Mendelssohn: String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 44, No. 3
A newly married Mendelssohn was already at work on his Opus 44 set of string quartets during his honeymoon late in 1837. Finished days after his 29th birthday in February the following year, the E-flat major quartet, the third of the set, shares its key and its youthful zest with the celebrated Octet of his teenage years. But the richly vivacious E-flat major quartet sees a more experienced Mendelssohn painting with the limited palette of only four players, savoring the natural intimacy of the quartet in its delicate passages, while relishing the challenge of creating outsized exuberance and full textures with smaller forces.
The spry sixteenth notes called out by the violin at the outset of the Allegro vivace are the germ that will infect the texture to varying degrees throughout the extensive first movement — at first alone in the tireless, insistent violin, sometimes mosaicked in imitation across the quartet, sometimes in cascading tutti choruses, and other times checked by martial dotted figures. The light-footed Scherzo second movement is true to form for Mendelssohn, a uniquely deft composer in the scherzo style. Its effervescence and minor mode mischievousness look forward to the famous scherzo from the incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” he would pen four years in the future, as does its dizzying spiral to its hushed, plucked finish. The ample warmth of A-flat major serves as the backdrop to the heartfelt Adagio non troppo, which is spiced with beautifully painful dissonances each time the theme returns, a twisting of the knife followed by the sweetest relief of its resolution. The ebullient, finger-twisting Molto Allegro finale revives the vigor of the first movement for a rollicking finish.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
A newly married Mendelssohn was already at work on his Opus 44 set of string quartets during his honeymoon late in 1837. Finished days after his 29th birthday in February the following year, the E-flat major quartet, the third of the set, shares its key and its youthful zest with the celebrated Octet of his teenage years. But the richly vivacious E-flat major quartet sees a more experienced Mendelssohn painting with the limited palette of only four players, savoring the natural intimacy of the quartet in its delicate passages, while relishing the challenge of creating outsized exuberance and full textures with smaller forces.
The spry sixteenth notes called out by the violin at the outset of the Allegro vivace are the germ that will infect the texture to varying degrees throughout the extensive first movement — at first alone in the tireless, insistent violin, sometimes mosaicked in imitation across the quartet, sometimes in cascading tutti choruses, and other times checked by martial dotted figures. The light-footed Scherzo second movement is true to form for Mendelssohn, a uniquely deft composer in the scherzo style. Its effervescence and minor mode mischievousness look forward to the famous scherzo from the incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” he would pen four years in the future, as does its dizzying spiral to its hushed, plucked finish. The ample warmth of A-flat major serves as the backdrop to the heartfelt Adagio non troppo, which is spiced with beautifully painful dissonances each time the theme returns, a twisting of the knife followed by the sweetest relief of its resolution. The ebullient, finger-twisting Molto Allegro finale revives the vigor of the first movement for a rollicking finish.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival