Octet for strings in E flat, Op.20
Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco
Andante
Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo
Presto
Even allowing for Felix Mendelssohn’s extra-ordinary youthful gifts, his String Octet Op.20 remains a remarkable work. As the opus number shows, the 16-year old Mendelssohn was already a practiced composer, and had received all the support and guidance that his large and affectionate family circle could provide. He was surrounded by domestic music-making from his earliest childhood, and had already turned his hand to solo piano music, piano quartets, and 12 String Symphonies, written in the manner of Mozart and designed for use by his family and friends. But, as promising and accomplished as these works remain, the string Octet, written in 1825 for the 23rd birthday of the violinist Eduard Rietz, a family friend, is something wholly different. It is the earliest of Mendelssohn’s works to remain in the international repertory and presents us, in its finished form, with his entire mature style. The effortless melodic invention, the structural mastery, the surging energy, and, above all, Mendelssohn’s magical and wholly original sense of instrumental colour – all these elements are present, fully formed, in this work by a 16 year-old boy. So perfect is the style achieved in the Octet, and Mendelssohn’s next completed work, the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that it scarcely developed further in the remaining 22 years of the composer’s career.
Biographers and musicians have sought external reasons for this sudden and brilliant flowering of child prodigy into great composer. An important influence may have been Mendelssohn’s meeting with Goethe – they were introduced in 1821 and were to meet 4 more times in the ensuing years. The sensitive and cultivated boy had tremendous admiration for Germany’s presiding literary genius; he dedicated an early piano quartet to the poet, and his growing appreciation of Goethe’s literary style – the expression of high romantic ideals in classical forms – seems to have been a particular inspiration. It is surely telling that he appended a motto from Faust to the scherzo of the Octet. Certainly, there are few musical antecedents for the work. The form itself is fairly rare, and although Mendelssohn may have been familiar with the first of Louis Spohr’s Double Quartets (1823), which provided a precedent for the eight-player ensemble, the manner in which he used the combination was wholly original. Spohr’s works were very much for two separate quartets; indeed, they were written, with characteristic ingenuity, so that the two quartets contained within the octet could themselves be played as separate works! Mendelssohn’s brilliant interplay of all 8 parts (particularly in the Octet’s finale) reveals a wholly different, and far more unified conception of the medium. Where Spohr was simply clever, Mendelssohn brought genius, and his Octet is still the acknowledged masterpiece of the form, standing almost alone after 175 years.
Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco: The opening theme swings upwards through nearly three octaves in as many bars before tumbling impetuously back down again – youthful energy matched by playful self-confidence, the defining spirit of the whole work. The second subject sails in on fourth violin and first viola, a smooth and gentle melody which builds to a brilliant climax. The mood darkens in the development section, with a passage of profound quiet which leads, via an extended build-up, to the recapitulation.
Andante: A graceful, rather italianate movement with the character of a siciliano. Although it is in C minor, the mood is gently melancholy rather than tragic. The pair of ‘cellos introduce the first melody, but throughout the movement the use of the pairs of instruments is particularly sensitive, allowing a remarkable range of subtle tone-colours.
Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo: One of the most justly celebrated movements in all chamber music; an exquisitely quiet fantasy prefiguring the "fairy music" of the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mendelssohn told his sister Fanny that it was inspired by a stanza from Goethe’s Faust:
Wolkenzug und Nebelflor
Erhellen sich von oben;
Luft im laub, und Wind im Rohr,
-Und alles ist zerstoben.
("Trails of cloud and mist brighten from above; breeze in the foliage and wind in the reeds – and everything is scattered").
Donald Tovey felt that "eight string players might easily practise it for a lifetime without coming to an end of their delight in producing its marvels of tone-colour".
Presto: The second ‘cello lights the touchpaper - a chamber musician himself, Mendelssohn appreciated the importance of giving every player a share of the limelight. The movement is a brilliant fugal perpetuum mobile, which, once all eight players have made their entries, spins along with unstoppable energy. Mendelssohn uses every technical trick in the book; themes are inverted, superimposed and worked together in counterpoint, all without any audible effort; at one point the theme of the scherzo flies by again. The energy and excitement is unflagging as the Octet speeds to its close.
Richard Bratby, 1999
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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