Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet Has Been Spreading Cheer for Two Centuries 

By Inge Kjemtrup | From the July/August 2025 issue of Strings

Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet is one of the most popular pieces of chamber music, and for good reason. From the joyful Allegro to the tender Andante, from the sparkling Scherzo to the energetic Presto finale, the Octet is a delight for listeners and performers. Two hundred years after its first performance in the Mendelssohn family home, the Octet—a graduation piece of sorts for the 16-year-old Felix—is a fixture in public concert halls and private homes. But what is it that defines that Mendelssohn Octet magic?

“The Octet has the best of what music can give,” says Swiss cellist Benjamin Nyffenegger, a member of Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra and an active chamber musician, who performed the Octet at a festival this summer. “There are a lot of extremely memorable melodies and with eight people playing, it’s also visually very expressive. It’s very impressive to see eight people and hear an almost orchestra-like sound.”

“It’s such a popular piece, so welcomed by audiences,” says violist Wenting Kang, who joins the New England Conservatory staff next year. “It’s always such a celebration when you play it.” Principal violist of Orquesta Sinfonica de Madrid at Teatro Real of Spain, as well a founding member of the Madrid Soloists Chamber Orchestra, Kang first played the Octet as a teen.

Boston-based Miki Cloud, a freelance violinist, teacher, and a leader of the A Far Cry ensemble, has played all four violin parts, including the demanding first part. “There’s a certain bravura that is inherent to a performance of the piece. But remember, even as you’re making technical decisions as a performer, the piece is really about joy: exuberant, bubbling-over-champagne-spilling-out-of-the-bottle kind of joy.”

The Young Felix

Mendelssohn had the good fortune to be born into a family that valued cultural and intellectual pursuits. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was one of the most well-respected philosophers of the Enlightenment, despite the many restrictions placed upon him as a Jew in Germany. Felix’s father, Abraham Mendelssohn, was a banker, his mother, Lea, was a well-educated woman “who, by her early twenties, drew and played the piano superbly, had mastered English, French, and Italian, and had even taken to reading Homer in the original Greek,” according to Peter Mercer-Taylor in The Life of Mendelssohn. This love of knowledge was transmitted to the three children, Fanny, Felix, and Rebecka.

Music was central to their education. Felix studied violin, piano, and voice; his sister Fanny was praised for her piano playing. Felix depended on and admired his older sister. But Fanny’s horizons were restricted, reflecting prevalent attitudes of the time. She was told by their father, that for her, unlike her brother, “music can and should only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.”

At regular salons in the family home in Berlin, the three children met the great and good of the age. As pianist Sarah Rothenberg observed, “the Mendelssohns maintained their privacy, and Europe came to their living room.”

By the time he came to the Octet, Mendelssohn had already composed a violin sonata, three piano quartets, four concertos, and 12 string symphonies. He began work on the Octet in autumn 1825, completing it on October 15th. He presented the score to his violin teacher, Eduard Rietz, as a birthday present. The Octet generally performed today is not that score: Mendelssohn made several changes to the work for its publication in 1832.

It’s interesting to compare the 1825 score, housed in the Library of Congress, to the published version. (The Eroica Quartet’s recording of the 1825 version, described by one reviewer as “exhilarating musically as it is absorbing musicologically,” is worth a listen.) 

Playing the Work

On the score, Mendelssohn instructs the performers: “This Octet must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style. Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed and more strongly emphasized than is usual in pieces of this character.”

“It can easily be too loud,” Kang notes. “It’s seven against one, often. The biggest challenge is to be able to hear each other and hear the texture. It tends to sound like a big bath of E-flat major.”

The first violinist has “concertante passages of staggering virtuosity,” as music scholar Thomas Schmidt Beste said. The other violin parts play vital roles, says Cloud. The person playing fourth violin “has to play out and bring something special to solo moments. In the first movement, they start the syncopated buildup, so you need somebody with a really strong sense of pulse and rhythm. The third violin has a lot of awkward entrances, especially in the last movement, and has to have a lot of confidence because you have to come in when it doesn’t feel quite right. The second violin is a team player, supporting and communicating what the first violinist is doing to the rest of the group.

“The first violinist can be like a surfer on a wild and vibrant sea. You can’t control the sea if you try, but you can choose what wave you want to ride on. Having the rest of the ensemble first find their balance and their preferred tempo and all that empowers them to drive things. If the rest of the ensemble finds themselves, then the first violin’s job is just to play.”

“One of the big challenges is to adapt one’s articulation to that of your colleagues,” says Nyffenegger. “There are so many places where three or four voices play the same thing simultaneously, rhythmically and technically. You have to find the crispy, light way of articulating and a sound with a certain core to it.

“You also have to change character extremely quickly. You have to change the atmosphere of the room in a split second.”

The second cello, with its quasi-bass role, is crucial, he says. “The pace and how an ensemble breathes is really in the hands of the second cello, whereas the first cello plays together a lot with the violas, in unison or together with the third violin. Of course there are small, more soloistic places. But the first cello part is more like an orchestral soloist.”

I. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco

With eight separate parts, and pairings that shift around constantly, it’s all too easy in the excitement for an individual player to “drive the car,” as Kang puts it. For violists, that risk manifests from the very start of the Octet. The syncopated viola figure is exciting and conveys that “we are going somewhere; we are not settled.” The violas must “give that edge” while other parts play a busy flurry of 16th notes. “If we want to be completely respectful, we need to listen to that.”

“You must find a way to start this piece in piano, but make it sound very alive at the same time,” says Nyffenegger. “It requires a lot of discipline to start from a piano and have the restraint to only go to a forte, not immediately to a fortissimo. To play full out is fun at the beginning, but eventually you start to annoy your colleagues because it’s doubled, with both cellos, and it’s in such a boomy register. So find a point quite close to the bridge where there is a lot of core to the sound.”

Another feature, here and in other movements, are the pizzicatos, often marked at pp. “You want to make sure that you are audible. I find most of the time the pizzicatos are just not heard,” says Nyffenegger

II. Andante

The Andante offers a calm contrast to the first movement. Nyffenegger advises playing it “as warmly and simply as possible. You want to look for a very good legato.” Players should stagger bow changes to keep a smooth legato surface.

Kang also stresses the importance of a good legato and creating a warm but not fluffy sound. “It needs to be quite edgy, be closer to the bridge, using less bow. Then you have an approach that matches the tension of the string.”

The sudden changes to more dramatic passages require “very present” fortes and fortissimos, says Nyffenegger. A section of fortissimo triplets calls for careful work on intonation. “Find the balance where the cello is a little bit more present than the viola, and that will just help the intonation immediately. Generally, in unisons, if the lower voice is a bit stronger than the upper voice, it helps a lot.”

In this movement, as elsewhere, it’s important to start together, says Kang. “Most importantly, feel the rhythm together before you start. Breathe the rhythm together, so that you feel these little subdivisions.”

III. Scherzo 

As a youth, Felix met the great philosopher Goethe, who praised the boy’s talent, ranking him above Mozart. The Scherzo is inspired by four lines from the Walpurgis Night’s Dream section of Goethe’s masterwork, Faust:

Clouds and mist drift off with speed,

Aloft ’tis brighter growing

Breeze in leaves and wind in reed,

And all away is blowing.

Fanny wrote of this movement that “one feels near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession.”

“It’s the Midsummer Night’s Dream atmosphere,” says Nyffenegger. “It’s so much in pianissimo and with small articulations. There are different ways of playing the very fast 32nd notes. I always go for ricochet. First of all, it’s fun. It sounds fun. And it’s the only realistic way to get them in tempo.” 

Getting a suitably scherzo sparkle on viola strings is also not that easy, says Kang. Whatever you do, don’t approach the delicate passages from the air. The movement ends simply and quietly. “It’s like perfume that just goes away,” says Kang.

IV. Presto

The last movement starts with a fugue-like theme from the cellos. It’s a perilous opening, and all too often the sound becomes blustery or indistinct in an attempt to play quickly. To avoid the thundering-herd effect, Nyffenegger advises cellists to bring the bow toward the bridge. “You’re looking for a bit more bow than a staccato stroke, but also not entirely on the string to get this place really crispy and clear.” He also practices the passage in different rhythms, perhaps with a dotted eighth note and a 16th, to perfect left hand and bow coordination.

“You want to go for articulation and not for pure volume. We need to give a rhythmical frame. Give your colleagues some space. And when you have long notes, just find a way to reduce the volume a bit and increase toward the end to give some transparency to it.”

Dynamic phrasing of the line will help, in particular for the cellos, “so you don’t cover the whole group, because of course we [the cellos] have this ability to do that.” 

Kang says, “I remember telling the cellists, look, it’s forte not fortissimo! I know it’s a big moment. I know it’s fun and it’s great. Be clear, but don’t go crazy because we can’t really quite catch that.

“It’s also about having a beautiful but very edgy pronunciation to emerge from the texture. Because when you start the motif, you need to be heard in order for the structure to work. You have to bite on the string for the middle strings of the viola to cut through.

“It’s also very important to group the notes so you have very clear direction. When there is no grouping, when there’s no real phrasing, it becomes just an exercise. Phrasing always makes things more interesting, and more interesting, the more you are heard.”

Looking at the Octet as a whole, Miki Cloud returns to a wave metaphor: “This piece works best if the little waves can work in tandem to create one great wave à la Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodblock [The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from 1831]. If everyone is crashing into each other blindly, then the first violinist drowns, and it will be a big splashy mess.”

But create the perfect Mendelssohn atmosphere, and you will enchant your audience.

“There are such joyful, exciting virtuoso moments in this work, and at the same time the most amazing lyrical moments,” says Nyffenegger. Mendelssohn died at age 38, relatively young, leaving a body of work that includes six published string quartets, symphonies, oratorios. Still, says Nyffenegger wistfully, “If he would’ve had more time, the places he would’ve gone musically!”