MENDELSSOHN Felix, String Quartet in E Flat (1823)

Mendelssohn was fourteen years old when he composed his E flat major String Quartet in 1823 – two years before Beethoven completed the first of his ‘late’ quartets, and two years before Mendelssohn himself wrote the first version of his Octet. It was published posthumously (in 1879) but is much less well-known than Mendelssohn’s mature quartets. Prodigiously gifted though he was, Mendelssohn was still finding his way stylistically so this work owes much to the models of Haydn and Mozart and, in the finale, to Bach. The Mendelssohn authority R. Larry Todd wrote that the music of the composer’s earliest attempt at writing a full-length string quartet was ‘firmly grounded in the classical tradition’ – but Todd also noted that it was completed in just eleven days: the first page of the autograph manuscript is dated 25 March 1823 and the last page 5 April. The opening Allegro moderato is an elegant, rather Mozartian movement in sonata form, but the Adagio non troppo, in C minor, is darker, with more adventurous chromatic harmony. The Minuet and Trio has distinct echoes of Haydn while the finale is a contrapuntal tour de force: a double fugue which was probably modelled on the fugal finales in three of Haydn’s Op. 20 quartets. 

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

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