Mendelssohn: Youth and the Octet
In 1825, a teenage Felix Mendelssohn gave the world his Op. 20 String Octet, a work overflowing with youthful energy and enthusiasm. The mid-1820s were a veritable golden age for chamber music, but most of the other chamber masterpieces coming out of this time were by composers nearing their end: Beethoven’s six late string quartets, and Schubert’s Octet, String Quintet and two piano trios. All-in-all, this five-year period gave the music world ten of the most innovative works in the history of the chamber music genre, a brief period unequaled in its chamber output in history.
Mendelssohn innovated on the tradition by including more musicians and instructing them to perform his Octet “in the style of a symphony.” The String Quartet dominates the entire chamber music tradition from Haydn onwards, but composers will frequently vary the string quartet instrumentation, adding or subtracting instruments. Most famously, Mozart added a viola to the ensemble for his wonderful series of string quintets, but Mendelssohn outdoes Mozart by doubling the ensemble exactly, including four violins rather than two, and two violas and two cellos rather than one of each. Since orchestras then contained less musicians than they do now, formally, this piece stands between the symphony and the string quartet, larger than an ordinary chamber ensemble, but not quite an orchestra.
The teenage composer imbued his Octet with the spirit of youth and youthfulness. At so many moments in this piece, the composer seems to be grasping at everything he can to make the music more dynamic and energetic. From the very opening, half the instruments are playing wide tremolos, a single cello pounds out a low bass line, and the two violists play a syncopated harmonic accompaniment, driving the music forward, creating a feeling of boundless energy, restless but not anxious. Doublings at the octave abound, creating a broader, statelier sound for his most important melodic lines. This first movement, around thirteen minutes long, is the heart of the piece. Mendelssohn sets the movement in the somewhat rarer key of E-flat Major, dignified and energetic, a smiling key, full of rich power, and this movement explores the fullest range of emotions seen in the piece. The opening melody stretching over three octaves, with huge arpeggiated leaps, often in fourths or fifths. I always marvel at the wonderful development section, and its beautiful well-wrought narrative arc, the turmoiled beginning melting into music of a quiet, uneasy peace, slowly building and building before the sublime recapitulation. Mendelssohn wisely lingers in this quieter music during the development, creating a needed contrast with the glorious music before and after.
A String Octet in the most common seating arrangement. Does this ensemble look more like a small orchestra or a large chamber group?
The Minor-key Andante has always been a very puzzling movement for me. Maybe a lot of that has to do with it being sandwiched between the two best movements of the piece, but even at my most lucid, I can’t help but thinking that Mendelssohn dawdles a little in this Andante. There is this wonderful abundance of ideas, and they move between each other seamlessly, but it seems there are too many ideas for a shorter style slow movement. Just half the length of the Allegro Moderato preceding it, and only slightly longer than the Scherzo after it, its relative shortness makes the work feel more like an intermezzo than a fully-fledged slow movement. I find that thinking of it as an interlude makes the movement easier to understand, as that also helps to explain why it is not particularly slow for a slow movement. It moves along at a brisker pace than we’d expect after the dynamic Allegro moderato preceding it and makes use of many of the same “energy devices” that Mendelssohn uses elsewhere in the piece. I often feel that what this movement is missing is more harmonic play, which seems to have been beyond Mendelssohn at this point in his musical career.
Great Scherzos are rare, I think many composers tend to “phone them in,” but what an exception this is! Mendelssohn infused the Octet’s scherzo with a marvelous sprightly energy, impish and mischievous, that invites comparison to the wonderful Midsummer Night’s Dream scherzo he wrote later. The piece also has this odd programmatic history: it is believed to be inspired by the “Walpurgis Night’s Dream” episode of Goethe’s Faust. This doesn’t seem to me that unlikely, as the music seems inspired by something extra-musical, something as impish and sprightly as the music itself, it doesn’t feel like strictly absolute music. Mendelssohn authority Larry Todd has even gone so far as to suggest that the entire piece is inspired by Faust, a wonderful thing to consider.
The finale must be played very quickly and with spectacular energy in order to be effective. It feels harmonically simpler than the other three movements but has many glorious moments and feels appropriate for a finale, if a little simple. It quotes from the Messiah’s “Hallelujah, chorus;” even novice listeners can easily notice the “And he shall reign for ever and ever” melody after the fugato opening. Maybe because of that quotation, maybe because of something else, this movement conveys some of the celebratory character of a Hallelujah. Exultant feels like the best word to describe it, joyful in an extremely dignified way, not stiff or held-back, but a little shallow compared with the first movement’s depth. I think that most musicians could easily turn this into the most memorable part of their performance, provided their technique and control are strong, and they are able to keep the energy up from the very beginning. It is this movement especially that seems to suffer from recording: I imagine a live performance could be unforgettable, and I look forward to my opportunity to see it performed live. Here, Mendelssohn’s wonderful talent for creating energy reaches its apotheosis, in fact, the movement seems made more of energy than of melody and harmony.
The famous 1839 watercolor painting of the young Felix Mendelssohn, by James Warren Childe. Despite being quite an informal little artwork, it is one of the most frequently reproduced images of the composer. Much of this has to do with Mendelssohn’s figure in the Western musical imagination as a great prodigy, and it being one of the few images of him as a young man: most paintings and portraits of him come from much later in his life.
Returning to this piece, I am astonished at its youthful energy. It’s literally impossible to imagine a composer older than a teenager writing it, or in their early twenties. We’ll listen to weightier music and think “it’s hard to imagine someone younger than a master shortly before his death writing this,” but never the other way around, unless we mean to criticize it. I think of other works from prodigies, but can’t come up with a comparable piece. Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture is more refined than this, I could imagine it being written by a composer of any age. Bizet’s Symphony in C has lovely moments that could only come from a very young man, but not all over, as in this Octet. I don’t think any young early Mozart piece has this characteristic: he developed an adult sophistication so early. It begs the question, is there wonderful music we can only write in the spring of our lives? I think that this piece proves yes, but if the corpus of classical music shows us anything, it’s that there is much less that can be written here than as our lives progress. Child prodigies are not that rare a thing, or else I imagine that there would be much more out there like this wonderful octet.
