Among the many testimonies to Mendelssohn’s precocity and industriousness is an 1824 diary entry by pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, who taught piano to Felix and his highly gifted sister Fanny. “This is a family the likes of which I have never known,” wrote Moscheles. “Felix, a boy of 15, is a phenomenon. What are all prodigies as compared with him? Gifted children, but nothing else. This Felix Mendelssohn is already a mature artist, and yet but 15 years old! We at once settled down together for several hours, for I was obliged to play a great deal when really I wanted to hear him and see his compositions, for Felix had to show me a concerto in C minor, a double concerto, and several motets; and all so full of genius, and at the same time so correct and thorough!”
A year or so after Moscheles penned that encomium, Mendelssohn composed his masterful String Octet, probably for one of the Sunday musicales held at the family home in Berlin. The work was instantly recognized as a worthy companion to Beethoven’s Septet of 1799 and Schubert’s Octet of 1824, both scored for mixed ensembles of strings and winds. It soon eclipsed the popular double string quartets of Louis Spohr, then one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. Unlike Spohr, Mendelssohn set aside the conventions of quartet writing and freely deployed the eight instruments in a dazzling variety of combinations, using techniques that he had honed in his early string symphonies. In addition to being a virtuoso pianist, Mendelssohn was an excellent string player and frequently took part in performances of the Octet as a violist. Yet the brilliance of the first violin part reflects his debt to his violin teacher Eduard Rietz, to whom the score is dedicated.
In keeping with Mendelssohn’s instructions that the Octet should be played “in symphonic orchestral style,” the opening Allegro moderato combines full-bodied sonorities with the transparency of chamber music. Mendelssohn cuts straight to the chase, allowing the surging waves of the main theme to sweep over the listener before releasing their latent energy and drama. The Andante flirts with tragedy, but never quite crosses the line. Twice, its dark-hued lyricism is magically illuminated by shafts of radiance in the form of pearly cascades of notes highlighted against a softly pulsing background. In marking the Scherzo to be played “as lightly as possible,” Mendelssohn anticipated his diaphanous A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture of 1826. According to Fanny, the movement was inspired by the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe’s Faust. “One feels,” she wrote, “so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial progression. At the end, the first violin takes flight with a feathery lightness—and all has vanished.” Witches’ revels give way to sheer bravura in the madcap Presto, a propulsive fugato that features a broadly striding theme based, somewhat incongruously, on a well-known phrase from Handel’s “Hallelujah” Chorus (“And He shall reign”).
Equally renowned as a violinist and composer, George Enescu was something of a Romanian Béla Bartók. Exact contemporaries, the two men were mutual admirers and occasionally concertized together. Moreover, they shared a keen interest in the vernacular music of their native lands, as well as a predilection for cyclical, organic musical forms. Like the Hungarian, Enescu followed a trajectory from late Romanticism and the folkish idiom of his two popular Romanian Rhapsodies to the austere, increasingly pithy language of his late chamber music. Although he described himself as “essentially a polyphonist” who eschewed “pretty chord progressions,” he developed a sensitivity to musical line at an early age thanks to his studies under master lyricists Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire.
Nineteen-year-old Enescu was poised on the threshold of his international career when he composed the String Octet in Paris in 1900. As he later recalled, the work represented an attempt to fuse Liszt’s technique of thematic transformation with the “cyclical” musical forms associated with Franck. “I found myself grappling with a structural problem, wishing to write the Octet in four linked movements, while respecting the autonomy of each movement, so that together they would form a single, extremely enlarged sonata movement. The whole piece would last 40 minutes. I wore myself out trying to hold together a piece of music articulated in four segments of such length that each of them threatened to snap at any moment. An engineer casting his first suspension bridge across a river could not have been more apprehensive than I was at the prospect of filling my music staff paper with notes. But the challenge was exhilarating.” In its later orchestral version, the Octet would become one of Enescu’s most widely performed works.
Enescu’s building technique is clear from the start: The first movement opens with a broad theme in full-bodied unison that swoops and soars above a pedal-point tremolo. This leads to a long, intricate canon for violin and viola, which in turn gives way to a section characterized by softly murmuring triplets in the inner voices. Thus, within the first five minutes Enescu has introduced three of the many recurring melodic and rhythmic motifs that define the Octet’s cyclical form. Although the scoring for double string quartet makes for a certain sameness in timbre, Enescu sidesteps monotony by deploying the instruments in varying configurations and alternating homophonic and contrapuntal textures. Harmonically, the Octet ranges between the murky sound world of Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (composed just a year earlier) and the more lucid tonalities of the Brahms sextets. Canonic and imitative writing is increasingly prominent in the later movements: the athletic, scherzo-like Très fougueux (“Very high-spirited”); the slow, muted Lentement, which Enescu called “a sort of nocturne”; and the seamlessly attached Mouvement de valse bien rythmée, or “Rhythmic Waltz,” which culminates in a massive fugato built on themes we’ve heard before.
—Harry Haskell