Franz Schmidt
                String Quartets

* String Quartet in A
* String Quartet in G

Franz Schubert Quartett, Wien
Total time: 77:56
Nimbus NI 5467

Summary for the Busy Executive: A Viennese master.

Music historians generally look at the so-called "big picture." They see
movements and enumerate the characteristics of a culture.  The broad view
can be a useful one, but it can also distort.  In a very real sense, there
are no artistic movements, but individual artists, and a culture consists
not of traits, but of a spectrum of viewpoints.  Baroque music didn't end
with the deaths of Bach and Handel, even though galant composers and even
early Haydn were by then producing in newer styles.  Many times we see old
and new at work simultaneously in the same piece.  Is Mahler's Symphony No.
7, for example, late Romantic, early modern, or something other? Unless a
composer resolutely shuts out all music other than his own (and not very
many composers have done so), he finds a spot along a continuum, because he
hears and marks - positively or negatively - his contemporaries.

I first came across Franz Schmidt's music after reading an article by
Harold Truscott in Penguin's The Symphony:  From Elgar to the Present Day,
a volume edited by British symphonist Robert Simpson.  If you can follow
examples in musical type, this remains an invaluable book for the beginner
and even beyond.  Schmidt hardly counts as a household name even now - how
much less at the time of Truscott's writing - and Truscott's was one of the
first English-language articles on the composer.  Schmidt (1874-1939) dies
well into modernism's heyday, but, superficially at least, the music shares
more with Brahms, Bruckner, Strauss, and Mahler than with Schoenberg,
Hindemith, Toch, or Weill.  Truscott argues for Schmidt as Bruckner's one
true heir.  I find few similarities myself, except in harmonic language.
The personalities of the two strike me as no more alike than two fin de
siecle Frenchman picked randomly off the street.  Both will speak French,
and dress may very well be similar.  But the word "heir" implies a family
connection.  I don't hear it myself, despite the fact that Schmidt studied
with the older composer.  To me, Schmidt's music is more disturbing than
Bruckner's and displays greater technical resource, although this doesn't
mean he's necessarily the greater composer.  Schmidt's music at its most
interesting presents a Janus head - simultaneously looking to late
Romanticism (although with less obvious reliance on Wagnerian harmony
than Bruckner) and, in its emotional ambivalence and even distance, to
modernism.  In short, I find him as Romantic (and as Modern) as Mahler or
- to take a similar figure from another field - the painter Gustav Klimt.

Both of Schmidt's string quartets come from well into the Twenties (1925
and 1929), but in sound and attitude toward materials they could have
appeared thirty years before or perhaps even earlier.  The Viennese loved
Schmidt's music and honored it with many prizes.  He had a good career and
deserved it.  Nevertheless, the world at large forgot the music for two
reasons.  First, the music had no star champion outside of Austria, as
Mahler had with Walter, Bernstein, and, to some extent, Horenstein - people
willing to muscle unfamiliar music few willingly heard onto a program.
Mehta, as far as I know, was the first in the stereo era to record a
Schmidt symphony (the fourth).  Second, Schmidt found himself on the wrong
side of the Anschluss and actually wrote a "Hymn to the Fuehrer." To some
extent, he was buried as fascist - both by the left and by Austrians
wishing to sweep the entire period under the rug - but I have no idea
whether he had any strong political commitment.  In either case, it doesn't
affect the music's quality.  Far more importantly, however, his music
suffered the fate of the unfashionably out-of-date.  New music, at least
in the United States, often gets programmed for reasons of prestige, and
Schmidt had lost out to the Schoenberg circle, as did a whole bunch of
Austrian and German composers of varied idioms.  The surface of the music
also must have seemed "been there, done that" to adventurous programmers
and yet thorny to those who, after forty years, still didn't get Mahler.
Now, of course, with Mahler's general acceptance and conservative audiences
more vocal and less tolerant of most forms of "difficulty" in music - from
Elliott Carter all the way to Carl Nielsen and Ravel - Schmidt may well
reap the benefits, not that his music doesn't present its own difficulties,
but that the harmonic and melodic languages have become familiar.

The String Quartet in A shows a composer who has mastered string writing
to such an extent, he doesn't have to impress anybody.  It begins with a
beautifully flowing theme warmly harmonized, a bit reminiscent of passages
in Wagner's Siegfried-Idyl.  Yet it's not Wagner's "wisps of themes
floating about" usually propelled by sequence (repetition of a phrase, up
or down by some regular interval) but a real sonata movement, which may
very well be the lesson absorbed from Bruckner or even from Brahms.  The
movement also sounds less cozy than that bare description.  A theme in
minor mode undercuts the Gemuetlichkeit of the main idea.  Jagged
dissonances crop up throughout, although a soft dynamic mitigates their
sting to such a degree that I suspect few listeners will catch them.
The movement displays real freedom in the handling of structure (unlike
Bruckner's sonata movements, which tend to rigidity) and tension between
a free-wheeling chromaticism and a sharply-defined classical shape.

