Schubert / Dorfman, Death and the Maiden

More than a century and a half after the death of Franz Schubert, the Chilean writer and playwright Ariel Dorfman wrote in 1991 a play about the torture and abuses of the Chilean dictatorship, which he titled Death and the Maiden. The play tells the story of Paulina, a woman tortured by a doctor who happens to be in her own house as a guest. She recognizes him, kidnaps him and manages to put him in the situation of the tortured. The background music is the second movement of the Schubert Quartet of the same name, a piece that the doctor made his victims listen to during torture sessions. With the doctor now as a victim, Dorfman's work relives the trauma but not to cure it but to recall it because redemption is not possible.

The work received immediate international recognition. On March 17, 1992, it had its US premiere at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York, directed by Mike Nichols, and with Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman in the leading roles.

In 1994, the play was adapted for the screen with the direction of Roman Polanski and the actors Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley and Stuart Wilson. A capital scene of this film is the one that heads this article.

Schubert, Goethe and the lieder
In 1816, by the first time, and through a friend, little Franz Schubert sent the poet Goethe the lieder inspired by his poems. As we know, Goethe turned a deaf ear and did not acknowledge receipt of the nineteen-year-old musician's work. Sometime later, Franz will make another attempt to obtain the recognition of the poet, this time on his own initiative although with similar results: the German poet didn't take the hint.

Death and the maiden - the lied
So, little Franz chose another poet to compose in 1817 perhaps his most celebrated lied, precisely the one entitled Death and the Maiden. The chosen poet was Matthias Claudius, an author of simple and popular verses, and the poem, one whose central theme addresses the musings of a dying young woman before the imminence of her own end.

Death and the Maiden - the Quartet
Such was the success of the composition that Schubert decided to use the theme with slight modifications to build the 2nd movement of the string quartet No. 14 in D minor, composed in 1824-26, and which took its name from the original lied. Like most of Schubert's work, Death and the Maiden quartet will be released posthumously, in 1832, four years after the author's death at age 31.

In the rendition by the Spanish group Cuarteto Stradivari, we listen to the second of the four movements of the quartet – the one that delighted the torturer –, performed in Tokyo in December 2012.