String Quartet No. 6 (Mendelssohn)
The String Quartet No.6 in F minor op 80 is the last completed work of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He created it in the year of his death in 1847. It takes both Mendelssohn 's oeuvre and in the history of the string quartet genre in a unique position.
Formation, structure and style
When some years ago ailing health Mendelssohn in May 1847 returned from a trip to England to Leipzig, he learned of the unexpected death of his sister and main caregiver, the composer Fanny Hensel. Hit hard, he broke with close family members on a relaxing break to Interlaken in Switzerland. Finally to compose After initial incapacity, he went to work and closed it in September of the year in Leipzig from. The movements are:
- Allegro vivace assai - Presto
- Allegro assai
- Adagio
- Finale: Allegro molto
The resulting work is a not complete, but until then once far-reaching break with the formal requirements of the classical string quartet and also Mendelssohn's own previous genus contributions represent, which until then were based on the structures about the formative string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, although already with an individual Sheet provided. Also, the expressive and massive character of the work astonished contemporary audiences to the utmost, as Mendelssohn's compositions were previously characterized by great intimacy.
The first movement is dominated at the beginning of angry, dark tremolos. Unbridled groundbreaking, expressive motifs emerge, only to sink again in an aimless acting power. The tempo is marked by a sharp dotted rhythm that is driven by the energetic Scherzo syncope and a stubborn ostinato on. The Adagio, which changes according to a harmonically wayward minor sigh after flat major, looked conciliatory with his lyrical singing until the finale returns to the dark turmoil of the first two sentences.
Reception
Was the basis of the background of the development time and the work is often regarded as autobiographical. So the work is a tribute or a "Requiem" for his deceased sister and expression of his desperate grief. Starting from this premise, many reviewers want to work in various allusions found on the compositions and musical preferences of Fanny Hensel. At its premiere, the work was taken up reserved. Many contemporary critics considered it unquartettmäßig, for the symphonic or experimentally, where it was often the same critics who had reproached him, his chamber works and other compositions were formalistic of too much surface gloss.
Two months after completion of the work Mendelssohn died after several strokes. The often posed question which way the works of Mendelssohn would have taken for this potentially revolutionary string quartet, must remain unanswered. The first rapidly fading memory of Mendelssohn was also his last work take no direct influence on the genre of the string quartet and let it stand as a singular phenomenon. In its radical strangeness comparable string quartets, there were only several decades later, during the transition from late Romanticism to Modernism.