String Octet in E‑Flat Major

There can be few works composed by a 16-year-old that measure up to Mendelssohn’s masterly for strings. Even Mozart’s teenage music can barely match its combination of symphonic scope, architectural balance, noble beauty and technical perfection. Although Louis Spohr had composed a double quartet shortly beforehand, Mendelssohn’s sonorous, orchestral deployment of the eight string instruments marks out the as something utterly individual and original. It was composed for the 23rd birthday of the young composer’s violin teacher, Eduard Rietz, whose evident skill is reflected in the virtuosity of the principal violin part. The opening movement unfolds at a leisurely pace, albeit marked con fuoco (with fire), every aspect of its structure held in an uncanny equilibrium that would be remarkable for a composer twice or four times Mendelssohn’s age. The “Andante” is a song without words in all but name, its yearning quality enhanced by the tension between its major- and minor-key music. The miraculous “Scherzo” is the first instance in Mendelssohn’s music of the feather-light “fairy” style that would come fully into its own in evoking the spirit world in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, composed directly afterwards. Indeed, such was the popularity of this “Scherzo” that the composer soon orchestrated it as a replacement movement for his First Symphony. The finale refers back to the music of the “Scherzo” in an irrepressibly garrulous “Presto”, whose transmogrification of Bachian counterpoint is thrown off with a joyous youthful nonchalance inimitably Mendelssohn’s own.