Max Bruch: String Octet in B flat major, Op. posth.
By the age of 20, Max Bruch (1838-1920) was captivating German audiences as a budding opera composer, and for the next sixty years, he built his sterling reputation on his many works for choir and individual voices. But modern audiences tend not to know of Bruch’s vocal roots, given the outsize influence of a handful of scores he wrote for soloist and orchestra: Kol Nidrei for cello, the Scottish Fantasy for violin, and above all the First Violin Concerto.
When the 82-year-old Bruch reworked a recent attempt at a quintet into the Octet for Strings in 1920, it had been a full sixty years since he had published any chamber music besides duets with piano accompaniment. He died later that year, and other than an unheralded radio broadcast in 1937, the Octet was out of the public eye until the score was finally published for the first time in 1996.
Bruch’s Octet never stood a chance at the time of its origins anyway, in that cynical age after the carnage of World War I when Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok and others pulled musical traditions apart at the seams, each in their own disruptive ways. Bruch was writing in an idiom deeply influenced by Brahms, with an eye turned back to Mendelssohn and Schumann, those keepers of the Classical flame. Bruch’s melodies are as hummable as you’d expect from a musician whose first teacher was a singer (his own mother), and the string textures are rich and lucid, never getting muddied up by the profusion of inner voices. Mendelssohn’s seminal Octet exerts an undeniable influence, and there is a lovely symmetry in hearing these two works comingle—one from a teenage firebrand, the other from a sentimental octogenarian, both of them keen students of music’s past.
© 2023 Aaron Grad.
Felix Mendelssohn: String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20
Growing up in a privileged family of bankers in Berlin, Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) often played chamber music at home with the best young musicians in the city. Piano was his primary instrument, but he could comfortably handle violin and viola parts as well, thanks to his years of study with Eduard Rietz, a prodigy who became the concertmaster of the Berlin court orchestra at 17.
In 1825, the 16-year-old Mendelssohn gave his friend and teacher a most precious birthday present: the Octet for Strings (Op. 20). The German composer Louis Spohr had published a work for two string quartets earlier that year, and Mendelssohn might have been aware of it, but his approach in the Octet was wholly original, treating it as one unified ensemble instead of two opposing groups. The orchestral grandeur of the music is apparent from the outset, with the first violinist rising over a saturated bed of slurred tremolos and pulsing off-beats. It would be easy for this profusion of textures to get messy and clouded, but Mendelssohn’s lucid orchestration only intensifies the deft progress through the customary sonata form, a structure dispatched with the fluidity of Bach and the rigor of Beethoven.
To counter the robust first movement, the Andante establishes a consoling tone, its sparing themes steeped in old church harmonies and resonant drones. For the lighter-than-air Scherzo, which must be played “always pianissimo and staccato,” Mendelssohn found inspiration in a dreamy episode from Goethe’s Faust. Some of that music crops up again in the manic finale, a contrapuntal wonder made possible by the young composer’s years of practice in the neglected art of fugue writing.
© 2023 Aaron Grad.
