Quintet No. 2 in B-flat major for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello, Op. 87
Felix Mendelssohn

- Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg
- Died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig
- Composed in 1845
- First CMS performance on December 13, 1969, by the Orford String Quartet (violinists Andrew Dawes and Kenneth Perkins, violist Terence Helmer, and cellist Marcel Saint-Cyr) and violist Raphael Hillyer
- Duration: 29 minutes

In the summer of 1845, Felix Mendelssohn was in Frankfurt, and while he was enjoying a productive spell he completed a string quintet in B-flat major. He did not send it to his publisher; he wasn’t happy with the piece, and it would not be released to the public until 1851, four years after his death. Mendelssohn was always hard on himself as a composer, and it seems that he wasn’t quite satisfied with the work’s finale. His friend the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles recalled that one evening in 1846 when they “looked at the Viola Quintet in B-flat major . . . Mendelssohn claimed that the last movement was not good.”

What was the deficit? The movement is exuberant and flashy; it’s got a furious, Mozartian fugal passage in the middle, a prayerful viola duet for some lyrical contrast, and a soaring final section reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s early String Octet. Joyous explosions and prayers are really the stuff of Mendelssohn’s Op. 87 String Quintet, and I might conjecture that the purported issue with the last movement is only that we get so little development of the more solemn, praying, second subject.

Such is not the case in the rest of the work. A cascading, contrapuntal, chorale-like idea appears as the somber contrasting tune in the opening Allegro vivace. The movement is dominated by energetic bursts in the first violin supported by shimmering tremolos, and the prayer idea is initially introduced as a brief respite. But this melody becomes a primary focus of the development section, and is varied in a striking, Romantic fashion in the coda. The second movement admittedly does not pray or explode, but flirts; a lyrical tune appears momentarily, played by a viola and then a violin, but the primary action of the movement is a fluttering atmosphere rather than melody or harmony.

Hopeful prayer is cast as an antidote to grief in the third movement. This Adagio opens with a funeral march, which intensifies into some of the most pained and passionate music that Mendelssohn wrote. The ensemble veers to the edge of desperation for several minutes before we finally get a glimpse of hope in a major-key chorale. He alternates these ideas until the climax of the movement. The funeral music is played above tremolos that bring to mind the energy of the work’s first movement, and indeed that shaking accompaniment pushes a harmonic transfiguration that allows the hymn’s spirit to win out in a peaceful D major. This tonality allows Mendelssohn to create a clever, smooth, yet contrasting transition to the finale, which begins attacca (played without a break between movements). In context, the finale feels like an elating answer to the prayers heard in the rest of the piece, even if the composer might have made a few tweaks had he lived long enough to get back to it.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.