Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 1809 - 4 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphonies, concertos, piano music and chamber music. His best-known works include his overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the oratorio Elijah, the overture The Hebrides, his mature Violin Concerto, and his String Octet. The melody for the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is also his. Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words are his most famous solo piano compositions.
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Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor, Op. 3 (1824 October-1825 January)
Dedication: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
1. Allegro molto - Più allegro (0:00)
2. Andante (9:56)
3. Allegro molto (16:54)
4. Finale. Allegro vivace (22:54)
The Atlantis Ensemble
Jaap Schröder violin: Matteo Gofriller, Venice c.1700;
Penelope Crawford fortepiano: Conrad Graf, Vienna, 1835
Daniel Foster viola: Luciano Bini, 1980
Enid Sutherland cello: anon. Tyrolean, 18th century
Description by Blair Johnston [-]
Felix Mendelssohn's first three official opuses -- the three piano quartets, Opp. 1, 2, and 3 -- present as clear a picture of his youthful development as we could ever hope for. Opus 1 is a nice piece, undeniably impressive when observed singly, but hardly of Opus 2's caliber. And Opus 2, in turn, pales next to Opus 3. The Quartet for piano and strings in B minor, Op. 3, in fact, turns out to have been the piece that made Mendelssohn's career, for when the renowned composer Luigi Cherubini studied and admired it while Felix and his father were on a trip to Paris in 1825, Papa Mendelssohn was at last convinced that his son might have a lucrative career. There and then, in Paris during March 1825, Felix Mendelssohn for all intents and purposes became a professional composer.
The Opus 3 piano quartet was started in late 1824 and finished a few weeks into the next year, shortly before Mendelssohn's 16th birthday. It is dedicated to Goethe, whom Mendelssohn had met a few years back. The piece has four movements. One gets the sense at the very start of the first that the composer has learned to fly on his own; whereas the Opus 1 and Opus 2 piano quartets began along prototypically Classical rhetorical lines (with square, urgent phrases that seem a conflation of Mozart and Beethoven), here the opening gesture is more unique. The piano, unaccompanied, mumbles a quiet Neapolitan-sixth idea that immediately turns on itself and sprouts wings that, if slightly altered, could sound almost like Schumann. The strings enter shortly, as one would expect, but do not immediately repeat the pianist's idea; first they throw caution to the wind and glide up the chromatic ladder. None of this is at all from the textbook of high Classicism that Mendelssohn studied so diligently as a boy. Mendelssohn the adult composer is appearing out of the brilliant, shining, distracting cloud that was Mendelssohn the boy-prodigy composer.
Length or size of score, too, can sometimes be a measuring stick of confidence (though beware: in music, brevity is sometimes a sign of deeper confidence than enormity!). The B minor Piano Quartet, Op. 3, fills nearly double the amount of paper used for the C minor or F minor piano quartets. The E major Andante is absolutely unhurried; the Allegro molto scherzo movement is enormous compared to the scherzo of Op. 1 and the Intermezzo of Op. 2; Mendelssohn has his thoughts, knows what they are, and thinks nothing of making room for as many of them as he wishes. And even though the virtuoso piano writing of the finale seems a throwback to the manner of the two previous piano quartets, the ideas around which the pianist is twirling and whirling were baked in a different oven -- and thus the virtuosic frosting put over them is likewise more sophisticated.