Goldmund Quartett

The string quartet subscription at Konserthuset Stockholm has a youthful character this season, with quartets that have received great acclaim in recent years. The German Goldmund Quartet has won several prestigious prizes and was appointed to Rising Stars for the 2019–20 season. Thus they were supposed to have performed as part of the string quartet subscription in March 2020, but the concert was cancelled due to the pandemic.

Without a doubt, one of the twentieth century’s most significant composers is Anton Webern. He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg and brought his fragile, almost aphoristic twelve-tone music to its outer limits. However, his early music is romantic, with traits of Johannes Brahms. We hear this in particular in his Slow Movement from 1903, a love song composed on a trip to Austria with his future wife, Wilhelmine.

Hans Grien’s painting of a young, nearly nude girl being kissed by death caused a commotion during the Renaissance. But the image has lived on, and has been portrayed in various ways in art and literature. In Matthias Claudius’ 1775 poem on the theme, Death uses beautiful words as a lure, and Schubert used the text in one of his best-known songs, Death and the Maiden, from 1817. He was unable to let the theme go and returned to it in his final string quartet, which is filled with intensity and drama, in which energetic imitations provide contrast against dreamy, sensual notes.