Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was born into an affluent household in Hamburg. The family’s Jewish heritage set them apart in this mercantile port-town. Felix’s grandfather was the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, which guaranteed a steady stream of intellectuals, artists, and poets passing through the house. Felix’s father moved the entire clan to Berlin in 1811, and, for better or for worse, he chose to distance himself from that heritage by converting the family to Christianity. Mendelssohn’s religious identity seemed less important during his lifetime than it did in the first half of the 20th century, when antisemitism obscured the vast oeuvre of masterworks which had been bequeathed to Germany and the world. We are doubly fortunate, then, that such ideology is no longer in power.

The boy’s musical abilities were noted early but not overly stressed – perhaps the contrary example of Leopold Mozart came to mind. However, once Felix’s talents began translating into earnest and viable compositional outlets, he was placed under the care of Carl Zelter in 1817. Zelter was steeped in “old-school” counterpoint; his influence on a boy not quite nine years old must have been profound. Mendelssohn’s skill in updating Baroque counterpoint to modern harmony and large-scale form was due in part to the rigorous training handed down by Zelter. The teacher also introduced Mendelssohn to the aging Goethe when he was just 12 years old. Young Felix dazzled the venerable poet with his technical and artistic ability; he also kindled a special fondness that bridged the generations.

Mendelssohn happened to come of an age at the same time as the piano entered a pivotal new phase of its history. Once the novel possession of the well-heeled nobility, the hammer mechanism fortepiano – supported by rapid advances in production methods – became a staple piece of domestic furniture by the mid 19th century. Mendelssohn lived at the very beginning of that development, but his large output for piano and his subsequent reputation are tied to the instrument’s domestication. For this market he produced eight volumes of Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words), solo piano pieces that beautifully capture the lyricism of song but playable by any talented, amateur pianist. In today’s concert, Sivan Magen performs two Songs Without Words from Opus 19, arranged for solo harp. Mendelssohn spent time in Venice during his Grand Tour (1830-1832), and the Opus 19 collection was completed there. The set closes with a “Venetian gondola song” languishing in the darkness of its G minor key, suggesting a funereal trip down the canal. The opening piece of the collection is quite different, fluid and tender as the highly-etched melodic line soars above ripping arpeggios below.

Although Mendelssohn is better known for his sacred choral works – like his oratorio Elijah or his choral psalm settings – his secular pieces for choir constitute a significant portion of the composer’s repertoire for multiple voices. Furthermore, these secular pieces provide evidence of a popular musical trend of the first half of the 19th century. Choral societies were springing up left and right throughout Europe as a new sociocultural milieu for the amateur working-class musician, and they were in demand of new repertoire.
Thanks in large part to the influence of writers like Rousseau and Goethe – each in their own way “fathers” of Romanticism – nature was a key, overarching theme in much of the art and music produced during this time period, and Mendelssohn’s choral music provides no exception. The composer’s Volkslieder (folksongs) turn admiring eyes and ears upon the wonders of the natural world. He even included the explicit directive within some of his folksong cycles that the music was meant to be sung outdoors.

All four part-songs performed today originate from the period immediately following the time that Mendelssohn heard some of his earlier choral songs (Op. 41) being sung in the open air in June of 1839. He wrote to a friend in London of the experience: “The most natural music of all is surely when four people go walking together in the woods and, as it were, carry music with them and in them.” The pieces performed today represent Mendelssohn’s attempt to recapture and recreate the musical idyll he experienced in the memorable summer of 1839.

In 1826, the same year that he wrote his overture for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mendelssohn began his inaugural attempt at writing a string quintet. This quintet, Op. 18, would be the first of only two string quintets completed throughout the composer’s brief lifetime, the second of which (Op. 87) remained unpublished at the time of his death, due to Mendelssohn’s dissatisfaction with the work’s finale. The genre of the string quintet, while so thoroughly intertwined with the history of the quartet, is a unique one inasmuch as it can only claim a handful of pieces that have reached canonic status within the Western European repertory. Unlike those of the quartet, the memorable champions of the quintet are rather few and far between, including just a few notable entries by Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, and Mendelssohn himself. Interestingly, the dearth of quintets written in the 18th and 19th centuries is likely merely a reflection of the scarcity of active professional quintets seeking new music during those time periods, rather than composers’ disinterest in the genre.

In a few key ways, Mendelssohn’s quintet follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, Mozart. First, he utilizes the same instrumentation that Mozart made popular through his own quintets: two violins, two violas, and one cello. Secondly, Mendelssohn’s first string quintet opens with an effortless buoyancy that easily recalls the carefree style of the earlier prodigy. The first movement of Mendelssohn’s quintet unfolds leisurely with seamless transitions between themes while simultaneously giving the listener a sense of perpetual movement. The second movement, titled Intermezzo, was actually an add-on that Mendelssohn wrote for the work years after the quintet’s initial completion, having excised the Minuet he wrote in 1826 for a more elegiac movement written in honor of the death of his childhood friend and violinist, Eduard Rietz, in 1832. This somber yet lovely movement gives way to the brisk, fugal structure of the Scherzo, before ushering in the finale. In the ending Allegro, the first violin introduces the lyrical main subject and returns throughout the piece like a refrain, marking the ends of episodes of joyful musical play.

© Jason Stell and Emily Masincup, 2024