For his first few large-scale musical compositions Arnold Schoenberg felt it necessary to rely on either an actual text (as in the Gurrelieder) or, alternately, a strongly implied literary programme (as in both Pelleas and Melisande and Verklärte Nacht) to maintain structural unity and dramatic flow over such extended harmonic and formal lines. By 1904, however, he felt ready to test his rapidly-developing skills in the more demanding realm of "absolute" chamber music; the String Quartet No.1 in D minor, Op.7 represents this pioneer effort in the genre of lengthy, pure music. The degree to which interest and involvement are maintained over the course of the Quartet's forty-five minutes is a testament to how well Schoenberg succeeded in this new arena and, while the work perhaps lacks the consummate craftsmanship of some of the later instrumental compositions, we can rightly consider it to be his first unqualified large-scale success.

While the Quartet ranges far and wide across the chromatic spectrum, an underlying D minor tonal scheme works as a strong unifying force throughout this massive four-in-one sonata-allegro design. Into this one large sonata movement (deeply influenced by the single-movement experiments of Franz Liszt some fifty years earlier) Schoenberg inserts a scherzo and an adagio-during the development portion of the overarching design-that draw on the same basic thematic substance as the more primary sections. Schoenberg's naturally contrapuntal mindset is everywhere apparent, and hardly a single non-motivic gesture or phrase is to be found; surface harmonies result almost exclusively from this contrapuntal melodic web, with the result that, on the small scale at least, tonality is occasionally obscured to the point that the music begins to resemble the wholly atonal efforts of a few years later. More often than not, however, these chromatic gestures take the shape of traditional tertian chord-structures, and so, while the music may be densely chromatic, it is not always particularly dissonant.

The Quartet opens with an ambitious theme whose dotted-note gestures seem to strive forward to some far-distance triumph. After a substantial working-out of this idea and its accompanying subsidiary motives, a somewhat more relaxed (etwas weniger bewegt) second idea arrives, piano, in a duet between the first and second violins-here Schoenberg uses two separate but basically equal and intimately related melodic strands, set in imitative double counterpoint.

Schoenberg's tireless development puts a real strain on both listeners and players (who have, after all, to make the myriad motivic cells discernable throughout the sweeping dramatic narrative) until, on the heels of broad, fortissimo triplets, the scherzo portion of the work (three-four meter) arrives, marked heftig (fierce, or perhaps violent). This is certainly no "joke" in the old sense!

The E major viola melody of the adagio sub-movement—actually marked langsamer als vorher, slower than before—is, after the stormy scherzo and the subsequent wild continuation of the development (the course of which has now been irrevocably changed by the intrusion of the scherzo), tenderness itself. The adagio is a closed movement unto itself, really, encapsulated into the larger formal body; it comes to rest, still in E major, as gentle arabesques reminiscent of those from Verklärte Nacht make a diminuendo to ppp. Chilling ponticello (on the bridge) tremolos make a transition back to the main body of the movement and, with it, the original theme. As if transformed by the adagio's influence, the remainder of the Quartet plays itself out in a far more approachable, and essentially more understandably tonal, style. The broad coda is of a warmth that betrays Schoenberg's youthful, soon to be disavowed, taste for the luxurious music of Richard Strauss.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide