Chamber music matinée 1

Chamber music always played an important role in the Mendelssohn family. And from the very beginning: Even the seven-year-old Felix was trained in ensemble playing by the Parisian violinist Pierre Baillot, and Mendelssohn’s earliest compositions include several pieces for violin and piano as well as a series of scholastic fugues written under the supervision of his Berlin composition teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter. A good quarter of a century later – in 1847, the last year of his life – Mendelssohn undertook a fourth journey to Switzerland, where he began to sketch a final, stormy string quartet – his sixth – in memory of the tragic loss of his sister Fanny Hensel. It was completed after his return to Leipzig, but not published until after Mendelssohn’s death in 1850.
It is a deeply autobiographical work, as Felix gave eloquent expression to his deeply felt grief over the death of his sister Fanny just a few months before the end of his own life. The structures of the music are repeatedly torn apart by stylistic breaks – by agitated tremolos and by interruptions and leaps in the first movement, by the macabre scherzo of the second movement, which begins immediately with disconcerting syncopations without an introduction, by the haunting lyricism in the slow movement and by the dissonant energy in the final movement.
Béla Bartók did not explore any other musical genre as frequently and intensively as the string quartet. The six works he created between 1908 and 1939 are not only among the highlights of his oeuvre, but also among the most important contributions to this genre in the 20th century. In 1945, the year of his death, he was still jotting down initial ideas for a seventh string quartet, although he was unable to complete it. The sixth string quartet was composed in 1939 in the Bernese Oberland and in Budapest. Stylistically, it marks the beginning of Bartók’s late work. It is his last major work before his emigration and, surprisingly, the composer returns to the traditional four-movement form here. It is fitting that this string quartet makes use of a more traditional musical language and increasingly features tonal references again. The first three movements open with a “mesto” introduction, whereby the number of voices is expanded in each case. In the first movement it is played by the viola alone, in the second by the cello, which is counterpointed by one of the other instruments. In the third movement, it then appears in three voices until the actual musical substance is presented in the final movement – the final point of the entire string quartet. The resigned tone of the quartet leaves no doubt that this is a work of farewell. These are quiet and melancholy sounds with which Bartók bids farewell to the old world.