String Quartets by Schoenberg, Berg, and Bartók

​ Marriage Scenes: String Quartets by Schoenberg, Berg, and Bartók

The string quartets of the Second Viennese School and their contemporaries offer more than revolutionary musical innovations—they provide intimate glimpses into the turbulent personal lives of their creators, where art and biography intertwine in dramatic fashion.

Schoenberg's Second String Quartet: A Musical Soap Opera

Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet (1908) stands as both a musical watershed and a deeply personal confession. Dedicated "Für Mathilde"—to the woman who broke his heart—the work emerged from one of the most scandalous episodes in early 20th-century musical circles.

The drama began innocuously enough. In 1906, Schoenberg's brother-in-law Alexander von Zemlinsky introduced the composer to Richard Gerstl, a talented young painter. Gerstl began giving painting lessons to Schoenberg and his wife Mathilde in their home, eventually renting a studio in their building. As a family friend, he accompanied the Schoenbergs on summer vacations and painted several expressionist portraits of the family.

The idyll shattered on August 27, 1908, when Schoenberg discovered his wife and the painter in a compromising situation. Mathilde immediately fled to Vienna with her two children and moved in with Gerstl, leaving Schoenberg alone and contemplating suicide.

This marital crisis permeates the quartet's musical fabric. The second movement features a striking moment where the Viennese folk tune "O du lieber Augustin" appears as a bitter scherzo—a song whose lyrics translate to "Oh dear Augustin, everything is gone! The money is gone, the girl is gone, everything is gone!" The musical quotation serves as an unmistakable reference to the wreckage of Schoenberg's life.

The quartet's revolutionary aspect lies not only in its biographical content but in its musical structure. The final two movements incorporate a soprano voice, setting poems by Stefan George. In the third movement, "Litanei," the soprano concludes with the chilling lines: "Kill the longing, close the wound! Take away love, give me your happiness!"

The personal drama ended tragically. Through the diplomatic intervention of Anton Webern, Mathilde reconciled with her husband, but Gerstl hanged himself in November 1908 after slashing his abdomen with a knife. Mathilde remained largely silent until her premature death in 1927.

Musical Revolution: The Birth of Atonality

Beyond its biographical drama, Schoenberg's Second Quartet marks a historic moment in music history. The final movement, "Entrückung," opens with the prophetic line "I feel air from other planets"—the first piece in music history to abandon tonality entirely.

In this movement, Schoenberg liberated music from what he called the "Procrustean bed" of traditional harmony. Rather than telling a musical story within a fixed tonal center, he treated all twelve tones of the octave as equals, freeing them from their previous harmonic functions. For the first time, dissonances served as destinations in themselves, without requiring traditional harmonic resolution.

Though radical, this transformation didn't occur in isolation. Composers like Wagner (particularly in "Tristan"), Mahler, and Scriabin had already stretched the traditional journey from opening chord to final resolution to its limits. However, composing entirely outside the framework of classical harmony represented an unprecedented intervention that left Viennese audiences outraged at the premiere.

Webern's Miniature Universes

Anton Webern, Schoenberg's devoted student, took his teacher's innovations even further in works like his Five Pieces for String Quartet (1909-1910). Recognizing that abandoning classical harmony made large-scale musical structures impossible, Webern created what Stravinsky called "dazzling diamonds"—compressed musical gems lasting often less than a minute.

These pieces exemplify Webern's early atonal style, featuring micro-melodies that bloom and immediately fade, constantly shifting timbres through extended techniques, and abundant silence. Despite their apparent cerebral intellectualism, Webern's sketches reveal that he followed his intuition first, often structuring compositions around the characteristics of friends and family or descriptions of beloved alpine meadows.

Webern was a passionate romantic at heart, finding mystical fulfillment in the natural beauty of the pre-Alps. His correspondence overflows with ecstatic descriptions of alpine flowers discovered during mountain walks. In one letter to Berg, he wrote: "I've come to know a little flower called 'wintergreen.' A bit like a lily of the valley, very simple, modest, barely noticeable. But with a scent like balm! What a fragrance! It encompasses for me the essence of tenderness, emotion, depth, and purity!"

Though Webern's complete output spans only six CDs, his ephemeral microcosms contain music's essence, just as he saw a macrocosm in the mountain flowers he collected in his herbaria.

Bartók's Eclectic Synthesis

Béla Bartók's Third String Quartet (1929) represents a different response to modernity's challenges. Inspired by hearing Alban Berg's Lyric Suite during a German concert tour, Bartók created what many consider his most adventurous quartet—a remarkable synthesis of Schoenberg's atonality with the primitive power of folk music.

Bartók's fascination with folk music began in 1904 when he heard his Transylvanian housemaid Lidi Dósa singing a song from her homeland. This revelation led him and Kodály to become ardent collectors of folk melodies, initially notating them by ear (aided by Bartók's perfect pitch) and later recording them with an Edison cylinder recorder. This research even took him to North Africa in 1913 to study Berber music.

For Bartók, folk music offered an escape from the weight of the Western European musical tradition, where he felt like merely an imitator. As a Hungarian formed by German culture that he simultaneously found suffocating, he discovered in folk music a primitive purity and musical originality untainted by modernity.

In his Third String Quartet, Bartók transforms folk melodies, sound textures, rhythms, and irregular formal schemes beyond recognition, incorporating them into a highly personal aesthetic. His approach represents an alternative path to that chosen by Schoenberg and Webern for dealing with both tradition and modernity—like every modernist, Bartók's engagement with modernity constituted a revolt against modernity itself, compelling him to forge ahead into uncharted territory.