String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13 by Felix Mendelssohn ((3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847)

Music

The String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13, was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1827. Written when he was 18 years old, it was, despite its official number, Mendelssohn's first mature string quartet.

Story

Though Mendelssohn was still a teenager when he wrote this quartet, he was already an experienced composer of chamber music. He had already written the String Quintet, Op. 18, the Octet for Strings, Op. 20, and three piano quartets, besides several youthful string quartets which remained unpublished. A few months beforehand he had produced his opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho, which was not a success. (His quartet Opus 12, though it bears an earlier opus number, was actually written two years later.)

Mendelssohn wrote the quartet a few months after the death of Ludwig van Beethoven, and the influence of Beethoven's late string quartets (written only shortly before and some of which had not even been published when Mendelssohn started his composition) is evident in this work. 

Beethoven's late works received a lukewarm reception at best, and many – including Mendelssohn's own father Abraham – agreed with composer Louis Spohr that they were an "indecipherable, uncorrected horror".[citation needed] Mendelssohn, however, was fascinated by them: he studied all the scores he could obtain and included several allusions to Beethoven's quartets in Opus 13. 

But more than being simply a homage to his great predecessor, Mendelssohn's quartet takes the implications of Beethoven's late quartets – above all their suggestions of cyclic formal organization – and develops them in radically new directions. As Benedict Taylor writes in a very detailed analysis, this quartet "is the most thorough-going essay in cyclic form, both by Mendelssohn and by any composer to that time, until the late works of Franck at the very least".

As a unifying motif, Mendelssohn included a quotation from his song "Ist es wahr?" ('Is it true?', Op. 9, no. 1) – "Is it true that you wait for me in the arbour by the vineyard wall?" – composed a few months earlier.

 Mendelssohn includes the title of the song in the score of the quartet, recalling the title Beethoven wrote on the last movement of his Op. 135 string quartet "Muss es sein?" (Must it be?). But, unlike the introspective, existential quality of Beethoven's quartet, Mendelssohn's work is passionate and richly romantic. "...This quartet, relying heavily on compositional techniques of late Beethoven, links Classical form to Romantic expression," writes Lucy Miller.

Movements

This work has four movements:

1. Adagio (A major) – Allegro vivace (A minor, sonata form)[a]
2. Adagio non lento (F major)
3. Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto (A minor) – Allegro di molto[b] (A major)
4. Presto[c] (A minor) – Adagio non lento (A major)

A typical performance lasts roughly 28 minutes.