The challenge of transcribing Schubert’s chamber music is considerable, for his writing for strings is highly idiomatic and at times certainly not pianistic in design. Yet there are qualities to this music that, when well transcribed, suit the piano almost more than their original clothing, creating what is not a new work, but perhaps one that deserves attention in its own right. In the hands of master transcriber Salamon Jadassohn (whose original piano works have been the subject of several of my CD releases), the “Death and the Maiden” quartet becomes a kind of forgotten piano sonata, with the writing recalling the Schubert of the sonatas D784 and D840 in particular.

The listener will note that, as is my preferred practice in Schubert, all repeats in the work are observed, including those in the da capo section of the Scherzo. The tradition of omitting exposition and other repeats is one that has serious structural implications, and if it has a place, it is in later nineteenth-century performance practice rather than Schubert’s own time and style. Schumann spoke of Schubert’s “heavenly lengths” and in doing so he was pointing out a key feature of this music; its expansiveness and concentration on harmonic change and thematic variation ahead of purely motivic development. This is somewhat at odds with the modern, businesslike, school of Schubert playing that has tended to favour brisk tempi and the minimum of observed repeats. My view is that Schubert is not a composer for the soundbite age; he demands patience and concentration from both interpreter and audience such that, in his finest work, time itself seems suspended.

The second movement is explicitly programmatic, taking as its theme Schubert’s earlier setting of Matthias Claudius’s poem that gives the work its title. The key text is as follows: