Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

A program of moving and uplifting works.

‘Here will be my ending,’ proclaimed Franz Schubert from his deathbed at the premature age of 31, before requesting that Beethoven’s Op.131 Quartet be the final piece of music he would hear. Wagner also agreed upon the melancholic nature of this quartet, writing that it was ‘surely the saddest thing ever said in notes’ - although the final modulation to C-sharp is felt to reflect some divine and uplifting transfiguration. Sadly, Beethoven himself died before it was ever played publicly.

Schubert’s Quartettsatz, an anxious, searching fragment of what was intended to be a large scale work and was the start of Schubert’s final period of chamber writing, almost reflects Schubert’s own all-too-brief life and untimely death, with the promise of so much more to come.

Late Australian composer Richard Meale’s second string quartet was written in memoriam of a close friend who died of cancer, with the elegiac final movement proving ultimately uplifting.

Presented by Melbourne Recital Centre and Hamer Quartet and Friends.

Program

Franz Schubert
Quartettsatz

Richard Meale
‘Cantilena Pacifica’ from String quartet No.2

Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartet No.14 in C sharp minor, Op.131

Featured non-Australian music: Schubert, Beethoven

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (03) 9699 3333

Featured Australian Works

Featured artists

• Performer Hamer Quartet