Schubert & Schoeck

By the age of 18, Schubert had already written ten string quartets, and what quartets they were! His G minor Quartet is a perfect example. True to tradition (Mozart’s G minor Symphony peeks out from the minuet), brimming with graceful invention, and crafted with the precision befitting a quartet. How much harder it was for Othmar Schoeck: when he composed his Second String Quartet, he was approaching forty, and separating him from his youth and student days was not merely a world war, but a shift in musical aesthetics. Stravinsky and Hindemith, and even more so Schoenberg, had brought a whole new kind of music into the world. Schoeck witnessed this transformation at close quarters. In 1923 he travelled to Paris for the first time to visit Arthur Honegger, where, among other things, he listened with enthusiasm to Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’. In the summer he travelled with his Winterthur patron Werner Reinhart in the latter’s ‘grande voiture blanche’ to Salzburg for the Chamber Music Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Here he heard the very most modern music of the time, not least string quartets by Alban Berg, Ernst Krenek, William Walton, Igor Stravinsky, Alois Hába and Darius Milhaud. And all this whilst he was in the midst of composing his own quartet! This makes it all the more fascinating to listen for traces in Schoeck’s work of those pieces that were ‘modern’ in their own way. New, dark harmonies in the ‘Grave’ opening movement, an almost atonal floating quality in the Allegretto, a hint of machine music in the pizzicato scherzo. In the Lento we encounter quite advanced dissonances, which Schoeck, however, layers gently. Finally, the finale gets the feet tapping, with polyrhythms and syncopation, as was the fashion in the ‘roaring twenties’. Less than a year after its world premiere, Schoeck’s new quartet was, of course, also performed in Winterthur. Ernst Wolters, first violinist of the Winterthur String Quartet and thoroughly familiar with the latest music, said it was “very difficult” …