Arnold Schoenberg - String Quartet No. 2, I

String Quartet No. 2, for soprano & string quartet in F sharp minor, Op. 10 (1907-1908) I. Mässig II. Sehr rash III. Litanei (Langsam) IV. Entrückung (Sehr langsam) New Vienna String Quartet Evelyn Lear, soprano The String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, of Arnold Schoenberg is one of the key works of musical modernism. Composed between March 1907 and August 1908, its last movement marks the decisive point at which Western art music moved from a tonally based harmonic structure to what has been called an atonal harmonic structure. Prior to the Quartet No. 2, Schoenberg wrote in the highly chromatic post-Wagnerian harmonic language of the fin de siècle, a language that took tonal music to the limits of its coherence by delaying the resolution of dissonances for longer and longer periods. After the Quartet No. 2, Schoenberg, then his pupils and then much of Western art music abandoned tonality for harmonic structures that not only allowed an extremely high level of chromatic dissonance, but which no longer required the resolution of those dissonances. The Quartet No. 2 itself begins tonally, and its first two movements are, in fact, in F sharp minor. The opening movement is in sonata form with the usual harmonic relation between keys. The second movement is a scherzo with trios, the second of which ends with a quotation from the plague song, Ach, Du Liebe Augustine. The third movement is in E flat minor, one of the most difficult keys for a string player to perform in, and sets...