Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet in F minor, Op.80 (1847)
Allegro vivace assai – Presto
Allegro assai
Adagio
Finale:- Allegro molto
When the Fitzwilliam SQ first performed this extraordinary piece (early in 1972!) there still persisted a culture of “fashion” in musical taste (especially regrettable for an Art form that can boast such widespread appeal). For example, during the 1950s Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and (to a lesser extent) Carl Nielsen were highly popular in England – but soon to be replaced by Mahler and Bruckner, eventually (with the help of anniversaries) regaining their rightful appeal. It was also the case that our early performances of Mendelssohn’s Op.80 were still hampered by the backdrop of this composer’s association with an earlier period of British culture. Hopefully we have gradually put behind us a received antipathy to the Victorian era, such that the neglect of all but a handful of his works has since been replaced by substantial re-evaluation: few would have argued that he might well have been the most gifted natural genius the world of music has ever known; but the popular misconception that he never fully matured as a composer, and that his finest music was written before the age of 25, has now been largely discredited.
The F minor quartet also dispels any misconceptions that his music was generally unaffected by personal circumstances: in the Spring of 1847 he undertook his tenth visit to England where, in the space of a fortnight, he conducted six performances (in London, Manchester, and Birmingham) of a newly revised version of Elijah – whose premiere he had given in Birmingham Town Hall on 26 August the previous year, to overwhelming acclaim. Other engagements, both musical and social, had to be crammed in around Elijah. Finally, on 9 May, totally exhausted, he crossed the English Channel (for the last time), arriving home in Frankfurt three days later; before he had time to recover he was suddenly confronted with the news of his beloved sister Fanny’s unexpected death: from a paralytic stroke, on the 14th. The shock was so great that he himself immediately collapsed, unconscious for a frightening length of time. Before the end of the month he had re-located, via Baden-Baden, to Interlaken, in hope of recovery – where visitors were shocked to find he had “severely aged, and walked with a stoop”.
So these were the circumstances under which this quartet emerged – Mendelssohn’s autograph is explicitly inscribed “Interlaken, September 1847”. Although he tried it out (at the piano) on Ignaz Moscheles (5 October), he never heard it played by a string quartet: on 9 September he had taken to his bed, as a result of shivering fits; after a fortnight he felt his strength returning, but on 30th October he had declined alarmingly, surviving just a few more days until 4 November. Sterndale Bennett provides evidence to suggest that he died of an “apoplectic condition started by the sudden shock of his sister’s death”. Indeed, Moscheles reported (after his private hearing) that “The passionate character of the entire piece seems to me to be consistent with his deeply disturbed frame of mind. He is still grappling with grief at the loss of his sister”; and Eric Werner writes of “the struggle of his will to live against the exhaustion of his physically and mentally spent organism”, and of his “frightful fear of death”. Exactly one month after he lost the battle, Jozsef Joachim led the quartet’s premiere in Leipzig: how profoundly startled must those present have been by the tone of this anguished, tempestuous, deeply tragic music; perhaps even more so by admirers when it reached the drawing rooms of Victorian England…….
Mendelssohn once declared that Beethoven’s F minor quartet (Op.95) was the most characteristic thing he ever wrote, and there can be little doubt that his own F minor betrays a strong influence – as also do his first published quartets: Op.12 in E flat and Op.13 in A minor. Indeed, the latter in particular demonstrates that, in the two years since the completion (in 1825) of his predecessor’s Op.132 A minor quartet, his astonishing youthful genius was evident not only in his prodigious compositions of that time – notably the Octet and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture; but also in this teenager’s ability to grasp and absorb the futuristic idiom of those last quartets of Beethoven, to an extant way beyond most musical connoisseurs of that time (remember too that he had had the vision to revive JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion – aged 20!). And so, now 17 years older, he finds a terse abruptness, a rage bordering on violence, a desperate outpouring of sorrow, which finds expression in a musical language – now gloomy, now macabre, now despairing, now bordering on savage – whose origins can clearly be recognised, but further enhanced by a forward-looking harmonic adventurousness he is rarely credited with. There is also to be encountered – particularly in the Adagio – a poignant tenderness which must surely emanate from deep fraternal love for Fanny: indeed, its opening violin melody would appear to have been transcribed from a tiny piano piece he sent to her in June 1830; thereafter John Horton perceptively writes of it as a “lamentation….full of dynamic markings, as if to emphasise every nuance of feeling……becoming more troubled, with harsher dissonances and broken, sobbing rhythms”.
A half century ago we were astonished by so many potent moments: not least the scary rushing of wind at the opening, the high first violin screams, the moments of heart-stopping stillness near the end of exposition and recapitulation, the outer movements’ headlong dash to their fierce dénouements. But what particularly reduced us to stunned silence was the strange, otherworldly disquiet of the scherzo’s central section: an ominous quasi-ostinato in the lower instruments, soon joined by the violins playing an affectingly sombre lullaby in sixths – eventually to be interrupted by sneering chromatic scales which hurtle us back to the movement’s wildly forceful opening. It is to be hoped that the passing of years will have enabled performers and listeners alike to recognise and share in a truly masterly revelation of the vicissitudes of human suffering.
© Alan George
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