Mendelssohn String Quintet in Bb major, Op. 87
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.
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.
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. The String Quintet in Bb Major, Op. 87 was written in 1845 while Mendelssohn was on holiday in Soden for the summer. He had recently tendered his resignation in Berlin and one can sense in this piece a sense of temporary relief from his hectic life. This is his second essay in the genre, along with the Op. 18 Quintet in A major. Mendelssohn chose to follow Mozart’s lead in composing for a quintet consisting of two violins, two violas and cello.
The quintet opens with a spritely movement featuring a symphonic texture favored by Mendelssohn in his chamber works since the famous Octet Op. 20 written some twenty years earlier. The second movement features an unusual and somewhat ironic tempo marking of Andante scherzando, perhaps tipping a hat to Beethoven who also liked to combine seemingly contradictory tempo markings to capture specific moods or characters via conceptual dissonance. Mendelssohn was a master at writing scherzos, and this movement is no exception, featuring humorous writing and light textures albeit at a walking tempo instead of the fast tempos usually associated with this type of movement. The third movement is deeply expressive in the tradition of the slow movements of the late Beethoven and Schubert works; some commentators remark that this movement foreshadows the music of Brahms.
The final movement returns to the lively spirit of the opening of the work. Wrapping up a multi-movement work is a task that many composers struggle with and Mendelssohn was no exception. Beethoven, despite his own trials and tribulations with the task, set a high standard in this regard and there is much documentary evidence from composers who came after expressing the difficulty of composing last movements. The finale of the Op. 87 quintet is what kept Mendelssohn from approving this work for publication during his lifetime. An 1846 entry in the journal of Mendelssohn’s friend Ignaz Moscheles describes an evening he spent with the composer where “We also looked at the Viola Quintet in B-flat major and Mendelssohn claimed that the last movement was not good.” As he aged Mendelssohn became increasingly picky about works that would represent his compositional legacy via publication. Great works such as his Italian Symphony met similar reservations in the composer’s mind and were withheld from publication. Most of these then met great success once they were released for public consumption after Mendelssohn’s death in 1847.
-program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña