The Quartettsatz in C minor, D. 703 was composed by Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...

 in December 1820. It is the first movement

Movement (music)

A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession...

, the Allegro assai, of a Twelfth String Quartet

String quartet

A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...

 which Schubert never completed. In addition to the opening movement, Schubert also composed the first forty bars

Bar (music)

In musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined by a given number of beats of a given duration. Typically, a piece consists of several bars of the same length, and in modern musical notation the number of beats in each bar is specified at the beginning of the score by the top number of a...

 of a second movement marked Andante.

The other compositions which Schubert began during that year were similarly abandoned, for the artist was experiencing a severe identity crisis

Identity crisis (psychology)

"Identity crisis is the failure to achieve ego identity during adolescence." The term was coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson. The stage of psychosocial development in which identity crisis may occur is called the Identity Cohesion versus Role Confusion stage...

 at the time. Nevertheless, the Quartettsatz was the forerunner of the late string quartets for which Schubert is best remembered. Four years after the Quartettsatz, Schubert returned to the genre to write the Rosamunde Quartet

String Quartet No. 13 (Schubert)

The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor , D. 804, Op. 29, was written by Franz Schubert between February and March 1824...

, which was followed by the Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden Quartet (Schubert)

The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as Death and the Maiden, by Franz Schubert, is one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire. Composed in 1824, after the composer suffered through a serious illness and realized that he was dying, it is Schubert's testament to death...

, and the Fifteenth

String Quartet No. 15 (Schubert)

The String Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887, was written by Franz Schubert in June 1826. It was posthumously published in 1851, as opus 161.-Movements:The piece is in four movements, and is about 45 minutes long:...

. The Quartettsatz received its posthumous premiere on March 1, 1867 in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

. A typical performance lasts around 10 minutes.

External links

• Full score and MIDI file at Mutopia