SCHOENBERG: String Quartet in D minor, Op.7

After years of trying to like Schoenberg's Op.7 string quartet I still perceive it as a mildly irritating exercise in compositional excess.  Its forty five minutes densely packed with feverish thematic development, frenetic piling up of counterpoint, and restless harmonic motion simply refuse to sum up to an aesthetically rewarding experience.  (Despite a committed and technically superb performance by the Borromeo Quartet from a 2011 concert at the Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, Boston.)
 
I even thought that perhaps "compositional excess" is an uncharitable way to describe what might be a case of compositional despair felt by a composer who wants to keep things fresh and interesting with compositional tools that have been badly worn-out by two centuries of heavy use.  What if Schoenberg's constantly varied asymmetric themes, his restlessly crisscrossing voice leading (with its constant spray of non-harmonic notes), his fluctuating rhythms, his refusal to punctuate his "musical prose" with musically meaningful pauses - what if all this is meant to divert my attention from the fact that the music's inner core consists of essentially triadic harmonies moving in familiar ways along the tonic-dominant axes of D minor and related keys?

If my guess is correct, then perhaps sympathy rather than irritation is an appropriate emotional response to Schoenberg's struggle with tonality -- the kind of sympathy one may feel for the desperate efforts of a long married couple to camouflage the boringly predicable and worn-out anatomical reality of their sex life with romantic getaways, Victoria's Secret underwear, and assorted contraptions delivered in plain wrapped parcels from Babes in Toyland...