Schubert’s Quintet in C Major: A Masterpiece Examined

In the final weeks of Franz Schubert’s tragically short life, he wrote one of the great masterworks in all of chamber music — his Quintet in C Major.

In this new five-part course, Jonathan Coopersmith, Chair of Musical Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, explores the work in depth, as well as the creative burst that spawned it. Benjamin Britten called Schubert’s last year and a half “the richest and most productive 18 months in our music history,” producing not only the Quintet, but Winterreise, the C-Major Symphony, the B-Flat and E-Flat Piano Trios, the Mass in E-Flat, and the final three piano sonatas. We look at the genius of the Quintet, what made Schubert a musical groundbreaker, and his unique place in bridging the Classical and Romantic eras.

Two days after the course’s final class, a Curtis on Tour ensemble performs the Quintet on the stage of Kaufmann Concert Hall, in a program also including the New York premiere of Richard Danielpour’s A Shattered Vessel. We explore this work composed 190 years later for the same instrumentation of two violins, viola and two cellos, analyzing it as a standalone composition, and informed by the insights of a living composer.

Corresponding Concert: Musicians from the Curtis Institute of Music play Schubert’s Quintet and more