What are the challenges and rewards of playing Mendelssohn’s chamber music?

Daniel McDonough: The rewards certainly make the challenges worthwhile. One challenge that I remember our group coping with was balance. In the Op. 13 quartet, for example, the counterpoint and textural accompaniment is always so interesting and characterful that it is hard to strike the right balance with the melody. A related problem was matching the brilliance of the voices in melodic material. Mendelssohn was so great at conversational virtuosity; you can hear it in the Octet or in the Op. 44, No. 1, quartet—in the way tiny sparks of melody will zip around the ensemble. It has to be so clean and energetic, like a bunch of sharp, fast-talking high schoolers trying to get a word in edgewise. The payoff, though, is a youthful enthusiasm that audiences really feel. Nobody did it quite as well as Mendelssohn.

David Finckel: Challenge and reward are very closely connected. Many times the most challenging things are the most rewarding to work on and achieve. Sometimes I find the challenge of playing Mendelssohn and Mozart to be similar. Both had an ease of execution and conception that is privileged to only a few mortals. So as a performer, I find my job is to try to dispatch the music of Mendelssohn and Mozart with a similar ease to that which the composers themselves would have brought to their performances.

That’s a very tall order, and for most of us mortals, to match the daring and the intellect and the facility in performance of a Mendelssohn or Mozart is, frankly, beyond most of us. But the fun part of the challenge is to make that effort. Think about the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto’s last movement: does anyone want to hear a performance of that that sounds labored and afraid and not utterly delighted in the quickness of one’s own fingers and the joy of playing music for others? No. That music needs a performer who is fully in the element and reveling in the opportunity to play the piece. Mendelssohn is hard work, but I always have to try.

Masumi Per Rostad: At first these melodic viola parts made it difficult for me to balance my part in the ensemble. I wanted to play my heart out all the time! Over time, I began to realize that I wasn’t the first to have this same problem. I have a theory that Mendelssohn’s musicians had this same problem and that he adjusted his dynamic scheme just to be extra clear. For example, the highly unusual (and unnecessary) scenario of fortissimo for one voice and pianissimo for the other three is not unheard of in his quartets. In Mendelssohn’s music, you sometimes have to “interpret” the dynamics.

Joel Krosnick: The early quartets of Mendelssohn, Op. 12 and 13, are very much derived from the composer’s early impressions of the grandeur of the Beethoven quartets, especially Op. 74, Op. 95, and Op. 132. These early quartets must be played with a sense of classical clarity of form and motivic shape, and yet with a Romantic flexibility of phrase shape. It is hard to play them with a sense of their Beethovenian derivation, and yet play them like youthful, exuberant early-Romantic music. The Op. 44 quartets are extremely romantic, fiery, and exuberant. There is much florid and spectacular passagework for all the instruments, especially for the first violin. There are veritable floods of brilliantly written notes, which are hard to play with a lightness that will keep the quartet textures from being too dense.

It is important in these quartets also, despite their virtuosity, to remember their basic Romantic and lyrical qualities. The Op. 80 Quartet in F minor is a very special tragic work, written just after the death of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny and only months before his own death. It is hard to play the dramatic, stormy textures of this work without sounding simply angry. One must imbue the tremolos, double-notes, sforzandi, and other dramatic gestures of this work with a dark and tragic tonal quality.

Nicholas Kitchen: The ease with which Mendelssohn could express himself makes his fleeting music one of the great treasures of musical expression: the “Mendelssohn scherzo” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of the Octet, of both piano trios, to name a few. There is also a sweetness in his slow melodic imagination that is unforgettable in countless works. There is a tendency for his dramatic music to be more vigorous than awesome, and his ease in repeating patterns to weave a texture is a slightly dangerous feature. There is always variety in the way Mendelssohn shapes his repeated patterns, but if the performer is not active in bringing out this shaping, then the impression can be that there is too much repetition.

One of the most beautiful examples of the way Mendelssohn can enliven the use of patterns is in the writing of the last movement of the Octet. Here, he never fails to take the opportunity to allow the patterned material to pass in a lively way between the eight parts. So where patterns are repeated, there is never a “repetitive” sense, and this movement elicits joy no matter how many times one has heard it or played it.

Mendelssohn was primarily a pianist, although he did also study violin. In his chamber music, did he write idiomatically or gracefully for strings, or does the writing pose certain problems?

Daniel McDonough: As far as I can tell, Mendelssohn composed for stringed instruments quite well and with a brilliant sense of virtuosity. No complaints here.

David Finckel: Mendelssohn played the violin extremely well, and also the viola, and his writing for the stringed instruments is impeccably well thought out—I think more so than with many other great composers. Having Bach as a mentor and role model necessitated his understanding his instruments well. Look at how carefully Bach took the trouble to figure out the violin for those six sonatas and partitas. Mendelssohn took the same care and trouble, but he never wrote beyond the ability of the instrument to do something. That’s not to say it’s not difficult. But I don’t find, when I pick up the cello sonatas, things where I’d say it’s too bad Mendelssohn wasn’t a cellist, because he would have written this better.

Masumi Per Rostad: Mendelssohn is a fantastic string writer. He was, perhaps, the most fluid composer for the string quartet. As a viola player in a string quartet, I am positioned to hear pieces from the inside out. The voice leading that takes us from one chord to the next often makes crucial shifts from the inner voices. Mendelssohn writes so smoothly and naturally for the inner voices that it seems like I am always playing some sort of melody. I never feel like I am playing random notes like some kind of chord processor!

Joel Krosnick: Mendelssohn had the gift already from his great Octet, written in his teens, of sensing instinctively what would sound wonderful on stringed instruments. His lyrical writing, his technical passages, and his dramatic gestures could scarcely be more brilliantly written for the violins, viola, and cello.

Nicholas Kitchen: I read a book by a close friend of Mendelssohn’s, the composer Stephen Heller. Heller related how the D minor Piano Trio was first written in a much different way than we know it today: the piano writing was much simpler. Mendelssohn’s colleagues, including Heller, heard the piece in this early version and pointed out that the fundamental ideas were very well suited to a more virtuoso type of figuration in the piano writing. Mendelssohn saw the point and reworked the piano part so that we have the fireworks in the piano writing that we are so accustomed to today.

I think Mendelssohn’s musicianship was so well centered that his writing is a little like Bach’s: excellently written for the intended instrument, but not fundamentally led by the physical experience of playing that instrument. My own impression is that he succeeded equally well with piano writing and string writing. With the D minor Trio, he searched for instrumental display as a second thought, and of course he had no trouble in succeeding once that was included in his goals.

I think Mendelssohn’s physical ease in playing had a great effect on the way he imagined playing while writing. His facility in hearing and playing created its own kind of virtuosity. In the pieces where he provided metronome marks, the speeds that he chose are stunningly fast, but I don’t think they are chosen in any way to show off. They simply reflect a speed and fluidity that was natural for him.

What is it that you especially love or admire about Mendelssohn’s music—and how are you able to do so despite the constant exposure of some of his (mainly orchestral) works?

Daniel McDonough: I don’t feel they’re overexposed at all. Maybe I should go to more orchestra concerts. But seriously, Mendelssohn had a real thirst to learn from his predecessors and contemporaries, and his synthesis of this tradition with his own enviable talent made for a lot of great music. The mastery of his craft is always evident, but his individual voice is also unmistakable. I think for this reason I never get tired of listening to him. The early quartets, Op. 12 and 13, are good examples of this. He was totally obsessed with Beethoven’s music, especially the late quartets, and he learns from him and pays homage to these works without it ever sounding like Beethoven-lite.

David Finckel: Let’s start with the loving part. Like Schubert, Mendelssohn had a way of grabbing somebody’s heart with a melody, with a turn of a phrase, a modulation, a little moment here and there, an unexpected change of key. He’s a great melodist, and it’s hard not to love the great melodies he wrote. The admiration part is huge, because he stands in a very special place in the history of music as having been a real bridger of the ages, going back to the Baroque and into the ethic of the Romantic era. His music stylistically embraces his own time and the past and the future. His diversity of musical projects is truly astounding.

Basically having founded the school of the conductor (being an administrator and director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and various festivals) and having absorbed in an incredible way the culture of his time and before; having studied the classics; reading Greek; knowing politics, philosophy, literature, history; and God knows how many languages he spoke—these are things to be admired and emulated. I’d advise anybody who wants to get the most out of life to look at Mendelssohn’s life and the things he did. Yes, he did live a privileged life, his family had money, but look at what he did with it.

