A full century passed between the deaths of Franz Schubert (1828) and Leoš Janácek (1928): it was during this time that Romanticism reached its peak and then declined, coming to an end at the rise of the Second Viennese School.
The two works recorded here have many striking similarities, despite having been composed more than a century apart: both works are programmatic in character and have a direct link with literary works in which death is the specific subject.
The inspiration that both composers drew from these texts makes the imaginative and narrative power of the music highly tangible. Both works provide a direct expression of the extreme emotions that death summons up: grief, pain, despair and madness.
Here is music from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet
