By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her first book, Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2025.
Young composers seem to be drawn to the string octet: intrigued, perhaps, by its theatrical proportions, opulent sonic canvas, and relative rarity. This evening’s program features two works by teenage composers—the sixteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn and the eighteen-year-old George Enescu—that have become classics of the genre. (Shostakovich’s well-known Two Pieces for String Octet, composed when he was eighteen years old, fit this description as well.) Given their early position within each composer’s body of work, such pieces are often heard as evidence of things to come, mined for clues as to the composer’s emerging signature style. Alternatively, youthful works are sometimes treated more like playthings, fun and novel rather than wholly representative.
Yet while these analytical approaches can be an illuminating, they aren’t entirely necessary. Both Mendelssohn and Enescu’s octets are notable not just for what they precede, but for what they are: exuberant, exciting, openhearted displays of musicality. Both embrace virtuosity, inviting the performers to shine as individuals and as a collective. And both are also immensely ambitious, interweaving dense fugues and complex counterpoint with yearning, luxurious melodies. No matter the age of their composers, these are examples of musical beauty worth celebrating.
Felix Mendelssohn, Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 (1825)
By the time he was fourteen, the prodigiously talented Felix Mendelssohn had already composed sonatas for both violin and piano, a set of piano quartets, and pieces for string quartet and piano trio—to mention just a few. His preternatural talent as both a composer and a performer astonished audiences. Goethe, who had heard a fourteen-year-old Mozart play the piano in 1763, met Mendelssohn, then twelve, in 1821. Comparing the two, he observed that Mendelssohn had “the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child.” The Octet builds on these chamber-music predecessors. Its larger ensemble seems appropriate to its extravagant sounds—as if a single quartet’s worth of players couldn’t possibly contain so much vivacity. The first violinist he had in mind as he wrote, Eduard Rietz, was a friend and mentor just a few years older than the composer, and Mendelssohn’s admiration for Rietz’s talents shines through in the bravura gestures that he offers to this player throughout the piece.
The quartet’s first movement begins with a splash, as a bold, climbing arpeggiated gesture is introduced in the first violin and then passed around the ensemble. Written in sonata form, it is consistently kinetic, with an undercurrent of restlessness underlying even its sweet second theme. The mood changes in the second movement, a lyrical, minor-key Andante which features plaintive solo melodies interspersed with stormier chromatic passages that are voiced by various combinations of players. The third movement is an early example of the fantastical, rapid-fire approach to scherzos which would go on to become a hallmark of the composer’s style; his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel, would later write that when listening to this movement, “one feels close to the world of spirits lightly carried up into the air.” And the finale is fittingly capacious: a gigantic fugal piece whose busy, eighth-note subject is introduced in the cello’s low register before bouncing up and around the ensemble, finally landing in the first violin’s stratosphere. Like the octet as a whole, the movement bubbles over with generosity and warmth, ultimately reaching a high-octane close.
George Enescu, Octet in C Major, Op. 7 (1900)
Like Mendelssohn, Enescu demonstrated musical promise from an extraordinarily young age. He began composing at age five, and commenced conservatory studies in Vienna when he was seven. As an adult, he became a sort of musical jack-of-all-trades: a sought-after violinist, pianist, and conductor; a well-respected composer; and a renowned musical mind who was reputed to know the entire Ring cycle and most of Bach’s works by heart. At the time that he composed the octet, he had just graduated from the Paris Conservatoire, where he came into contact with some of the day’s most prominent European musicians. The piece embodies both the scope of Enescu’s ambitions as a composer and the singular historical moment in which he worked. Crafted on a grand scale, it luxuriates in sumptuous late-Romantic harmonies and elaborate counterpoint, while also embracing the angular rhythms and crunchy chromaticism of early-twentieth-century modernism.
The octet consists of four movements played without pause, a quality which draws attention to its cyclical form. The first movement announces its grandeur from the start, with a lengthy first theme voiced in octaves. A striking variety of additional thematic figures emerges over the course of the movement. Sometimes, Enescu treats the ensemble as a mini-orchestra, with triple-stop chords for multiple instruments creating an enormous, symphonic sound. At other points, the players create haunting, drone-like textures over which a solo violin might play a freely wandering line; subtle shifts in tempo heighten the improvisatory feel. The second movement is explosive. It begins with a furious, ultra-expressive fugue, which shows none of the academic restraint often associated with that form. Soon, it swerves into a trio section full of syrupy melodies and fancy chromatic flourishes, before gathering energy for another fugal section. At the beginning of the third movement, all eight players mute their instruments, producing a thick, subdued tone. All eight instrumentalists play nearly without rest throughout the movement, creating a warm foundation upon which individual melodic lines can rest. A storm gathers at its end, eventually transforming into the fourth movement: a spooky, frenetic waltz. Emotionally far from the elegant ballroom dance that the name implies, this waltz feels almost confrontational, like a dance performed by two opposing boxers getting ready for a match. Its sharply accented rhythms share space with elaborate arpeggiated figures. In the final moments of the octet, Enescu evokes Schubert’s Cello Quintet with a prominent figure that descends from D-flat to C—a subtle but unmistakable homage to another beloved classic of the more-than-a-quartet string repertoire.
