In addition to being born with the proverbial silver spoon, Felix Mendelssohn was virtually bestowed a golden baton as a natal gift. His parents’ household was among the most cultured and affluent in all of Berlin, but his family saw to it that his privilege was well tempered by discipline and responsibility. Young Felix arose at 5:00 every morning (6:00 on Sunday), and spent several hours in private tutoring with the best available teachers. When his musical talents became evident in his early years, he was first given instruction in piano, and soon thereafter in theory and composition by the distinguished pedagogue Carl Friedrich Zelter. Mendelssohn’s earliest dated composition is a cantata completed on January 3, 1820, three weeks before his eleventh birthday, though that work was almost certainly preceded by others whose exact dates are not recorded. To display the boy’s blossoming musical abilities, the Mendelssohn mansion was turned into a twice-monthly concert hall featuring the precocious youngster’s achievements. A large summer house was fitted as an auditorium seating several hundred people, and every other Sunday the city’s finest musicians were brought in to perform both repertory works and the latest flowers of Mendelssohn’s creativity. Those matinees — complemented with an elegant luncheon — began in 1822, when Mendelssohn was thirteen. He selected the programs, led the rehearsals, appeared as piano soloist, played violin in the chamber pieces, and even conducted, though in those early years he was still too short to be seen by the players in the back rows unless he stood on a stool. With sister Fanny participating as pianist, sister Rebecca as singer and brother Paul as cellist, it is little wonder that invitations to those happy gatherings were among the most eagerly sought and highly prized of any in Berlin society. By 1825, Mendelssohn had written over eighty works for those concerts, including operas and operettas, string quartets and other chamber pieces, concertos, motets and a series of thirteen symphonies for strings.

The D major Sextet for Piano, Violin, Two Violas, Cello and Bass, written for the Sunday household musical matinees, was completed on May 10, 1824, when Mendelssohn was fifteen. (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was premiered in Vienna only three days earlier.) The work, Classical in design and spirit but possessing those distinctive qualities of lightness and translucence that characterize so much of his music, is more a little concerto for piano with strings that Mendelssohn composed for himself than a fully democratic integration of all the instruments of the ensemble. The main theme area of the opening, sonata-form movement is filled with an entire clutch of melodic motives tripping one upon another; the second theme is announced by the piano alone and repeated by the strings. The movement is rounded out by a full development section and the return of the earlier themes in the recapitulation. The Adagio, in the romantically remote key of F-sharp major, is a small sonatina of hymnal nature. The following Minuetto is a true scherzo in all but name. A youthful impetuosity infects the finale, yet another sonata-form structure. (Mozart had a similar absorption with sonata forms.) A recall of the music of the Minuetto after the recapitulation and a dashing coda bring this charming Sextet to a vigorous close.

By Dr. Richard Rodda