The second movement, labeled Adagio but striking one more as allegretto
in character (like Brahms), presents an interesting conflation of themes
and accompaniment:  that is, themes derive from and disappear into
accompanying figures, which has the effect of stressing each instrument as
an independent voice and of shifting tonal colors as one instrument emerges
from and another recedes into the background texture.  Schmidt sings
beautifully here, even elegantly.  The themes are free from the clutter of
notes usual in late 19th-century music.  The ending consists simply of the
first violin going from tonic to dominant and back in long rhythmic values,
and it just about breaks your heart.

The third movement takes the form of a fugal scherzo, with two trios:
the first a Mahler-peasant dance, the second a reminiscence of the gracious
first movement.  One even gets a hint of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's
Dream music, although Schmidt's more deliberate tempo slightly obscures
this connection.  This is Schmidt at his most charming, even exquisite, and
reveals a composer of enormous range - who can range from the apocalypse
of the fourth symphony and Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln to a Dresden-china
pastoralism.  The finale, consisting of an introduction leading to theme
and variations, during which the composer explores novel (but not bizarre)
string sonorities and even, in one variation, hints of bitonality.  The
composer begins lyrically, even comfortably, and constructs the movement
masterfully with a steady increase of interest and excitement, until it
culminates with a restatement of the theme.  Nevertheless, the movement
doesn't come off like, say, Elgar's Enigma.  Schmidt this time out doesn't
try to scale Olympus.  The work comes off as congenial, as if a
satisfactory close to an evening of amateur quartet playing.  In its
independence of ensemble and problems of intonation arising from its highly
chromatic idiom, however, this ease is really an illusion.  The work needs
a great bunch of string players to make its full effect.

Superficially, the second quartet resembles the first:  flowing first
movement, slow second, scherzo third, and finale.  However, the second
quartet is an altogether less breezy matter.  The chromaticism, while
remaining tonal, gets even heavier than in the first - harmonically more
reminiscent of Tristan than, say, Meistersinger.  In fact, compared to the
first movement of the first quartet, the opening movement of the second
comes almost as a slap, even though it sings softly.  The independence of
voices has also become stronger, quite the reverse of expectation.  In
general, the more chromatically tonal the music, the more the parts move
in lockstep.  The voices, indeed, are so rhythmically independent and
sing lines of such integrity that it takes a couple of listenings to know
which has the burden of the narrative at any given moment.  Indeed, the
individual voices have such strength that they seem to generate the
harmonies, rather than the other way around.  Furthermore, the sense of
unease only hinted at in the first quartet breaks out onto the surface
of the second in the form of more unstable harmonies more consistently
applied, louder dynamics, and more insistent, even angry, rhythms.

The second movement, a true adagio, sings of great yearning.  Korngold and
Schrecker slow movements share this quality.  Again, the music doesn't
often follow the normal breakdown into song plus accompaniment, but every
instrument weaves its own strand in the accompaniment from its own song.
Nevertheless, the Schmidt isn't all longing.  A pesante theme in the lower
registers of the instruments treads like a funeral march.  Here, Schmidt
reaches the depths of his symphonies.  In the richness of its emotion and
the solid assurance of its craft, this movement impresses me the more than
any other of both quartets.

The scherzo (again, with two trios) seems to stagger - from the unstable
harmonies and a rhythmically eccentric cello part - a bit like the finale
of Hindemith's third string quartet, written seven years before the
Schmidt.  The first trio, however - simple and serenely diatonic - tips us
off that despite what the scherzo may tell you, this ain't Hindemith.  The
second trio - also harmonically more secure - sings a bit sadly a theme
that in its shape and mood recalls the opening of the Brahms first cello
sonata.  In an unusual move, Schmidt brings back a bit of the first trio
(it's too lovely to forget) before winding up with the unsteady gait of
the scherzo.

The finale begins in faux-Baroque contrapuntal geniality, with a hint of
the tipsy scherzo.  Indeed, the unease of the previous movements seems
never far away, despite the fun and games.  Nevertheless, Schmidt works the
movement toward resolving the disturbances of the previous three.  At the
last moment, however, he pulls the rug out from any hope of a triumphant or
even jolly conclusion, coming down to bare textures and ending, really, on
a question.

Despite the familiarity of their idiom, these quartets pose enormous
interpretive difficulties - the second quartet more than the first, but
the first has many hurdles of its own.  Both quartets take a world-class
group to reveal them in all their glory.  The Schubert Quartet of Vienna
really hasn't the richness of tone, for one thing, or quite the soundness
of intonation these works demand.  Nothing is outright bad or horrifically
out of tune, but nothing in their sound allows you to revel in the sheer
sonic beauty of these two pieces.  Furthermore, the second quartet forces
the performers to find its shape (the architecture of the first is much
clearer).  Again, the Schubert doesn't fall apart, but it seems to be
holding on to just this side of intelligibility with its fingernails.  I
think especially of the opening movement of the second quartet.  I also
question some of their tempi, particularly in the second's finale, which
plods a bit.  The rhetorical movement of conflict, apparent resolution,
and enigma would become more apparent with a quicker pulse.  The marking
is, after all, Allegro, and by no stretch of charity do they get beyond
moderato.  This may be a matter of phrasing and impetus as well.  The
players seem to hesitate - take a deep mental breath - before arriving at
a new section.  I'd like to hear someone really chomp into these works.
However, don't let these remarks put you off.  The performance is good
enough to let you know the quartets' considerable stature.

The sound is acceptable.

Steve Schwartz