Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings

I featured the Scherzo from this work in the radio show Archie's Archives.  This afternoon, though I got a desire to hear the whole thing—four movements—in its entirety.  Somehow I had a CD of it in our car, so we could listen to it on long journeys.  I must have listened to this CD, because I was familiar with both the first movement and the third movement (the Scherzo, which is especially famous).

Mendelssohn is a composer whom I especially like; very possibly because of he having written this very Octet.  Musicologists note that octet that had been written by other composers, before this one, were actually two quartets, seated across from one another, playing antiphonally.  (I'll explain that another time.)  Most importantly, Mendelssohn is said to have instructed that this octet was to be played not antiphonally, but as if all the players constituted a tiny orchestra.

Mendelssohn wrote a lot of chamber music,  that is, Trios, Quartets, Quintets, Duets, etc.  Every weekend, they had a concert night in the Mendelssohn household, which is a huge incentive for the young folk to compose their own music to be performed at these musical evenings.  (The Octet was composed when Mendelssohn was 18.)  Felix and his sister, Fanny, were both accomplished instrumentalists.  In fact, Fanny was also a composer.  Felix's string quartets are among the best known string quartets we have, together with this of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.  (Shortly after Haydn's time, lots of composers began writing String quartets.  The reason being that any group of friends, two of whom could play violin, and one play the viola, and one play the cello, could form a string quartet, and frequently did.  All these amateur String quartets were on the lookout for music to play, and anyone who composed a string quartet was reasonably sure of getting it performed fairly promptly.  It's no fun writing a String quartet if nobody plays it, I can tell you.)

One of the important aspects of a String quartet is: counterpoint.  This is a hard property of a piece to describe, but it makes a piece so much more interesting to listen to!  And Mendelssohn was a master of introducing just enough counterpoint to make his music interesting. 

[Bach, writing music some decades before, was a master of counterpoint.  Audiences of the late 1700s found so much counterpoint difficult to tolerate, and Mendelssohn found just the right degree of counterpoint that was pleasing to audiences of his time, and even our time.]

In the recording I own, the First Movement was the longest, about 15 minutes long; each of the others were about 6 minutes long.