The Allegro moderato ma con fuoco tumbles forth with blistering energy, and the second movement injects deeply felt emotional undercurrents beneath the imaginatively scored ambling. In the first two movements Mendelssohn pens a first-violin part filled with the sort of virtuosity that Rietz would soon face in the D minor Violin Concerto. Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed and more strongly emphasized than is usual in pieces of this character.” He would later arrange the Octet’s Scherzo as an orchestral piece with wind parts so that it might be used as an alternative movement in his C minor Symphony. In this regard, Mendelssohn’s Octet is quite closely related to the dozen string symphonies he had been composing during the preceding years, a connection underscored by the composer’s instruction on the published score: “This Octet must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style. Where Spohr’s two string quartets operate as independent units, Mendelssohn uses his eight instruments as a single ensemble capable of any interactive permutations. Louis Spohr had produced the first of his four “double quartets” in 1823, but despite their identical combination of instruments they hew to a fundamentally different concept from Mendelssohn’s. The string octet was in no way a classic chamber music genre. It was Franz Liszt who broke the news to Mendelssohn. Rietz was on the way to becoming an accomplished conductor, too, when he was swept away by tuberculosis in 1832, a few months after his twenty-ninth birthday. Rietz had been the concertmaster of the Berlin Court Orchestra in 1819, and that was the position he held when Mendelssohn wrote for him his rarely played D minor Violin Concerto (not to be confused with the later, more famous E minor Concerto). He wrote it as a birthday gift for his friend and violin teacher, Eduard Rietz, and the florid first-violin part stands a compliment to that musician’s abilities.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), perhaps the most extraordinary composer–prodigy in the history of music, was just midway between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays when he composed this piece.
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