DEATH AND GIRL

Franz Schubert and Feliks Mendelssohn — artists who share as much as they share. Both were exceptionally early recognized talents, both made excellent chamber music, and at the same time successfully reached out to other genres: they wrote symphonies, piano pieces, songs, religious and stage music. Both died prematurely: Schubert was only 31 years old and Mendelssohn was 38, but their biographies are quite different. Schubert grew up in a modest teacher's house on the outskirts of Vienna. Mendelssohn grew up in a wealthy, intelligent family in Berlin, in an environment that fostered his development from the beginning and gave him the chance to meet many intellectuals and artists, including Johann Wolfgang Goeth. Schubert struggled with illness and a sense of underestimation, Mendelssohn, in turn, was valued throughout Europe, acted in many fields as a pianist, conductor and organizer of musical life.

Schubert's quartet in D minor “Death and the Girl” is one of those chamber pieces that prove that the most important and poignant stories do not have to be written into a large orchestral composition. An intimate and at the same time expressive statement translated into four string instruments with a notable quote from a song composed a few years earlier, this is one of the greatest string quartets ever created. Mendelssohn's VI Quartet is also extremely intense and poignant — one of the composer's last works, written in the last year of his life, after the devastating news of the death of his beloved sister Fanny.