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.

Remember, you haven’t heard classical music until you’re heard it performed by candlelight in a cemetery, surrounded by 30,000 eavesdropping corpses. So enter the cemetery at sundown and proceed at your peril in a procession through the tombstones to the chapel where you can quell your quaking spirits with a Hendrick's gin cocktail.

Tickets £20 including a delightful gin cocktail. Please click here to purchase

The Mons Quartet
The Mons String Quartet was formed in 2023 at the Conservatoire in Mons in Belgium, from the serendipitous meeting of four young musicians who had booked the same rehearsal.room by mistake. This mix-up would be the start of something much greater as they decided to play together for the first time and found there was something magical in this combination.

Franz Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, "Death and the Maiden” with its emotional intensity and echoes of the eternal, resonates profoundly with the history of Mons, the site of one of the first and most brutal battles between British and German forces in World War One. Yet, just as in Schubert's quartet, where death encounters the purity of the maiden, in Mons, music has emerged as a vital force that transforms pain into beauty.