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The Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 76, No. 4, derives its sobriquet—“Sunrise”—from the arching opening theme, one of Haydn’s most limpid and sensual melodic inventions. The music is more animated during the transitional passage that leads to the second theme, but again becomes subdued, almost dreamy, when that theme proves to be a sweet variant of the opening subject. These two principal moods are again opposed to close the exposition, and their juxtaposition continues to form the basis of the development section. A full recapitulation provides formal closure and expressive balance.

The Adagio is an expression of thoughtful introspection such as could only have been composed by one whose long and rich experience of life is matched by a transcendent mastery of technique. The movement follows no traditional form, but is rather a fantasia, perhaps even a musical sermon, that refers repeatedly back to the hymnal statement with which it began.

The jolly peasant dance of the Menuetto stands in striking contrast to the contemplative mood of the Adagio, but the curious, winding melody of the central trio, presented by the violins in barren octaves above a drone in the viola and cello, brings a deeper emotional tone to the movement.

The exuberant finale, thought to have been based on a folk song Haydn brought back with him from England, is in three-part form (B-flat major—B-flat minor—B-flat major) with a dashing coda whose youthful effervescence belies the fact that this was at least the 78th quartet Haydn had composed.

Bartók’s Third Quartet is among the great masterworks of 20th-century music—brilliant, challenging, cathartic, one of the most difficult yet rewarding pieces in the entire chamber literature. Though the music is Bartók’s furthest adventure into modernity, it is founded solidly on the confluence of two traditional but seemingly opposed musical streams—the folk music of Eastern Europe, a subject on which Bartók was a scholar of the highest accomplishment, and the elaborate contrapuntal constructions of Sebastian Bach and other Baroque composers. By 1927, the time of the Third Quartet, Bartók had so thoroughly absorbed the quirky intervals, tightly circling motivic phrases, snapping rhythms and ornate decorations of indigenous Hungarian music into his original work that his themes constitute a virtual apotheosis of native folksong. “The melodic world of my string quartets does not essentially differ from that of folksong,” he said, “only the framework is stricter.” For the working-out of his folk-derived thematic materials (Bartók never quoted existing melodies unless specifically noting that they were arrangements), he turned to the highly organized models of canon and fugue postulated by Bach and his 18th-century contemporaries. The Third Quartet therefore represents a marvelous pan-European synthesis—the structural integrity and emotional range of Bach wedded to the melodic and rhythmic exoticisms of Slavic folksong.

The Third Quartet, one of Bartók’s most tightly constructed works, is disposed as a large single span divided into four sections. Part I opens with a mysterious harmonic curtain that serves as an introduction to the work’s germinal theme—a tiny fragment comprising a rising fourth and a falling minor third initiated by the violin in measure six, at the point where the lower strings remove their mutes. The first section is largely based on the extensive permutations of this pregnant thematic kernel through imitation, inversion, augmentation, diminution, and other processes that Bartók learned from Bach. Part II, which follows without pause, is a free, continuously unfolding variation of an arch-shaped folk-dance melody presented in pizzicato multiple stops by the cello. A passage of dizzying slides and almost brutal dissonance bridges to Part III, which is a thoroughly reworked version of Part I (Bartók marked this section “Ricapitulazione della prima parte,” but also noted, “I do not like to repeat a musical idea without change”), a distillation of the essence of the Quartet’s earlier material. The concluding Coda starts as a vague, bow-tip buzzing, but soon develops into a furious altered restatement of the folk dance of Part II. The Quartet culminates in a powerful, viscerally compelling cadence.

Despite his declarations of inactivity, Schubert completed a number of songs on texts by Shakespeare at Währing in 1826, and set to paper the String Quartet in G major, which proved to be his last work in the form. He had last broached the genre two years earlier with the Quartets in A minor (D. 804) and D Minor (D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”), and the new G major Quartet may have been spurred by the successful performance of the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet at the Viennese residence of the lawyer Josef Barth on February 1, 1826, as well as by his attendance at the premiere of Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet (with the Grosse Fuge as finale) on March 21st. Though Schubert dated the finished score of the G major Quartet “June 10–20, 1826,” he had almost certainly begun sketching this enormous creation during the preceding weeks. The composer (as violist) played through the piece informally with some friends on March 7, 1827, and included the first movement on the only public concert entirely of his works held during his lifetime, given in the hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on March 26, 1828. That event, prompted and sponsored by his circle of devoted friends, was a significant artistic and financial success, and he used the proceeds to celebrate the occasion at a local tavern, pay off some old debts, acquire a new piano, and buy tickets for Nicolò Paganini’s sensational debut in Vienna three days later. Schubert offered the Quartet for publication to Schott in February 1828, along with the Quartet in D minor, three operas, the Mass in A-flat, the E-flat Piano Trio and several dozen songs, but he was refused. The work was not played publicly again until 1850, and the score was issued (as Schubert’s Op. 161) only in the following year.

Robert Haven Schauffler wrote of the G major Quartet, “The chief characteristics of the music are a forward-looking modernity surpassing even that of the D minor Quartet, the rhapsodic quality of certain themes, much of Schubert’s characteristic wavering between major and minor, the antiphonal play of upper against lower strings, a more marked orchestral quality, a tendency toward horizontal rather than vertical counterpoint, and a diffuseness that stretched the work to an inordinate length.” The first movement is launched by a swelling chord that slips from G major to G minor as it leads to a tiny leaping motive in craggy dotted rhythms. The main theme, based on the leaping motive, is presented in full in a haunting passage of shivering mystery. Tightly knit extrapolations of the first theme serve as transition to the subsidiary subject, a syncopated construction in chordal texture that incorporates the dotted rhythm of the opening. The extensive development section, largely concerned with permutations of the long swelling note and the craggy figure of the beginning, is marked by unsettled harmonic motion and considerable rhythmic agitation. The music quiets, becomes fragmented, and pauses on an expectant harmony to lead to the recapitulation, in which the earlier thematic materials are extensively reworked to provide further formal and expressive expansion while satisfying the requirements of the movement’s sonata form.

The Andante, one of Schubert’s most daring and original formal experiments, contrasts music of irreconcilable differences. The movement opens with a long, lyrical song of deeply nostalgic feeling for the cello. Without warning, the music suddenly turns ferocious and violent, explosive with snapping rhythms, quaking tremolos, fiery scales, and abrupt dynamic shifts. Calm is eventually restored, and the cello and then the violin tentatively continue the lyrical theme, but the melody is cut short once again by the vehement music. Finally, emotion spent, the movement tries to resume the mood of the opening, but the earlier serenity has been replaced by a wary enervation occasioned by the menacing corridors through which the music has passed.

The anxious character of the Quartet continues in the quicksilver Scherzo, whose elfin transfigurations of its basic motive—six quick notes followed by three longer ones—bring to mind Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, composed in Berlin by that 17-year-old wonder just one month after this Quartet. The central trio, in the style of the Austrian Ländler, provides the only untroubled passage in the entire Quartet. “It sounds like a glimpse of paradise after the storm and stress of the first two movements,” commented John Reed in his study of Schubert’s final years.

The finale is cast in the form of a vast rondo, though the episodes do not differ markedly in character from the traversals of the principal subject. The movement’s theme is a tarantella melody that summarizes the flexing between the major and minor forms of the tonic triad which has energized so much of the work. This music of brilliance and energy and soaring spirits requires enormous feats of virtuosity, endurance, and musicianship from the ensemble to close this Quartet, which, John Reed wrote, “is in the technical sense perhaps Schubert’s most considerable—and most carefully considered—chamber work.”