GENIUS: String Quintet in C major, Franz Schubert

American Classical Orchestra

GENIUS: String Quintet in C major, Franz Schubert

Schubert’s brilliant String Quintet in C major, the composer’s final instrumental work, was completed just two months before his death at the age of thirty-one, when—despite failing health——the composer was at the height of his musical powers. Ignored at the time, the Quintet is now widely hailed as not only the composer’s finest chamber piece, but one of the greatest pieces of chamber music of all time.

Among other qualities, the work is notable for its instrumentation. Instead of bringing in a second viola, a more conventional choice for the era’s string quintets, Schubert uses a second cello. This imbues the Quintet with rare, lower-register richness and depth on which he builds surprising key changes, innovative harmonic developments and gorgeous melodic lines that effect searing, almost painful, beauty that bespeaks the composer’s genius.

Given the timing of completion, one wonders if Schubert sensed he might not live to hear the work publicly performed. When Schubert submitted it to his publisher, along with three piano sonatas, his tone was deferential. Please let me know, he wrote, if “any of these works commend themselves to you.” Sadly the Quintet in C major did not. His publisher responded only with requests for more of the Lieder and piano music Schubert was better known for. After his death, Schubert’s final chamber work would bounce between publishers before a first public performance in 1850 (twenty-two years after his death) and its publication three years later. Only over time would his Quintet in C major be recognized as a masterpiece.