String Quartet in F minor, Op.80 (1847)

The sudden death of his sister Fanny in May 1847, when she was 42 and he was 38, had a traumatic effect on Felix Mendelssohn. A composer and accomplished musician herself, she had always been exceptionally close to her brother – “part of myself every moment of my life,” as he said to a friend a few days after her death. The String Quartet in F minor was written three or four months later at Interlaken in Switzerland, where his family had taken him to recover from the shock. It was the last major work Mendelssohn completed: he died in November of the same year.

A requiem for Fanny, and perhaps an anticipation of the composer’s own death too, the Quartet in F minor is not a happy work. When he played it to his colleague Ignaz Moscheles shortly after it was written and Moscheles observed, wrongly, that all four movements were in F minor – the Adagio is actually in A flat major – Mendelssohn did not disagree: “Yes, that hadn’t occurred to me,” he said, implicitly acknowledging that, whatever the technical situation, all four movements carry the same emotional message.

From the dramatic beginning, marked by a painful stab on the cello and shuddering tremolandos in all four parts, the pressure is scarcely relaxed throughout the first movement. The comparatively lyrical second subject, quietly introduced in the relative major by first violin, is effectively undermined by the persistent syncopations on the cello underneath it. Far from finding peace or more than momentary consolation, the Allegro vivace assai proceeds inexorably to its despairing presto conclusion.

The second movement, the least Mendelssohnian of all Mendelssohn’s scherzos, is no joke either. If there is anything remotely playful here, alongside the obsessionally syncopated main theme, it is the eerie pizzicato cadences and, in the middle section, the sinister conspiracy between a ground bass on viola and cello and a stealthy counter-melody on the two violins. The Adagio offers only the illusion of a point of repose. Its harmonies, as Moscheles observed, persistently tend towards the minor. Melodic beauty is unsettled by disruptive rhythms and structural balance is upset by a recapitulation that starts too soon and is itself interrupted by a worrying development.

The persecuted Finale of this uniquely inspired string quartet confirms the desperate message: more disturbing even than the anxiously syncopated main theme and the disorientated textures it encounters is an ending which drives the first violin to expressive extremes far beyond the conventional chamber-music limitations.