Mendelssohn - Complete Works for String Quartet

Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)

Complete Works for String Quartets 

Bartholdy Quartet

Recorded: February 1973 

(First Recording of the Complete Set)

CD1 

String Quartet in E flat major (1823) 

Fuga in E flat major, Op.81/4 (1827) 

String Quartet (No. 2) in A minor, Op.13 (1827) 

CD2 

String Quartet (No. 1) in E flat major, Op.12 (1829) 

String Quartet (No. 3) in D major, Op.44 No.1 (1838) 

String Quartet (No. 4) in E minor, Op.44 No.2 (1837) 

CD3 

String Quartet (No. 5) in E flat major, Op.44 No.3 (1838) 

Capriccio in E minor, Op.81/3 (1843) 

Andante (Tema con Variazioni) in E major, Op.81/1 (1847) 

Scherzo in A minor, Op.81/2 (1847) 

String Quartet (No. 6) in F minor, Op. posth. 80 (1847) 

Mendelssohn, sometimes known as the ‘classical romantic’, was revered in his lifetime as one of the very great composers. He has become considerably less regarded since the mid-twentieth century, although in recent years the tide seems to be turning in his favour. Only a handful of compositions has kept Mendelssohn’s name in the spotlight. Masterworks such as, the Violin Concerto, the Overture to a Midsummer Nights Dream and the Octet for strings are the still the most likely to be encountered on record or in concert, and the Scottish and Italian symphonies and the Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave) have also remained popular. Of the composer’s substantial choral output only the oratorio Elijah and to a lesser extent St. Paul are still performed by choral societies.

Musicologist Edwin Evans has described how MENDELSSOHN was born into the romantic era, but his aristocratic fastidiousness made him averse to the romantic excesses of his time, even when writing for the orchestra. He was perfectly comfortable in the old world of classical form and refinement but infused with a new lyricism. For many years it became fashionable to disparage MENDELSSOHN on account of his gentle romanticism that to later generations appeared mere sentimentality. Subsequently, a reassessment has resulted from the reaction against later excesses. Gradually MENDELSSOHN became rehabilitated, not for his romanticism, but for his almost classical formal elegance. It is now recognised that whatever may have been Mendelssohn’s weaknesses, his sense of classical form was well-nigh perfect. He excelled in understatement and nuance, in subtle, colouristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. MENDELSSOHN only on rare occasions attempts to achieve significant depth and drama in his "cultured, well mannered, refined, and exquisitely fashioned music …" (David Ewen) Musicologist Ewen explains how MENDELSSOHN did not aspire to the new kinds of romantic musical expression striven for by contemporaries such as Berlioz, Schumann and Liszt. He did not seek out new romantic forms, being thoroughly satisfied with the style and structures of the Viennese classical period. "He did not particularly try to make music a medium for the projection of extra-musical experiences, ideals or sensations." Biographer Daniel Gregory Mason says of Mendelssohn, "his style is too fluent, too insinuating and too inoffensive, to embody tragic emotion. It lacked rugged force, the virile energy, the occasional harshness and discordance… its reading of life in which there is ugliness, crudity and violence, as well as beauty, is too fastidiously expurgated."

With particular regard to Mendelssohn’s chamber music, Musicologist R. Larry Todd in his essay on ‘The String Quartets of Mendelssohn’ contained in the Emerson’s Deutsche Grammophon set writes, "Chamber music remained a constant preoccupation of MENDELSSOHN throughout the meteoric career that established him at the forefront of German music during the 1830s and 1840s. Already at the age of seven, the boy was coached in ensemble playing by the Parisian violinist Pierre Baillot, and among Mendelssohn’s earliest surviving works are various pieces for violin and piano from 1820, and a series of learned fugues for string quartet from 1821, all written under the supervision of his composition teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter."

Around 1825 MENDELSSOHN and his family moved into a grand mansion in the Leipzigerstrasse on the outskirts of Berlin. In the extensive grounds was a garden house which contained a room large enough to seat a sizeable audience at the family’s Sunday morning chamber concerts. It was at these gatherings that the young MENDELSSOHN gained much of his musical education, both as a listener and performer. As well as the piano he also played the violin and the viola and regularly took part in performances of the several String Symphonies he had already composed. From these early years, examples of Mendelssohn’s chamber scores include the String Quartet in E flat major composed in 1823, when he was fourteen, the three Piano Quartets, the Piano Sextet and the Octet for strings, Op.20 from 1825, his sixteenth year.

Mendelssohn’s music in general is becoming far better served in the catalogues and his works for String Quartet can now boast many top-class versions. Complete sets of the Quartets have been around for some time; notably those from the Cherubini on EMI 585693-2; 585805-2 and 586104-2, the Melos on Deutsche Grammophon 415 883-2GCM3 from 1987, the Coull on Hyperion CDS44051/3 and the first complete set to be recorded by the Bartholdy in 1973 on Acanta 43 075. These works are all now firmly established in the repertoire.