DEATH AND THE MAIDEN A torchlit walk and candlelit concert of Schubert’s string quartet No 14 in D minor Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th October 2019 at 8:00 pm The string quartet has traditionally been the medium via which the composer exposed their innermost feelings. The poverty-stricken and already terminally ill Franz Schubert wrote “Death and the Maiden” in 1824 at the same time as churning out jolly gemütlich music for Viennese society balls. The title of the piece comes from its second movement which was based on a song “Der Tod und das Mädchen” that Schubert had written seven years earlier. The bleak, foreboding theme of mortality permeates all four movements of the quartet. The last movement is a tarantella - a traditional dance to ward off madness and death. The quartet was not publicly performed in Schubert’s lifetime. He died four years after completing it, at the age of 31. Enter the cemetery at sundown, pause for a morale boosting Hendrick's gin and tonic and proceed at your peril on a procession to the chapel in the heart of the cemetery. The Vanitas Quartet |
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