Fear No More

Schoenberg’s string quartets – and his music in general – have a reputation for being feared and unfathomable, but, as Philip Clark reveals, this music has been celebrated in two recent recordings, each of which has taken a different historic cycle as its benchmark.

- Philip Clark

Nearly 70 years after his death, could it really be true that Arnold Schoenberg’s music still has the power to inspire fear and distrust in audiences otherwise willing to travel to the darker side of the human psyche with Bach, Schumann or Mahler? Schoenberg’s string quartets nos.1–4 were all conceived during periods of transition in his work, and each instalment nudged his aesthetic language forwards, dragging his technical tools along in its wake. The single most famous moment in a Schoenberg quartet – the fourth movement of the Second, where a soprano voice declaims words of the German poet Stefan George: ‘I feel air from another planet / I faintly through the darkness see faces / Friendly even now, turning towards me’; and tonality symbolically crumbles – introduces an alien presence into the string quartet line-up, pushing the medium beyond itself.And each subsequent quartet teases listeners’ expectations, playing with elements of architectural scale and proportion.