Quatuor Hermès

SCHUBERT

Rosamunde - Der Tod Und Das Mädchen

By turns symphonic in scope and intimate in lyricism, grippingly dark and envelopingly gentle, these two chamber music monuments reveal Schubert's double face. 
At the end of 1822, Schubert learned that he had contracted a venereal disease. His hopes were "reduced to nothing", friendship and love became "torture". He threw all his strength into his work and began the most profound part of his oeuvre. The cycle of lieder La Belle Meunière was born, followed in 1824 by the Rosamunde Quartet, the Arpeggione Sonata and the Young Girl and Death Quartet. He left more and more works unfinished, but everything he completed took on a new dimension. His quartets are no longer 'first violin accompaniment': they gain in expressiveness, power and symphonic richness. 
The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D.804 Rosamunde was the only one printed and publicly performed during Franz Schubert's lifetime. It is a whispered work, with its tremolos, its unisons of melodies, its modulations. This string quartet is deeply touching in its confidences without vehemence or drama. A nocturnal hymn to nostalgia, it is fragile and should be played neither sorry nor too lightly, always in the ambiguity between dew and tears. 
Schubert's music is neither happy nor sad, but simply fraternal. The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 The Maiden and Death is a piece dictated by despair. Schubert joins Mozart in saying that death is man's best friend. He wrote his quartet in D minor, the key of his elder's Requiem. Very dramatic, the first movement is a struggle for life. In the second movement, death is accepted. The drama returns in the third movement in an ironic way. Then the work ends with a dance of death, a presto in the form of a tarantella (the Italian dance invented to cure the bite of the tarantula). Last chord in D minor. There is no doubt about the tragic outcome...