Danish String Quartet

The Danish String Quartet (DSQ) first brought its Doppelgänger Project to Cal Performances in the fall of 2021. Pairing four newly commissioned works with milestones from Franz Schubert’s chamber music, the project began with a combination of the String Quartet in G major (D. 887) and the Danish com­poser Bent Sørensen’s Doppelgänger Quartet. This was followed last spring by a program including Death and the Maiden and Pige by the Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski—an incisive counterpart to Schubert’s most-famous quartet that, in keeping with our early-21st-century Zeitgeist, deconstructs Romantic assumptions about gender identity.

This latest installment in the project juxtaposes Schubert’s return to quartet writing, after a hiatus of several years, with Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s new work Rituals. The Rosamunde Quartet in A minor was the only Schubert string quartet published during his lifetime yet, according to DSQ violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, has been eclipsed in popularity by the two quartets that followed it. He finds the Rosamunde the most challenging of the three to interpret, although on a technical level it is considered the easiest. “With Death and the Maiden, for example, you can make a lot of drama. But the characters and colors in Rosamunde are very close to each other and shift subtly, with small blocks of notes that are repeated many times: this requires more-mature musicianship to phrase.”

These “ritualistic repetitions of gestures” share a quality with Rituals, even though Thorvaldsdottir chose not to respond directly to her “companion” piece when fulfilling the commission. Nørgaard posits a relationship with the Schubert in the sense that in both works, “power is harvested in the repetition of things. It’s an experience different from when a piece has traditional melodies and developments. Both pieces have a meditative element. They take you into a different state of mind, and then you stay there for a while.”

Also included in the program is Quartettsatz (the German simply means “quartet movement”), which dates from the end of 1820—a year after the beloved Trout Quintet—and signals a turn in the direction of Schubert’s final three masterpieces in the genre. And, as in their other Doppelgänger Project concerts, the DSQ bookend the program with their own arrangement of a Schubert Lied related to the opening quartet.

Layered Melancholy, Subtextual Lieder
The Rosamunde Quartet in A minor (not the composer’s nickname) marked Schubert’s return to the string quartet medium in 1824, after a pause of several years. Members of the Schuppanzigh Quartet (which performed Beethoven’s groundbreaking late quartets) premiered the piece. The young composer, then 27, had been accepted as a performing member by Vienna’s Society of Music Lovers three years before. He had come to a keener understanding of the potential lurking within the Classical genres through his appreciation of Beethoven. These factors may underlie his renewed interest in the string quartet as well as the ambition of his symphonic projects (including the Unfinished Symphony of 1822 and the Great C major Symphony, which he began in the wake of the 1824 premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth).

Yet alongside these increasingly sophisticated musical visions—visions that arguably surpassed those Beethoven had pursued at the same age—Schubert was weathering intense depression and the ongoing anxiety caused by incurable syphilis, which he had contracted in 1822. “I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world,” he famously confessed in a letter dated March 31, 1824. “Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, a man whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, whose enthusiasm for all things beautiful is gone, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being? Each night, on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday’s grief.”

Schubert had also suffered the bitter disappointment of an unrequited love for opera. His two most significant forays into the genre, Alfonso und Estrella and Fierabras, had been rejected in 1822 and 1823, respectively. In 1823, he also penned an incidental score to the Romantic drama Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus by the journalist and amateur fiction writer Helmina von Chézy. The production was withdrawn after a mere two performances. In contrast to the devastating reviews, Schubert is said to have described the drama as “fully convincing right from the first time you read it.” The play’s original text is no longer even extant, though a revision was later discovered. The story tells of the titular heroine and her ultimately successful quest to be restored to her rightful royal position.

Rosamunde prompted Schubert to write 10 numbers: choruses, ballets, and entr’actes, as well as the Romanze “Der Vollmond strahlt auf Bergeshöhn.” Together with the Romanze, the entr’acte following the third act has become a popular extract from this incidental score, its ethereal theme ranking among Schubert’s most enchanting melodies. It pleased Schubert himself so much that he reused it in the Andante of the A minor String Quartet (as well as in the third of the Four Impromptus, D. 935).

Rosamunde is not the sole external source for this heavily subtextual, self-quoting quartet. Its opening measures recall the anxious ambience of Schubert’s breakthrough song from a decade before, “Gretchen am Spinnrade”—a new arrangement of which the DSQ has made for string quartet to conclude this program—as well as of the still-more-ominous preludial measures to the Unfinished Symphony of 1822. Still another subtext of longing for what has been lost emerges in the third movement (a minuet rather than a scherzo), which quotes from Schubert’s extraordinary 1819 setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (“The Gods of Greece”).

A layered melancholy thus permeates the A minor Quartet, in which the Rosamunde melody (transposed to C major from its original B-flat major) becomes a kind of stand-in for the sense of lost innocence conveyed by these very disparate Lieder. The variations it undergoes in the Andante transform its disarming simplicity into Schubert’s signature ambivalence. Added to this is Beethoven’s influence, as evidenced by the simple rhythmic pattern (long–short–short–long–long) that echoes the Allegretto of his Seventh Symphony. The finale, like the previous three movements, begins pianissimo. Its rustic atmosphere and folklike ambience inform a combination of rondo and sonata architecture. A kind of cheerful delicacy here makes for a curiously subdued counterpart to the headlong death dance with which the Rosa­munde’s immediate successor, Death and the Maiden, will be driven to its end.

