The Mathilde Album

With this album of works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern – key figures in Vienna’s musical life in the early 20th century – the Quatuor Arod honours the woman who became Arnold Schoenberg’s wife in 1901. Mathilde was Zemlinsky’s sister and the dedicatee of her husband’s String Quartet No 2, an innovative work in both its tonal language and its integration of a soprano – here Elsa Dreisig. It was completed in the summer of 1908, a tumultuous period in the Schoenbergs’ marriage.