ABSTRACT
Of Mendelssohn’s best-known and most beloved works, the Octet perhaps more than any other continues to resist critical inquiry and elucidation, so that it paradoxically remains by virtue of its unusual scoring, striving toward monumentality, and depth of expression among his least understood compositions. First, as to its overwhelming familiarity: It has become a kind of metaphor for what Greg Vitercik recently labeled “Mendelssohn’s preposterously masterful early output” 1 —that is, the incomprehensible idea of a sixteen-year-old producing an innovative chamber work that rivals in conception, textural complexity and variety, and compositional scope the very best of the chamber-music repertoire. It would be difficult, I suspect, to find string players who do not admit to enjoying performing this ebullient work, which ever since its composition in 1825 has had an irrepressibly strong performance tradition. A review of its early history gives some idea of the durability of the composition and its popularity, and some of the remarkable ways in which it was put to use. Created for the birthday of Mendelssohn’s violin instructor and friend, Eduard Rietz (it fell on October 17; the autograph of the Octet is dated October 15, 1825), the work was at first performed privately at the Mendelssohn Berlin residence. We do not know the complete original cast of musicians, but it is clear that Mendelssohn designed the florid first violin part, which not occasionally takes on the character of a concerto, for Rietz, a protégé of Pierre Rode. Almost certainly Mendelssohn himself, a skilled violinist and violist, dispatched one of the parts, and there is the possibility too that his brother, Paul, a worthy amateur cellist, participated (in 1829, Mendelssohn dedicated to Paul the Variations concertantes op. 17, for cello and piano).
