The premiere of the quartet, four days before Christmas 1908, provoked one of those much-loved Viennese scandals with the press reporting that "elegant women uttered cries of pain, raising hands to their delicate ears and elderly gentlemen wept tears of anguish at the dissonances". Few recognised that this was a pivotal moment in musical evolution, a glimpse of the future. And Schoenberg himself was still struggling to repair the breach in his marriage. Vienna, being the world capital of gossip, lost no time in connecting the two ruptures, and that link has hardened into popular myth.
Now — and you read it here first — a historian has blown the whole story to bits. Raymond Coffer, in a doctoral thesis at the University of London and a website he has just built, demonstrates that the atonal leap cannot have been triggered by adultery. Letters between the married couple show that the quartet was completed three weeks before Schoenberg caught Mathilde in the act of betrayal and she ran off with her lover.
Tension had been brewing for a while. Schoenberg, unable to meet the bills and with two children to feed, had taken a lodger in 1906. Richard Gerstl, just 22, was a painter who lacked much faith in himself and his work. Embraced by the Schoenberg circle, he blossomed, making portraits of both Arnold and Mathilde, the latter on one occasion apparently in the nude. Gerstl became so much part of the Schoenberg family that they took him along to share their lakeside summer holiday in Gmunden in June 1908.
Schoenberg went to Vienna on business and in his absence, Gerstl and Mathilde may have grown closer. Suspecting nothing, Schoenberg returned to the lake and finished the finale of the quartet between July 25 and 27, dating the manuscript 27/7. That same week Gerstl was expelled by the Vienna Academy of Arts and began acting strangely.
On August 26, a full month later, Schoenberg stumbled across his wife and her lover in a clinch, in Gerstl's farmhouse by some accounts. Outrage ensued. Mathilde, unable to calm Arnold down, left the children and ran off with Gerstl. They spent a night in a Gmunden hotel before finding a boarding house on the outskirts of Vienna.
