– Composer: Arnold Schönberg Schoenberg after 1934 (13 September 1874 — 13 July 1951)
– Performers: Kohon Quartet
– Year of recording: 1967
String Quartet No. 1 in D minor Op. 7, written between 1904-1905.
This quartet consists of one movement, and was Schönbergs first assured masterpiece as it was the real beginning of his reputation as a composer. The quartet is remarkable for its density and intensity of orchestration with only four instruments. Unlike his later works, this work is tonal, bearing the key of D minor, though it stretches this to its limit with the thoroughly extended tonality of late Romantic music, such as moments of quartal harmony. It also carries a small collection of themes which appear again and again in many different guises. Besides his extension of tonality and tight motivic structure, Schönberg makes use of another innovation, which he called “musical prose.” Instead of balanced phrase structures typical of string quartet writing up to that period, he favored asymmetrical phrases that build themselves into larger cohesive groups called “sentences.”
According to Schönberg, when he showed the score to Gustav Mahler, the composer exclaimed: “I have conducted the most difficult scores of Wagner; I have written complicated music myself in scores of up to thirty staves and more; yet here is a score of not more than four staves, and I am unable to read them.”
The first performance was given in Vienna on 5 February 1907 by the Rosé Quartet after extensive rehearsal.