Composed 1827; 30 minutes
When Felix Mendelssohn composed this A minor Quartet, he was just 18 – but already fully aware he was writing in Beethoven’s shadow. At the same time, he was confronting one of the great 19th century compositional challenges: how to reconcile free Romantic expression with the rigor of classical form. He found his answer by turning to Beethoven – and especially to the recently deceased composer’s late quartets. These then little understood works offered Mendelssohn a wealth of technical lessons, which he absorbed with the skill and apparent ease that comes only from deep study.
Beethoven had completed his own A minor quartet, Op. 132 between July and October 1827, just two years before Mendelssohn began writing today’s quartet. Commentators have often noted the similarity in texture between Mendelssohn’s outer movements and those of Beethoven. Mendelssohn knew Beethoven’s late quartets intimately – especially evident in his intense, deeply felt Adagio, whose chromatic fugato echoes a device Beethoven had used repeatedly. The movement’s contemplative stillness recalls the ethereal ‘Sacred Song of Thanksgiving’ from Op. 132. Yet Mendelssohn’s music recreates these echoes without ever sounding imitative. Beethoven’s late style had opened the door to inwardness and ambiguity; Mendelssohn, just beginning to find his voice, walked straight through that door.
The A minor Quartet, Op. 13, springs from a single, short, three-note motif – more question than theme. It resembles the ‘Muss es sein?’ – Must it be? – idea from Beethoven’s F major quartet, Op. 135. Mendelssohn’s motif, however, comes from a love song he had recently composed called Frage (Question). His three-note question (‘Is it true?’) appears in the slow introduction, and echoes throughout all four movements. “You will hear its notes resound in the first and last movements, and sense its feeling in all four,” he wrote to a friend. The motif becomes the urgent, driving theme of the first movement and the starting point for the noble, chorale-like Adagio. It underpins the graceful Intermezzo and even joins the featherlight music of a miniature scherzo embedded at its center.
Echoes of the motif return in the dramatic recitative that opens the finale. After an intense and tightly argued Presto, the connection with the song becomes unmistakable. Mendelssohn musically quotes the line “She who feels with me and stays ever true to me,” revealing the poetic, programmatic impulse behind the quartet. The young Mendelssohn had recently fallen deeply in love. That experience inspired the song . . . and the entire quartet. In Op. 13, Mendelssohn fuses Romantic emotion with classical structure, poetic allusion with rigorous craft. It is the work of a teenager possessed not just with astonishing talent, but also a deep historical awareness – and bold enough to place himself in dialogue with Beethoven.