A Gateway to the Late Quartets
Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in B minor from 1822 is one of the most famous musical torsos in the classical repertoire. Quartettsatz represents a parallel situation in the medium of chamber music. Enhancing the mystique of both is the fact that the incompleteness of these works resulted not from Schubert’s premature death but from what is thought to have been a creative block. After completing this C minor movement, he drafted 41 measures of a slow movement in A-flat major but then abandoned the quartet-in-progress. Quartettsatz, like so many of Schubert’s compositions, remained an unknown gem during his life and wasn’t published until 1870 (when it appeared as the Quartet No. 12).

The restless energy of the opening gestures already breathes the same air as the beginning of the Unfinished Symphony. There’s even an anticipation of the life-or-death urgency we recognize from the outer movements of Death and the Maiden. This unsettling agitation colors the whole movement—a persistent subtext, even when temporary refuge seems to beckon in the lyrical consolation of the second theme. Schubert underscores this ambivalence by reversing the order of presentation in the recapitulation, ensuring that the overly agitated material has the final say, driving us onward, through surprising harmonic detours, to the peremptory final chords that bring Quartettsatz to an abrupt halt.

“An Ecosystem of Materials”
Anna Thorvaldsdottir grew up in a town that was small even in the context of sparsely populated Iceland; only later, as a college student, did she move to Reykjavík, the capital city. But her family was musical and encouraged young Anna’s interest in playing the cello—though the town had only a violin teacher available to teach her the instrument. It was at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík that she started finding her voice as a composer.

“I like working with timbre and texture on an individual instrumental level,” Thorvaldsdottir remarked on a podcast interview with NPR, adding that the particular nuances and gestures that make her music as recognizable as a painter’s signature brushstroke are her equivalent of melodies: “I allow them to move from one instrument to the next [as they present] sounds and textures in waves. I also like to morph sounds, to find ways for different elements and sounds to speak to each other and become one another through a natural progression.”

Thorvaldsdottir is especially acclaimed for the large-scale orchestral canvases in which she has developed this language, such as Dreaming, her breakthrough composition from 2008. Along with works for orchestra, her catalogue ranges from pieces for prepared piano and chamber ensembles to choral music and scores for radio drama and film; she has also written a chamber opera (UR_) to her own libretto. This May, the intrepid flutist Claire Chase will debut a major new work for solo flutes, two cellos, and piano at Carnegie Hall.

The DSQ previously collaborated with Thorvaldsdottir to perform her string octet Illumine (2017), which explores “the notion of dawn and the relationship between light and darkness—in particular the ignition of the first beams of light and the subtle rhythms that appear through the pulsating dance of light emerging,” as she explains. Thorvaldsdottir, who herself plays cello, was eager to take on the Doppelgänger commission to explore the possibilities available within the sound world of four solo strings.

Thorvaldsdottir’s compositions often invite comparisons with natural landscapes (in particular, the bracing, volcanic beauty of Iceland). An otherworldly quality has been attributed to Thorvaldsdottir’s music: if “other­worldly” is understood to embrace not only a time-transcending beauty but its shadow as well, and the sense of an unidentified foreboding that lurks beyond the horizon as well—an ambivalence that, come to think of it, is quintessentially Schubertian.

In Rituals, which is cast in 11 interlinked sections (two of them titled “Ascension,” the rest using abstract roman numerals), Thorvaldsdottir fragments textural sonorities in a manner that can be compared with ritualistic behavior. Repetition and ritual, she notes, can be found “in everything: in breath, and in the way we do everything.” She describes her process in this piece as “repeating materials in different ways so that they are sometimes unrecognizable; sometimes you might recognize some elements and not others. The core is going into all these little things that are so different, yet are all the same.”

Thorvaldsdottir also refers to her music as “an ecosystem of materials that are carried from one performer—or performers—to the next throughout the process of the work. …All materials continuously grow in and out of each other, growing and transforming throughout the process.” A pitch that is sustained for a long time, for example, should be approached as “a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling. It is a way of measuring time and noticing the tiny changes that happen as you walk further along the same thin rope.”

Thorvaldsdottir writes that her music in general emerges not from “a verbal place” but “as a stream of consciousness that flows, is felt, sensed, shaped, and then crafted.” Once a piece is completed, she often seeks how to articulate “some of the important elements of the musical ideas or thoughts that play certain key roles in the origin of the piece.” According to Rand Steiger, who became one of the composer’s mentors at the University of California, San Diego (where she obtained her doctorate), “her internal process is completely about sound,” bypassing the realm of verbal language.

But with Rituals, Thorvaldsdottir realized that her commentary “needed to be left impressionistic and unfiltered.” It reads as follows:

repetition in atmosphere—going through motions, the same motions, but it is never the same—with every repeating breath is a new feeling, new vision, new life, new being, same life—the same but always different—various perspectives of ritualistic feelings, sensations, explorations, from the hymn-like Ascension to obsessive percussive materials… from parts that move like a rigorous engine to others of flowing atmospheric ether—but all have in common the ritualistic approach to the material—rituals in lyricism—rituals in hope—rituals in repetition—rituals in song—rituals in material—rituals in prayer—rituals in obsession—rituals in life—rituals in being—rituals in harmonies—bending rituals—rituals in difference—ritual as an escape—ritual as peace—ritual as continuation—ritual as burden—ritual as hope—ritual as obsession—ritual as being—ritual in harmony—each part is its own ritual and together the 11 parts form one ritual

—Thomas May