Mozart & Mendelssohn

MOZART & MENDELSSOHN Thursday 29 October 2020, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––

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SEATING LIST VIOLIN Maria WÅ‚oszczowska Gordon Bragg Amira Bedrush-McDonald Rachel Smith VIOLA Jessica Beeston Brian Schiele CELLO Su-a Lee Donald Gillan

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Mozart (1756-1791) String Quintet No 4 in G minor, K 516 (1787) Allegro Menuetto: Allegretto Adagio ma non troppo Adagio

Mendelssohn (1809–1847) String Octet in E-flat major, Op 20 (1825) Allegro moderato ma con fuoco Andante Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo Presto

––––– Darkness and light; extroversion and introspection. The two works in today’s programme inhabit starkly contrasting worlds, arguably inspired by their respective composers’ particular circumstances when they were creating them.

Indeed, you can experience those same stark contrasts across works within Mozart’s own output. He famously preceded his final Symphony, the lavish, optimistic, confident ‘Jupiter’, No 41 in C, with a far more inward-looking, restless, even tragic creation – No. 40 in G minor.

The striking differences between the two symphonies – almost as if they’re portraying contrasting sides to the same personality – might not be considered noteworthy, were it not for the fact that Mozart did exactly the same thing, and in the same keys, with his final two string quintets. K515, in C, is bright, blithe and full of good humour, while this concert’s opening work, K516 in G minor, is – well, a different beast entirely.

For a start, the key of G minor itself seems to have held a special significance for Mozart. It was the tonality he chose for expressions of everything from wistful melancholy to outright despair – clearly in his Symphony No 40, but also to a lesser degree in No 25. In The Magic Flute, it’s the key in which Pamina sings ‘Ah, I feel the joy of love has gone for ever more! Never will happiness return to my heart!’

That opera would come four years after the period in which Mozart was working on the G minor String Quintet. The year 1787 was hardly a good one for him. He’d moved permanently to Vienna from Salzburg six years previously, but was still finding it

He completed the Quintet on 16 May 1787, and his father died barely two weeks later.

Because of the suddenness of the older man’s demise and the lengthy travel Mozart would need to endure between Vienna and Salzburg, he wasn’t even able to return for the funeral.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

difficult to achieve lasting success among the notorious fickle Viennese audiences.

He travelled to Prague, Dresden, Meissen, Potsdam and Berlin to promote his playing and his music – but his touring left him seriously short on cash, and forced him to borrow substantial sums from friends.

Most seriously, his father – who had been the rather pushy, overbearing but astonishingly effective figure behind Mozart’s breathtaking early successes – was taken seriously ill back in Mozart’s birth town of Salzburg. Mozart learnt of his condition by letter in April 1787, and rather melodramatically wrote back: ‘I have now made a habit of being prepared in all the affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed, during the last few years, such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.’

It’s tempting, then, though perhaps a little facile, to see all this turmoil and upset as direct source material for Mozart’s G minor Quintet. There’s no denying it’s a brooding, introspective piece – for the most part, at least. But at the same time, Mozart seems to have taken such trouble to make his music unsettling, disturbing, even violent at times, that it’s hard not to understand the Quintet as an intentional expression of anger or despair.

Even the very beginning of his first movement sets out two musical elements that will return again and again to create a sense of unease and instability across the whole Quintet. First, there’s the chugging accompaniment in repeated chords: it might seem charming at first, but it soon becomes nagging and rather more sinister in its relentlessness. Second, listen out for the sighing slither down a chromatic scale in the violin’s second phrase, almost like a little moan of discontent. Once you’ve noticed those two features, you soon realise that they crop up throughout the Quintet – not only to provide a sense of structural coherence across the work, but also to pervade it with a feeling of agitation and disquiet.

Mozart’s second movement is supposedly a danceable minuet, but with its unpredictable syncopations and violent accented chords, it’s as though it’s been created intentionally to confuse the ear (and the feet, for that matter). His slow third movement begins

calmly enough, but soon becomes a lot more uncertain. Of it, the great Mozart admirer Pyotr Tchaikovsky later wrote: ‘Nobody has ever known as well how to interpret so exquisitely in music the sense of resigned and inconsolable sorrow.’

