ABSTRACT
Mendelssohn's chamber music is usually thought to reflect the tastes of a classically inclined nineteenth-century composer who, during a short, meteoric career, remained content to build on the firm foundations of his predecessors Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. In this view, Mendelssohn is the supreme representative of the Restaurationszeit in Germany and the early Victorian period in England. He is the staunch upholder of conservative aesthetic values; no radical reformer or innovator, he is the composer of finely polished chamber works that fall easily and unobtrusively into the Classical paradigms (duo sonata, piano trio, string quartet and quintet) established by Mozart and Haydn in the eighteenth century and redefined by Beethoven in the early decades of the nineteenth. Mendelssohn is the conservator of historical models, who reveals no great anxiety of influence but a serene confidence that there are “no new paths to be cleared,” that in the best case what the accomplished composer does is to manage musical material “imperceptibly better than his immediate predecessors.” 1
