Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)
String Quartet no. 6, in F minor (1847)
Felix Mendelssohn packed a lot into his 38 years: in addition to his prolific compositional output, he was – with Berlioz – one of the first individuals to make a powerful impact as a conductor; he was in demand throughout Europe as a pianist; and he was highly cultured and well versed in other arts (Goethe was a family friend, and Mendelssohn was a talented painter – a trait that puts him in company with Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin, among others).
Much of his music is characterized by transparency: the gossamer textures of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the magnificent counterpoint of the Octet for strings are often held up as examples of a style that was both fragile and brilliant – much like Mendelssohn, himself. After his death, this lightness of touch, though, was one of several things held against Mendelssohn’s reputation, due to the absence of depth of expression it supposedly demonstrated. (Mendelssohn’s Jewish ethnicity and the fact he never wrote an opera were among his other alleged detriments – though it’s hard not to sense that professional jealousy played the biggest part: until the last fifteen years of his life, Richard Wagner, Mendelssohn’s most vitriolic posthumous opponent, experienced only a fraction of the popular and financial success Mendelssohn enjoyed during his lifetime.)
At the heart of Mendelssohn’s output is a tremendous amount of chamber music. Much of it is for (or involves) the piano, Mendelssohn’s primary instrument, but he was also a prolific composer of music for strings. His six string quartets occupy a place somewhere between Beethoven’s epic sixteen and Bartók’s equally momentous six.
The String Quartet in F minor (no. 6) was the last piece Mendelssohn completed, written in the shadow of his sister, Fanny’s, death in May 1847. Mendelssohn and his sister were very close: she was his equal as a musician, a talented composer, pianist, and conductor, though the conventions of the day limited her professional exposure (in fact, she suffered her fatal stroke while rehearsing her brother’s cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht). Mendelssohn took her death very hard and there’s some suspicion that it played a role in his own demise just six months later.
The F Minor Quartet is Mendelssohn’s most unrelentingly dark composition. The first movement begins with echoes of shuddering string tremolos – about as far removed from the world of the Midsummer Night’s Dream scherzo as can be imagined. The opening music eventually calms down, though it never really settles – harmonically or dramatically – into anything we might call peaceable.
A return of the tremolo figure initiates the first movement’s development, a substantial exploration of the movement’s opening material that covers a wide range of harmonic areas, drawing on Mendelssohn’s substantial skills as a contrapuntalist.
The one ray of light in the opening movement comes in the recapitulation, where the music turns to F major for nearly a page of the full score. The contrast between this mostly diatonic section and the surrounding chromatic material could hardly be more pronounced.
The grim mood continues in the second movement, a brisk scherzo that suggests the influence of Mendelssohn’s friend Robert Schumann in its use of hemiolas.
What impresses most about the slow third movement is less the fact that it’s the only music in a major key in the entire quartet, but that Mendelssohn imbued it with the all the dramatic weight of the surrounding movements. Yes, there’s a sense of respite here, both in terms of tempo and tonality, but, especially when heard in its proper context, this is some of the saddest major key music ever written – and it’s a marvelous example to overturn the banal notion that “major keys mean happy and minor keys mean sad.”
Mendelssohn was, after all, one of the 19th century’s greatest tunesmiths and the melody he crafted in this movement is among his best: simple, flowing, and utterly natural – it’s as inevitable-sounding as anything Beethoven, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, or Lennon and McCartney ever wrote.
The finale returns to the energetic spirit of the first two movements, opening with a brisk, syncopated figure that’s traded off with a transformation of the first movement’s tremolo pattern: now measured sixteenth notes passed between the ensemble.
In this movement, though, the second theme is hardly removed from the first. Everywhere, intensity reigns and, as the movement progresses, the tension is only ratcheted higher and higher. This is music that’s spinning inexorably to its end and is uncompromising in its asperity.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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