Mozart then takes the unusual step of following his slow movement with another slow movement. Or at least a lengthy slow introduction, led by an arioso violin solo with a gently throbbing accompaniment (those repeated chords again), leading to the main body of the movement in a bright G major. Mozart’s moment of transition feels as though the lights have suddenly been switched on – but whether the ensuing music is bright and breezy enough to counterbalance the earlier movements is another question entirely. Indeed, with its restlessness and its

he remembered it as ‘my favourite of all my compositions’, adding: ‘I had the most beautiful time writing it.’

He wrote it as a birthday gift for his friend and violin teacher Eduard Rietz, and clearly intended the Octet’s sometimes florid, virtuosic first violin part specifically for its anniversary recipient. He completed it on 15 October 1825, presented it to Rietz two days later, and Rietz proceeded to copy out its parts by hand himself in preparation for its first private performance. It had to wait another 11 years before being unveiled before the public, however, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 30 January 1836.

Later in life, he remembered it as ‘my favourite of all my compositions’, adding: ‘I had the most beautiful time writing it.’

switchback changes of mood, it’s as if Mozart is replaying all the elements we’ve come to associate with gloom and misery in what’s an apparently lighter-hearted context.

If it might be hard to feel entirely convinced by the apparently blithe conclusion to Mozart’s G minor Quintet, Mendelssohn’s 1825 Octet occupies the opposite end of the emotional spectrum altogether. It’s become something of a cliché to refer to the Octet’s youthful enthusiasm and energy. But likewise, it’s an inescapable fact that Mendelssohn wrote the work at the remarkably tender age of just 16, and it’s hard to deny that he was at least flexing his compositional muscles in it. Later in life,

The Octet is doubly remarkable, in fact, not just because of Mendelssohn’s youth, but also because he achieved such rich, apparently effortless invention

in an instrumental grouping – comprising four violins, two violas and two cellos – that had barely any precedents. He was no doubt partly inspired by Louis Spohr’s 1823 Double Quartet, but that earlier work is conceived very much for two individual, sometimes musically separate, string quartets.

Mendelssohn, however – perhaps drawing on his own early string symphonies, which he’d written between the ages of 12 and 14 – views his eight string players as a miniature orchestra, and thereby exploits all manner of textural possibilities within the group.

And while the Octet’s music might seem vivacious, carefree, even spontaneously composed in a burst of creativity, Mendelssohn in fact pored over the piece,

frogs, flies, mosquitos and even bagpipes.

Indeed, all of those can be heard in the scherzo if you listen hard enough.

Returning to the beginning of the Octet, however, its lengthy first movement (more than twice as long as any of the work’s later movements) launches with a bounding, propulsive theme in the first violin that it’s almost impossible not to associate with youthful vigour. Its central development section passes through darker moods, but the return of its opening theme is heralded by a remarkable rushing unison passage across all eight instruments, just one example of Mendelssohn’s astonishingly audacious treatment of his ensemble.

Felix Mendelssohn

The only movement, in fact, that

He divides his eight players into smaller groups for the thoughtful second movement – for example the four lower instruments separated from the four higher in the movement’s very opening. And once his quicksilver scherzo has disappeared in a puff of smoke, he shows off his mastery of

Mendelssohn didn’t substantially revise is the Octet’s third, a gossamer fairy scherzo that prefigures a style he’d go on to make entirely his own, not least in the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he wrote just a year later. The composer is said to have been inspired by the Walpurgis Night section of Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles invites his acolyte to a gathering of witches and demons high in the German mountains.

Even at the age of 16, Mendelssohn counted Goethe – who was 60 years his senior – as a friend, having first met the revered writer at the age of 12 and impressed him greatly with his playing and his wideranging intellect. It’s even been suggested that Mendelssohn set out to portray in the movement’s music, specific elements from

counterpoint in the Octet’s bold, confident finale, which feels like a release of the energy that’s been pent up during the previous two movements. Listen out for what might sound like a direct quotation of the line ‘And He shall reign for ever and ever’ from the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in Handel’s Messiah, which Mendelssohn manages to integrate fully into his complex contrapuntal texture. It might just be coincidence, of course, but it’s even been suggested that the whole Octet is based around Goethe’s Faust, and that this section somehow marks the struggle of faith between Faust and Mephistopheles for Gretchen’s soul. Whether that’s plausible or not, it does nothing to sap the breathless good humour and wit of this smiling, sunny conclusion.

Goethe’s sinister literary evocation – crickets,

© David Kettle

putting it through quite a lot of substantial changes and revisions. You don’t achieve this level of apparent spontaneity without a lot of toil and sweat behind the scenes.

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