Schubert/Mahler - String Quartet "Death and the Maiden" (1824) arr. for String Orchestra

Franz Peter Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including 600 secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of piano and chamber music. The Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (Trout Quintet), the Symphony No. 8, D. 759 (Unfinished Symphony), the three last piano sonatas, D. 958-960, and his song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are some of his most important works.

Please support my channel:
https://ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans

String Quartet No.14 in D minor, "Der Tod und das Mädchen", D. 810 (March 1824)
arranged for String Orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1896)

1. Allegro (0:00)
2. Andante con moto (15:43)
3. Scherzo. Allegro molto — Trio (26:37)
4. Presto — Prestissimo (30:35)

Petr Bernášek, violin
Praga Camerata conducted by Pavel Hůla

Mahler began arranging Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”) around 1894–1896, with the earliest documented work on the score dating to 1894. He marked up a copy of the quartet with detailed notes on instrumentation, dynamics, and articulation, envisioning a string orchestra version.

By 1896, Mahler had conducted only the second movement in a concert in Hamburg kennethwoods.net. The arrangement remained incomplete, and Mahler never performed the full work. After his death, his daughter Anna discovered the unfinished score, and scholars Donald Mitchell and David Matthews published it in 1984 based on Mahler’s annotations.

The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D 810, known as Death and the Maiden, is a piece by Franz Schubert that has been called "one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire". It was composed in 1824, after the composer suffered from a serious illness and realized that he was dying. It is named for the theme of the second movement, which Schubert took from a song he wrote in 1817 of the same title. But, writes Walter Willson Cobbett, all four movements of the quartet are welded "into a unity under the pressure of a dominating idea – the dance of death."

The quartet was first played in 1826 in a private home, and was not published until 1831, three years after Schubert's death.

The quartet takes its name from the lied "Der Tod und das Mädchen", D 531, a setting of the poem of the same name by Matthias Claudius, that Schubert wrote in 1817. The theme of the song forms the basis of the second movement of the quartet. The theme is a death knell that accompanies the song about the terror and comfort of death.