Salzburg Festival – Schoenberg, Beethoven – Stiftung Mozarteum – Grosser Saal; 19/8/24

Schoenberg, String Quartet No 1 in D minor op. 7; Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor op. 131. Belcea Quartet

 It’s been raining for most of the day and I still have two whole days after this one for touristy stuff before evening performances. So I wandered around and went only to the Cathedral – massive and ornate white and gold Rococo as you might expect – and Mozart’s birthplace, which is obviously a tourist trap of a major kind but doing its best to be serious for those interested. I was particularly struck by the large oil portrait of Constanze, dating to 1802, showing a very determined lady who managed Mozart’s posthumous reputation and documents very well – see photo below. And I had forgotten that her husband, von Nissen, eventually wrote the first biography of Mozart with all sorts of help from his wife. A pity that it doesn’t appear to be available in English currently.

And so on to Schoenberg and Beethoven – a very serious programme……….And I hadn’t realised that Schoenberg had actually written 4 quartets – I know the one with the voice, but this is the first time I have ever heard Op 7.

I should mention first something about Salzburg dress codes, or lack of them, incidentally. I was told beforehand that the Festival was much more formal than Bayreuth. In fact at the Weinberg opera there were a few DJ’s but a lot of the men were wearing dark suits. I was wearing suit trousers and an open necked white shirt and so were a few other other men, so there was some variety, thank goodness, and I didn’t feel conspicuous. But at this concert – inevitable perhaps given its content – anything was OK: there was a guy in tennis shirt and shorts, lots of short sleeve shirts, Hawaii shirts, a guy with a baseball hat and some in jeans. Good!!……………..Unfortunately the other inevitability of this concert was the curse of Schoenberg on the box office – the downstairs part of the Grosse Saal was full but the upstairs ‘Rang’ was empty. Nevertheless those who were there were very vocal in their appreciation.

The Schoenberg piece is one of his pre-atonal works, and in fact it has a very identifiable main theme at the beginning that is subject to umpteen transitions, variations and changes in the course of 40 minutes or so (I originally wrote slow – Freudian slip). I had read that it had 4 movements but got lost fairly on. It is an extraordinary piece – there are elements that sound like Mahler, others sounding like Brahms, there’s certainly some Viennese pop dance music, but all mixed up in a whirl of intersecting instruments that make it sound quite as dense as the Pelleas I heard 4 weeks ago at the Proms. I just couldn’t get the emotional narrative here, and yet I felt there probably was one – with a peaceful – or numb – ending.

The first movement of the Beethoven is almost as dense as the Schoenberg – it sounded startlingly modern in this reading – but what the Beethoven has is a clear – well, pick-upable – narrative trajectory: from sadness to humdrum daily routine, to (after a prelude) a core 4^th movement that copes with suffering, moves us to a joyful 5^th movement, and after a turn-around 6^th movement prelude, ends in toughness, some grief but also resilience and hope. I thought the Belcea Quartet played it very well indeed – more characterful than Ensemble 360 in Sheffield – but I did think, from a quibbly point of view, that they took the 5^th movement too fast, so that notes got elided.

So enthusiastic was the audience response that there was an encore – the wonderful 3^rd movement – ‘Solo’ – of Britten’s 3^rd Quartet, with what sounds like the flutterings of a soul released from earthly life

Brilliant concert………….