Listen to Beethoven’s Second Symphony and you would be hard put to make a connection with the composer’s inner turmoil and his realisation that the increasing signs of incurable deafness would be life-changing. The work’s key of D major exudes sunniness. But contrast that with the example of Mahler’s annus horribilis in 1907: the early death of his daughter Maria, the diagnosis of a fatal heart condition, his wife Alma’s betrayal with a much younger man, and his ousting as director of the Vienna Court Opera. It is hard to conceive that these events had no effect on the composer’s last two symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde. Whether it is always legitimate to draw links between biography and artistic output is a debatable point, yet 1907 was significant not only for Mahler but also for Schoenberg, and the older composer left his musical mark on the younger composer’s Second String Quartet in more than one way.
Schoenberg and his wife Mathilde had befriended a young Viennese painter by the name of Richard Gerstl, who as well as using the wife as a model gave painting lessons to the husband. Then events took a desperate turn. Mathilde and Richard fell madly in love; they upped and went leaving Schoenberg and the two children behind. Months later Mathilde was persuaded by none other than Anton Webern (one of Schoenberg’s pupils) to return to the family home. That in turn threw Gerstl into a deep-seated depression which resulted in him first stabbing and then hanging himself naked in front of a mirror in his studio, whereupon his lover became so distraught that she had to be institutionalised and died just over a decade later.
Why does all this matter? The composition of the Second String Quartet spans the critical years 1907 and 1908. It is a jolt to the system. It marks the point when the bubble of Romantic tonality finally burst. Nothing was ever quite the same again. As in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, Schoenberg introduces a female voice for the third and fourth movements, a quite startling innovation. As in Mahler’s First Symphony, he makes use of a popular song. With Mahler it is Frère Jacques; with Schoenberg it is Ach, du lieber Augustin. The reference comes in the quartet’s second movement, it is quite brief, and might be thought to be merely ironic. Except that the Viennese folksong has the critical phrase “Alles ist hin” (= All is lost) as a refrain, following the realisation that “Mäd’l ist weg” (= Girl’s gone). Coincidence or the kind of deliberate self-laceration that Mahler knew all too well?
This seminal work by Schoenberg is more talked about than performed, so it was hugely rewarding to see it featured as the main work in this concert given at Wigmore Hall by Barbara Hannigan and the Belcea Quartet. Hannigan has already recorded this quartet as part of her 2023 CD “Infinite Voyage” for Alpha, but whereas that album encompassed Berg and Chausson, this evening’s music included two other composers outside the immediate frame of the Second Viennese School. Taken together they stood under one of the most famous lines in musical history, the opening of Stefan George’s poem Entrückung (= Rapture) which launches the quartet’s final movement: Ich fühle luft von anderem Planeten (= I feel the air of another planet).
Where does this intriguing idea come from? From earlier Symbolist leanings George moved into the realm of mystic sensibility. As such, the words of this poem are designed to reach out, over and beyond, conveying a transcendence that fits very nicely with the trajectory of Schoenberg’s music in its visionary departure from pure tonality. Not that the composer was entirely without misgivings. He later commented: “I was afraid the great dramatic emotionality of the poem might cause me to surpass the borderline of what should be permitted in chamber music.”
The members of the Belcea Quartet delivered a performance of engrossing amplitude, rich in colour and nuance, laid out on an almost symphonic scale. There was so much to enjoy in their playing: the clean lines, the perfect inner balances, the astonishing virtuosity at speed, the generosity of tone, and the sense of always being inside the music and not merely contemplating it from without. What stood out especially was their constant attention to signs of unsettling activity in the troubled undergrowth, right from the start of the first movement in the unusually remote key of F sharp minor, later heightened by the repeated questioning of the correct path ahead. Schoenberg feeling his way tentatively into a different musical universe became very palpable.
Hannigan was completely at one with this music. Her voice is virtually ideal for everything the composer demands of his soprano soloist in the last two movements: a bell-like clarity, a beautifully legato line, a precise articulation of the words and endless minutiae of vocal colouring. There are few singers who can express pain quite so powerfully, evident in phrases sich as “voll nur die qual” (= full but my pain) in George’s poem Litanei at the heart of the third movement. Its climax on the word “Liebe”, where Hannigan moved from a long and piercing top C on the first syllable to a cavernous bottom B for the second was utterly arresting. She was no less affecting in those moments of exquisite sadness and tenderness as well as in fin-de-siècle sensuousness, such as the reference to “fiebernd der mund” (= fev’rish my mouth). At its close, the quartet of string players sounded just like four voices forming a choir with the soloist.
There is a long instrumental introduction for the second George poem Entrückung which takes the music into very distant regions, the two high-lying violins weaving an imaginary tapestry of ethereality, giving full significance to the concept of being “detached from reality” present in the German word. Although it is invidious to single out individual players, the rock-steady richness of the cellist Antoine Lederlin in his duetting with the violist Krzysztof Chorzelski was mesmerising. With a gnarly wind blowing below, Hannigan’s first entry was quite other-worldly, her angelic tones lifting the music up onto a higher plane. She had deliciously dark colouring for the line in which the poet yields himself “into the mighty breath”, and the two words “inbrünstige Schreie” (= fervent cries) were like the ice-cold blade of a dagger being thrust into the musical fabric. Not the least of her felicities came in the concluding reference to the holy voice, the melismatic delivery of the word “heiligen” leaving an indelible impression.
Hannigan prefaced the second half with a comparative rarity by Hindemith, his Melancholie, written in the closing stages of World War One, a setting of four poems by Christian Morgenstern for soprano voice and string quartet, also featured in her Alpha album. This was for me revelatory, never having previously alighted on much tenderness in Hindemith’s other music. The third poem Dunkler Tropfe proved to be a wonderful example of tone-painting, the pizzicato notes from viola and cello mimicking the “dark drop” at the start and at the end, Hannigan producing hushed vocal sighs for the repeated “müde” (= weary), and she and the Belcea players being quite magical in all the spectral associations. The finely projected whispers she found in Traumwald, which acts as a memento mori, effortlessly floating the two words “steigt empor” and opening out magnificently for “fern läutet”, were characteristic examples of her vocal art.
Any backward reference to Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19, nicknamed “Dissonance”, would have caused a wry smile to audiences at the premiere of Schoenberg’s quartet, whistling, catcalling, slow-clapping and shouting as they did in reaction to what seemed like the collapse of all known knowables in the musical world. The moniker is essentially a misnomer. Only the first twenty-two bars of the Adagio are imbued with chromatic dissonance, but here too there is a notable searching for a pathway out of chaos, the reverse of what occurred later in the Schoenberg. The Belcea players made the most of the sun-coated C major brilliance, occasionally with a degree of forward-thinking forcefulness, though the Menuetto was played with invigorating earthiness.
What was uncanny about this performance was what had preceded it. Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, written just a year after Schoenberg’s quartet, are models of instrumental compression, the ear constantly tantalised by the range of unconventional techniques and also in its exploration of Klangfarbenmelodie (tonal colour) a remarkable instance of innovation. The Belcea players moved seamlessly from the morendo ending of the Webern into the Mozart. Those unfamiliar with both works would have scarcely registered that there was any discernible break between the two.
From the prescience of Mozart it is a short step to the backward-looking references in Schoenberg, for it was the prophet of serialism who acknowledged his overriding debt in writing string quartets to the first Viennese master. All of this is a reminder that every new direction grows out of the pathways already trodden in the past. But though others such as Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Max Reger and indeed Mahler had been busy blazing a modernist circuit, it was Schoenberg who took the decisive step in moving from the gravitational pull of a tonal system into a distant universe. When asked to identify himself during World War One, Schoenberg stated his name. “Are you the notorious composer Arnold Schoenberg?” “Yes,” he replied, “somebody had to be.”
Alexander Hall
Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten
Webern – Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5; Mozart – String Quartet No, 19 in C, K465 “Dissonance”; Hindemith – Melancholie, Op. 13; Schoenberg – String Quartet No. 2 in F sharp minor, Op. 10
Barbara Hannigan (soprano); Belcea Quartet: Corina Belcea (violin), Suyeon Kang (violin), Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola), Antoine Lederlin (cello)
Wigmore Hall, London, 17 March 2026
All photos © Darius Weinberg