It opens with an extended sombre ‘adagio ma non troppo’, including a lengthy minor-key fugal passage. Certainly, her forms are unconventional, but the piece works brilliantly in performance. Like Clara Schumann, she expressed doubt in her abilities to handle large-scale forms, arguing that she ‘lacked the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency’. Mendelssohn herself reflected wonderingly how she, ‘not an eccentric or overly sentimental person’, had come to write such music for her this arose from having encountered the ‘exceedingly moving and emotional’ style of Beethoven when she was a child. This extraordinary, rhapsodic work is her only mature string quartet, and, among those currently known to us, is one of the first surviving string quartets written by a woman.
Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E flat major was written in 1834 but based on an unfinished piano sonata she wrote five years before.
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