In the fall of 1814, the 17-year-old Schubert began working as a teaching assistant under his father, managing the youngest students at an elite Viennese school. He also kept up twice-weekly composition lessons with the local Kapellmeister, Antonio Salieri. Schubert had enjoyed a childhood rich in music—singing in the court choir, playing string quartets with his family, composing for and playing in the school orchestra—but at that point the precocious teenager made a shocking leap into musical maturity. In the next two years, he composed some 300 songs for one or more voices, plus four symphonies, three masses, five musical dramas, three string quartets, three violin sonatas and dozens of miscellaneous works.

The Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, written in the spring of 1816, is a prime example of Schubert’s early orchestral craft. Although Beethoven’s first eight symphonies had already played in Schubert’s home city of Vienna, the young composer used the earlier models of Mozart and Haydn as his points of departure. Schubert’s opening sonority, with the single pitch C spread across the orchestra’s range, mimics Haydn’s Symphony No. 97 in C Major, which starts the slow introduction with the keynote in octaves. The pulsing continuation and hanging suspensions recall the C-minor introduction of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19, K. 465 (“Dissonance”). When the Allegro vivace tempo enters, the long, singing phrases of melody and churning accompaniment are a world apart from the terse “Fate” motive of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in the same key of C minor; instead, the way the theme asks and answers its own questions recalls the rising and falling melodic dialogue of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. Schubert’s cantabile sensitivity, so highly developed in his vocal music, bears fruit in the Andante movement, with the opening melody marked dolce (“sweet”). Even the contrasting minor-key section, which begins abruptly with turbulent ascending figures, soon settles into a more lyrical state. The Menuetto, with its off-beat accents, deceptive phrasing and slippery chromatics, leans heavily on Haydn, the master of musical wit, but the younger composer’s perspective emerges in the Trio section, which tiptoes with urbane civility. The Allegro finale returns to extended phrases and scurrying accompaniment, another natural extension of Schubert’s incomparable songs.

 

Anton Webern and Alban Berg were Arnold Schoenberg’s most accomplished pupils. Schoenberg exerted enormous influence over his musical coterie — known collectively as “The Second Viennese School” — but his two star students also developed independent approaches. While Webern took Schoenberg’s 12-tone system to extremes of abstraction and pointillism, Berg maintained vestiges of Romanticism and tonality in his lush compositions. Berg’s relationship to Schoenberg was conflicted, both musically and personally, yet the tension seemed to fuel some of Berg’s most inspired work. One example is the Lyric Suite, a set of six movements for string quartet, in which Schoenberg’s 12-tone method creates a framework for exquisitely beautiful and personally significant music.

The long-buried secret behind the Lyric Suite was Berg’s affair with Hannah Fuchs-Robettin, the sister of Franz Werfel and the wife of a prominent businessman and arts patron. The story remained concealed until the composer and scholar George Perle discovered an annotated copy of the score in 1977. This musicological treasure, once a gift from Berg to his mistress, pointed out in detail the arcane references to their love, including each of their initials (A.B. and H.F., which translate to the pitches A, B-flat and B-natural, F) and even a reference to Fuchs-Robettin’s daughter, known as Dodo (represented by repeated C’s).

Berg arranged the second, third and fourth movements for string orchestra in 1928, and the expanded texture magnifies the fascinating subtleties of the composition. The Andante amoroso movement fulfills the loving character promised by the tempo indication with lush and hazy harmonies and choice solos of lyrical beauty. There are also peppy pizzicatos and perhaps some pent-up frustration in the more turbulent final minutes; in the secret program, this movement represents the lovers’ first meeting. The Allegro misterioso movement buzzes with glassy, muted swirls and bubbling plucks and taps, coalescing into an impassioned core—supposedly corresponding to their love professed for the first time—before dissolving back into the primordial soup of sound. The Adagio appassionato movement, in the annotated score, bears the words “You are my own,” and the music can be heard as a charged and visceral representation of the affair’s consummation. The final sonorities have an air of foreboding, a tension that Berg’s string-orchestra version leave unsettled.

 

On December 22, 1808, Beethoven presented a remarkable concert in Vienna. The four-hour extravaganza featured public debuts of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy (composed as a showstopper for the occasion), as well as miscellaneous excerpts from the Mass in C, a rendition of the concert aria Ah! Perfido and some piano improvisations. Reports from the concert bemoaned the glut of music, the hall’s frigid temperature, and a sloppy orchestra (the Choral Fantasy ground to a complete halt, at which point Beethoven returned to the beginning and prolonged the concert even further). Sadly, this misbegotten spectacle turned out to be one of Beethoven’s last public appearances as a piano soloist, with encroaching deafness finally silencing one of the great performers of the era.

The Fourth Piano Concerto left spectators particularly baffled. In fact, the work remained largely untouched until Felix Mendelssohn revived it in 1836. The piano enters alone in the home key of G, spinning out a simple harmonic progression marked piano dolce (quiet and sweet). Then, after the piano leaves a chord hanging that by all expectations would resolve back to G, the soloist withdraws and the strings enter in the foreign and exotic key of B. Unexpected and playful harmonic transitions recur throughout the movement, but they seem more bemusing than shocking, keeping with the questioning and introspective mood established at the outset.

In the Andante con moto movement, a single line, scored across several octaves in the strings, engages the piano in a halting tête-à-tête in E minor. The final cadence flows directly to the Rondo finale, which again starts with just a whisper. The strings take the lingering memory of the pitch E as the start of the galloping tune, stating the theme first and then passing it to the piano. The melody begins with a repeated tone and ascending arpeggio that spell out the home key, except that it is the wrong one: C major instead of G. The movement eventually points toward the expected and ultimately triumphant harmonic resolution, reaching the first true passage in G major almost halfway through. Amazingly, the main theme of the finale never begins in the concerto’s home key, even when it appears moments from the end in the final presto section. The harmonic sleight-of-hand that began the work continues throughout, defining this most elusive of Beethoven’s piano concertos.