Brahms and the Long 19th Century String Quartets from Vienna and Beyond
Har r y Haskell
In music as in other fields, the 19th century was an age of awakening historical consciousness. Thanks to legions of scholars and musical archaeologists, Romantic composers were keenly aware of their place in the annals of music, however cavalierly, and at times condescendingly, they may have treated the work of their predecessors. None was more historically aware than Brahms, who transcribed, collected, edited, and performed music by a wide range of Renaissance and Baroque masters, as well as near-contemporaries like Schumann and Chopin. One of his prize possessions was the manuscript of Mozart’s great Symphony No. 40 in G minor. In the early 20th century, Schoenberg presented his own music and theoretical writings as the culmination of a Germanic tradition that stretched to Bach and beyond; he famously proclaimed that his discovery of twelve-tone composition would ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years. “When I think of music, the only type that comes to my mind—whether I want it to or not—is German music,” Schoenberg wrote, predicting that “its wordless power will create and fill stately mansions of the spirit into all eternity.” In this pair of concerts, the String Quartet of the Staatskapelle Berlin explore the historical lineage leading both to and from the three string quartets that Brahms composed in the 1860s and 1870s. The two programs shed light on what historians call the long 19th century, in this case extending from 1772, when the 16-year-old Mozart wrote his three genial Divertimenti for strings, K. 136–138, in Salzburg, to 1909, the date of Webern’s pathbreaking Five Movements for String Quartet. To say that a common thread runs through all seven works is to affirm the obvious—their shared 19
