Death and the Maiden

PRESENTED BY:

Classical elegance and Romantic passion in music for string quartet.

The heart of this program is a song that won’t be sung. When Schubert wrote his ‘Death and the Maiden’ it was ‘just’ a deliciously morbid song by a 20-year-old Romantic. By the time he transformed it for the slow movement of his D minor string quartet he was facing the spectre of syphilis – death was all too real. The quartet is gloomy and impassioned, with every movement in a minor key, and listening to it is a cathartic experience – the musical equivalent of Titanic and a box of tissues.

Maddalena Lombardini was a product of the Venetian orphanage-music schools where musicians such as Vivaldi had composed and taught. Her teachers included the violinist Tartini, and after marrying another violinist she toured Europe before arriving in London, where she met Johann Christian Bach and became popular as the ‘celebrated Mrs Lombardini Sirmen’. Her surviving music includes a set of six string quartets from 1769, and we’ve chosen one of these elegant and graceful works as a foil for the intensity and pathos of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet.

This musical pairing, says Jessica Cottis, embraces the struggle between hope and despair as we contemplate our own mortality.

PROGRAM

Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen 
String Quartet in B flat major, Op.3 No.4

Franz Schubert
String Quartet in D minor, D.810 (Death and the Maiden)

ARTISTS

CSO String Quartet

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