Masumi Per Rostad: Mendelssohn was great with creating textures, too. The textures he achieves with strings are always attractive and somehow compelling. I think that in many ways, he defined what idiomatic meant for string writing.

Joel Krosnick: The exuberance, dramatic spirit, and tender yet intense lyricism—all at the same time—in Mendelssohn’s quartets are unsurpassed by any other composer. The scherzi of Mendelssohn are legendary, and rightfully so. The slow movements, songs without words, really, are unduplicated by anyone who has ever written. He is unlike anyone else.

Nicholas Kitchen: The sweetness and the sprightly humor of Mendelssohn’s music, combined with his naturally complete craftsmanship, mean that if a performer puts even moderate effort into the performance, it is easy to feel the energy of the piece anew.

Could you single out one piece, or if necessary a small set of pieces, that you might regard as a favorite, and explain why?

Daniel McDonough: We just finished recording the Op. 80 Quartet, so that one is currently at the top of my favorites. This is a work, written just after the death of his sister Fanny, that trembles with anxiety and cries with anguish. You really get the sense that the poor guy was utterly devastated. He was still pretty young when he wrote it, and would end up being his final work. For a composer whose music often reflected his charmed and conservative upbringing, this piece feels raw and exposed, and I love that.

David Finckel: Several of them have a great impact on me. The Op. 13 A minor Quartet, which alludes to Beethoven very heavily in several of the movements, was composed very, very shortly after Beethoven’s late quartets were heard for the first time. Mendelssohn probably only heard or saw the score to Op. 132 once, if he was lucky, but somehow at this young age he captured the spirit and essence of what Beethoven was doing in his later years and worked it into his own language. It’s an incredibly profound and moving work and a tribute to Beethoven, and that connection is very special to me.

Another work that speaks very powerfully to me is the B♭ major String Quintet. I have a long association with that piece, having played it way back when I was at the Marlboro Festival. It’s practically the first piece by Mendelssohn I grew to know inside and out. In the outer movements, it’s more in the exuberant vein of the Mendelssohn we know and love; it has a delightful scherzo in the middle and a heart-wrenching, almost Beethovenian slow movement with one of the most beautiful cello solos in the chamber literature.

And the Second Piano Trio, the C minor trio, which has one of the most exciting, turbulent, and, in some ways, Beethovenesque first movements, absolutely one of the most virtuosic scherzos ever written, a beautiful song-without-words-type slow movement—and the last movement takes the most extraordinary turn of introducing the hymn melody at a most unexpected moment. The way Mendelssohn worked that in, and the way the piece ends triumphantly in C major after having come out of C minor, is one of the great moments in music.

Masumi Per Rostad: I love the Op. 81 quartet set. These four gems span his career and were collected and published together as a single opus after he died. They demonstrate the wide range of sincere expression and textural capability that he was able to draw out of the four voices. You can play them as short individual pieces or as a minisurvey of his quartet writing. I also want to throw in that he wrote a very nice viola sonata when he was just 14 that more people should play.

Nicholas Kitchen: There are the pieces that are the favorites of audiences: the octet, the piano trios, the Op. 13 quartet, the Op. 44 quartets, the orchestra pieces such as “Fingal’s Cave,” the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “Italian” Symphony, mentioning just a few. All these pieces are popular for the best reasons. However, my personal favorite is one that is a little less known: the A major Viola Quintet. I find the ideas in this piece to be so appealing and gently asymmetrical. And with the instrumental textures, I find them intricate but also delicate. I discover more and more layers every time I play the piece.

Joel Krosnick: I love all the quartets of Mendelssohn, the early Op. 12 and 13, the great Op. 44, and the tragic, stormy Op. 80. But if a chamber musician has to pick one work of Mendelssohn, how can he not pick his great Octet (for four violins, two violas, and two cellos)? As often as this work has been played, as often as it has been heard… there is only one Mendelssohn Octet. The lyricism, passion, tenderness, and fire of this work are unduplicated in the entire chamber-music literature. The first movement is so dramatically passionate; the scherzo is one of his greatest in any form; the slow movement is so tenderly yearning; the last movement is so jubilant in its heroism. There is only one Mendelssohn Octet. God bless it.