Notes for: August 5, 2014
Mendelssohn was arguably the most precocious youngster in western music. When he was a boy, his father, a wealthy Berlin banker, regularly invited professional musicians to his home on evenings and Sunday mornings to join the family in informal music-making. Many distinguished non-musicians were also invited, including the poet Goethe, with whom young Felix became great friends.
These weekly concerts gave the young composer a workshop in which to experiment with his own creative ideas. But this arrangement had one limitation. In those days, wind players were considered socially inferior, and the musical visitors were all string and piano players. Mendelssohn’s earliest instrumental works, consequently, were for strings alone or strings with piano.
In this environment it was natural that Felix’s latent talent would be recognized and encouraged, and his father engaged for his development a number of leading musical educators. Under the expert teaching of Carl Henning, a young violinist and future royal kapellmeister, Felix soon mastered both the violin and the viola. Similarly, his piano studies progressed at an astonishing degree under Ludwig Berger, a prominent concert pianist.
After hearing a piano recital by the 12-year old Felix, Goethe exclaimed, “What this little man is capable of in improvisation and sight-reading is simply prodigious. I would not have thought it possible at such age.”- great praise from a man who had heard Mozart extemporize at a similar age.
Most important, for Felix’s general music education, his father brought in Carl Friedrich Zelter, a prolific composer who set the poems of Goethe to music. Zelter insisted on giving Felix a thorough grounding in basic compositional techniques, and encouraged his study of Handel, J. S. Bach, Haydn and Mozart. By the time Felix was 10 years old, he had absorbed much of the music of these great predecessors, and was beginning to compose freely in a synthesis of Baroque and Classical styles.
Zelter’s impact on young Felix was life-lasting. He communicated to Mendelssohn his strong love of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, one direct consequence of which was Mendelssohn’s 1829 revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion under Zelter’s auspices. This epochal event sparked a general revival of Bach’s works throughout Western Europe.
Between the ages of 11 and 14, Felix produced more than 100 compositions. His earliest surviving compositions, dating from 1820, included a violin sonata, three piano sonatas and two operas. His initial ventures into orchestral music occurred the following year with his first six String Symphonies. During a family holiday in Switzerland in 1822, Felix began work on what was to become his first published composition, the Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 1. In the next three years, he followed this first opus with two more piano quartets, published as Op. 2 and Op 3.
Opus 1 is the work of an amazingly talented 13-year old boy, who had learned his lessons well from his study of Haydn and Mozart and was now finding his own voice. The first movement, allegro vivace, is in the sonata form that he inherited from his predecessors -- three distinct themes, their extensive and well-crafted development, their recapitulation, and a culminating concluding coda. Further, it is in a stormed-tossed minor key – surprising for such a seemingly contented young man.
The second movement, adagio, is an early example of the gentle lyricism that was to become a strong feature of Mendelssohn’s later works, particularly in his “songs without words.” The decorative piano passages in the contrasting middle section are particularly striking.
Similarly, the scherzo, presto, anticipates the light, tripping fairlyland scherzos that were to become a Mendelssohn specialty. The major-key trio relaxes the pace, with the violin and the pianist’s right hand taking a well-deserved rest.
The fourth movement, allegro moderato, is another venture in sonata form, with the interesting feature that the two themes, while different in key, are made up of the same melodic material. After the usual development and recapitulation, the quartet ends with a bravura finish.