Schoenberg’s second quartet of 1908 marks one of the two major turning points in both the musical language of Schoenberg himself and that of the whole Second Viennese School. The first quartet, Op 7, of 1904/5—a beautiful and unjustly neglected work—had already further extended the language of Verklärte Nacht. The third and fourth quartets would both be written using the twelve-note technique which Schoenberg gradually developed in the years leading up to the appearance of the Piano Suite, Op 25, in 1923. Quartet No 2 marks—and audibly demonstrates—the point at which Schonberg’s late Romantic language gave way to the free atonal ‘expressionist’ language that would characterise his music during the intervening years, the language of, amongst other works, Erwartung, the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op 16, and Pierrot Lunaire.

The progression from highly chromatic tonality to free atonality is unfolded within the work itself. Formally, Quartet No 2 is more traditional than No 1 which, like the first chamber symphony of 1906, had welded the usual four-movement symphonic structure into a single 45-minute work by spreading the different sections of the traditional sonata form first movement over the whole piece. Here in No 2 the first movement is a clear sonata form movement, the second movement a scherzo and the third movement, a setting of a poem by Stefan George, a set of variations on a seven-bar theme. The fourth movement—also a setting of a text by George but one that begins with the significant words ‘Ich fühle Luft vom anderem planeten’ ( ‘I feel the air from other planets’)—is Schoenberg’s first fully atonal movement. The work ends on a major triad of F sharp, the key of the first movement but, as Schoenberg himself says in his essay ‘My Evolution’ in Style and Idea, 'the overwhelming multitude of dissonance' could not be 'counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent keys'. The move to atonality was, therefore, both a compositional and a necessity since it was no longer adequate 'to force a movement into the procrustean bed of tonality without supporting it with harmonic progressions that pertain to it'.

One curious feature within the second quartet’s progression from extended chromaticism to atonality is the appearance in the centre of the second movement scherzo of the totally diatonic melody of the popular Viennese street song ‘Ach, du liber Augustin’. Various explanations have been given for the inclusion of this rather trite tune in the piece—from the purely musical (George Perle argues that its inclusion represents ‘a sardonic contrast to the tonal ambiguity of the rest of the work’) to the autobiographical in which the text (‘alles ist hin’—‘everything is lost’) as a reference to the impending collapse of Schoenberg’s marriage to Mathilde following her affair with the painter Richard Gerstl (although, in fact, the matter only came to a head some months after Schoenberg had decided to include the melody). In the essay ‘How one becomes lonely’ (Style and Idea) Schoenberg himself describes it as simply being included in 'a tragicomic' manner.

from notes by Douglas Jarman © 2022