Mendelssohn Four Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 81
The chamber works of Felix Mendelssohn provide a unique perspective on the development of his musical language. Mendelssohn chose four chamber works (three piano quartets and a violin sonata, composed 1822-25) as his first published works. Throughout his musical career he would continue to explore the chamber music genres that had been established and developed by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, including those of the string quartet and string quintet. Mendelssohn’s last complete major work was the String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80, written two months before his death and widely seen as a reaction to the untimely death of his sister Fanny.
It should be noted that opus numbers for Mendelssohn’s works are not a reliable tool for determining the chronology of his compositions. All works after Opus 72 were published posthumously and therefore only indicate publication order.
Much of the music on today’s program come from the last five years of Mendelssohn’s life. During this time he was constantly traveling between Leipzig, Berlin and London. Mendelssohn was instrumental in founding the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843 and was deeply involved in the administration of the school along with serving on its faculty. He was also the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a position he held from 1835 onwards. In Berlin Mendelssohn served as Kapellmeister to Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Mendelssohn was highly in demand in London; along with playing concerts as a piano soloist he fell into favor with Queen Victoria and was known to accompany her in performances of his lieder and other works during private gatherings at Buckingham Palace. Juggling all these duties, along with raising five children with his wife Cecile, understandably led to the consequence of Mendelssohn being severely overworked.
The Four Pieces for String Quartet Op. 81 is a collection of movements written for quartet during various points in Mendelssohn’s life. Mendelssohn composed a Theme and Variations in E major (Op. 81 No. 1) and a Scherzo in A minor (Op. 81 No. 2) in 1847 shortly after completing the String Quartet in F minor Op. 80. The E-major Theme and Variations bears similarities to movements in Robert Schumann’s Op. 44 string quartets, which were dedicated to Mendelssohn and speak to the influence that these two friends had on each other’s music. The Scherzo is a wonderful example of Mendelssohn’s continuing mastery of this type of movement and the characters it evokes. The character of this movement can be traced back to the scherzo of the Op. 20 Octet that was inspired by the Walpurgisnacht scene from Goethe’s Faust, evoking images of a breeze blowing through leaves illuminated by moonlight. These two movements were likely meant to be part of another complete string quartet; judging from the character of these movement the quartet may have served as an expressive foil to the intensity of the F-minor string quartet. Due to the increasing demand for Mendelssohn’s works after his death the publisher Breitkopf and Härtel attempted to create a complete quartet by combining these two movements with other music for quartet that Mendelssohn had composed earlier in his career. Pairing works from different stages of Mendelssohn’s career was not without precedence. Mendelssohn composed his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826. This was then joined with the Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s play that he composed in 1842 and was used in an 1843 production of the play in Berlin.
The Capriccio in E minor (Op. 81 No. 3) was composed in 1843 while Mendelssohn was in Leipzig. The movement starts out with a barcarolle sung by the first violin. This section is punctuated by a recitative, possibly hearkening back to Mendelssohn’s use of this operatic device in his first two string quartets. He then launches into a fugue in the style of J.S. Bach, paying homage to the composer which re-appeared in European musical consciousness due in no small part to Mendelssohn’s staging of the St. Matthew Passion. The set of pieces is then rounded out by a Fugue in E-flat major written in 1827 shortly after Mendelssohn completed his String Quartet in A minor Op. 13. This movement was probably written in the spirit of the dozen or so fugues that Mendelssohn composed for string quartet at the behest of his teacher Carl Zelter. The publisher may have decided to end the collection with contrasting fugues to mirror Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge Op. 133, which was originally intended to be the final movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat major Op. 130. The young Mendelssohn was obsessed with Beethoven’s late quartets and he most probably carried an appreciation for the works during the rest of his life. Attempting to end the Op. 81 collection in the spirit of Beethoven would be an appropriate gesture of homage to Mendelssohn’s relationship to the genre of the string quartet.
-program notes by Daniel Doña