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Did Mendelssohn revolutionise the string quartet?
The answer is, without a shadow of a doubt, yes with the
String Quartet in F minor
.
Showing great mastery of acoustic space, Mendelssohn, creates a harmonic
bridge between Beethoven and late Romanticism. The work was written
in 1847. He had less than four months left to live. He was in pain, terrified at
the idea of his mortality, and disappointed by the hostility and the envy he
met with in the music world. In May he learned the shattering news of the
death of his sister, the pianist and composer Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn (17
May 1847): he is said to have fainted. For nine years he had not composed for a
string quartet. He chose the anguished key of F minor to convey the urgency,
the fatality, and his distaste for the behaviour of his fellow men and for his
own life in particular.
This cry of despair should prove to Mendelssohn’s detractors that his works
are not exactly ‘light’. There is no attempt at refinement; the movement is
sensuous and ghostly. The value of the dissonance is not important. We are
reminded of Beethoven’s final works. Passionate composition was his only
means of putting across his feelings.
Mendelssohn’s writing becomes expressionist, announcing the scherzos of
Mahler and Janacek’s
Intimate Letters
. We are far from the common image of
Mendelssohn as an amiable, carefree man. In the drama and solitude of this
requiem he shows his true face. Mendelssohn does not hesitate to make a
masterpiece out of ‘ugliness’, to explore a form that disintegrates beneath the
brutal attacks of writing that has apparently lost its structure.
32 MENDELSSOHN_TALICH QUARTET