists of his own family in mind -- Schubert's brothers played the violin, his father the cello, and young was Franz took up the viola to complete the string quartet texture -- is easily seen, or rather heard, in the relatively simple part-writing found in such works as the String Quartet in G minor, D. 18 composed in 1811 and the just slightly later Quartet in D, D. 94. By the time the teenage phenomenon got around to composing the String Quartet in B flat major, D. 112 (called the Quartet "No. 8" because of the order in which his quartets were once thought, wrongly as it turns out, to have been written), however, his ever-growing musical muscles were starting to burst forth from the constraints imposed by the Schubert family amateurs. The quartet was written in about nine days (September 5-13) during a period of relative vacation immediately following Schubert's successful completion of his final teacher-training examinations in August 1814. Though still within the realm of feasibility for such intermediate-level players as Schubert and his family, the music of this B flat major Quartet is of both a technical and a structural complexity that would lead most such players to seek out a new piece to play; the 17-year-old Schubert's will is strong here, perhaps stronger than we hear in any other work from the same time, and he is beginning to compose beyond the scope allowed by his immediate musical environment.

The String Quartet in B flat major, D. 112 was eventually published in 1863 as Opus 168. It is a work in the usual four movements, here designated Allegro ma non troppo -- Andante sostenuto -- Allegro (the Minuet) -- Presto. Schubert dutifully notes on the work's manuscript that the first movement was composed in four-and-a-half hours. Sonata-allegro form is of course the model, but, as with such hyper-extended examples of the form as the first movements of the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet and "Great" Symphony (still many years in the future), Schubert provides such an abundance of thematic material that we are forced to expand our usual "A theme/B theme" notion of the form. Theme groups or areas is more the idea here, the first one as usual in the tonic (but bending down to G minor for an iron-like subsidiary theme) , the second, far more compact one as usual in the dominant.

The Andante occupied Schubert for several days, it seems. The movement wanders forth from its pensive G minor opening, touching here and there along the tonal spectrum as a sonata-form takes shape, occasionally giving Haydn a musical nod as if in passing (as at the very beginning, with the perfectly "Classical" shape of the two inner voices). During the trio section of the third movement, the same B flat - B natural - C chromatic motion that gave life to the first movement takes center stage again.

At the opening of the Presto, a movement which, like -- but less obviously -- than the first, probably could not have been composed by Schubert even just a few months earlier, the first violin taunts the lower three parts with some scampering, pianissimo eighth notes; the second violin, viola, and cello try their best to resist their friend's urging to come out and play, as it were, but in the end find themselves unable to resist and plunge forth into an energetic repartee. From time to time they again seek out the dignity of their broad initial gestures, but always the first violin manages to entice them back out onto the playing field.