Musical History and Self-Consciousness in Mendelssohn's Octet, Op. 20

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BENEDICTTAYLORMendelssohn’sOctet, Op. 20

19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 131–59. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.131.

Musical History and Self-Consciousnessin Mendelssohn’s Octet, Op. 20

Toward the end of the finale of Mendelssohn’sOctet for Strings in E� Major, op. 20, the musi-cal past becomes increasingly drawn into thepresent. Reminiscences of earlier movementsare heard fleetingly amid the seemingly irre-pressible drive of the music to its final mea-sures. In the central developmental section ofthis movement’s irregular structure, the theme

Genieße mäßig Füll und Segen!Vernunft sei überall zugegen,

Wo Leben sich des Lebens freut!Dann ist Vergangenheit beständig,

Das Künftige voraus lebendig,Der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit.

—Goethe, Vermächtnis

BENEDICT TAYLOR

of the quicksilver third-movement scherzo iscaught three times, always in a new key, but itis never securely held—and then “all has van-ished.”1 The climactic coda, the apotheosis ofthe whole composition, unfurls in a series ofthree increasingly explicit references to themusic of the first and second movements. Theprocess begins with a passage that, strangelyfamiliar yet unlike anything previously heardin the finale, manages to allude unmistakablyto the opening Allegro moderato without everquite quoting it. There follows a distant echo

“Enjoy in measure fullness and blessing! / Let reason bepresent everywhere, / Where life delights in life! / Thenthe past is still abiding, / The future lives on before us, /The moment is eternity.” The epigraph is from JohannWolfgang von Goethe, Vermächtnis (“Kein Wesen kannzu nichts zerfallen!”), strophe 5, in Poetische Werke:Vollständige Ausgabe, 10 vols. (n.p.: Phaidon [2006]), I,442.

1Literally, “turned to dust.” Goethe, Faust I, l. 4398(Walpurgisnachtstraum), in Poetische Werke, V, 230.

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of the crisis—the insistent repeated half notesand the C- and F-minor tonal areas—that hadbefallen the first movement’s development sec-tion and whose darker hues had also spilled outto form the slow movement. Finally, the irre-sistible drive of this section culminates withthe explicit reappearance of the closing themeof the Allegro over the pulsating eighth notesof the finale’s own closing theme. The finaleand opening movement have closed and mergedinto one another, tying up the work with areturn full-circle in an ecstatic meeting of partsand whole. The entire composition has turnedround on itself to form a single, interconnectedorganic system, which has grown away fromitself only in order to grow into itself again.Beginning and end, first and last, are one andthe same: “It is the process of its own becom-ing, the circle that presupposes its end as itsgoal, having its end also as its beginning; andonly by being worked out to its end, is it ac-tual.”2

If reception history is anything to go by(which admittedly in Mendelssohn’s case is notalways the best course), the Octet occupies apivotal position within its composer’s œuvre.Robert Schumann, who hailed the work for its“consummate perfection,” recounts how theOctet remained Mendelssohn’s favorite amongthe pieces of his youth.3 Judging by its subse-quent reception, this work, along with the Over-ture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream that fol-lowed barely a year later, has become emblem-atic of a popular image of Mendelssohn that isas limited in scope as it is enduring. This Octetis celebrated as the miraculous product of ateenage prodigy who at sixteen finds his ma-ture voice. It thus helps sustain the myth of theyoung Mendelssohn emerging from nowhere asa fully formed genius like a musical Minerva.As John Horton expressed it, in a phrase thathas been imitated and paraphrased countlesstimes, “not even Mozart or Schubert accom-

plished at the age of 16 anything quite so ac-complished as this major work of chamber mu-sic.”4

Notwithstanding Spohr’s series of “Doublequartets,” which the elder composer was quickto point out were in any way different in con-cept from Mendelssohn’s work, the Octet, asthe first—and so far the only really success-ful—composition for eight strings, effectivelycreated a genre of which it is both the origina-tor and sole surviving member.5 Its third move-ment has provided (for better or worse) theembodiment of the iconically deft and mercu-rial Mendelssohn scherzo.

Significantly for the present study, the Octetis also one of the first and most importantcompositions in cyclic form. The cyclic recallof parts of the work’s earlier movements acrossthe course of the finale is both a groundbreakingnew formal paradigm and the climax of thework’s expressive journey. The Octet providesan important model for the paradigmatic “plot”of an instrumental work that would be usedcountless times following Mendelssohn. Itdisplays the ceaseless onward drive of thearchetypally heroic Beethovenian model, but itsimultaneously subsumes the past within itscourse. Indeed, the goal of the work seems to bethe melding of the past and the present. Thisprocess can, I believe, be applied usefully as amusical expression of views of time and historyprominent during the early nineteenth centuryand represented notably by two of Mendels-sohn’s most important mentors, Goethe andHegel. This article approaches the Octet fromthe standpoint of its cyclic formal design andoffers readings of the work from the perspectiveof these two leading figures of German culture.

2Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit,trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979),p. 10.3Robert Schumann, “Aufzeichnungen über Mendelssohn,”in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzgerand Rainer Riehn, Musik-Konzepte 14/15 (Munich: Edi-tion Text + Kritik, 1980), p. 107.

4John Horton, The Chamber Music of Mendelssohn (Lon-don: G. Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 60.Horton’s formulation perhaps owes something toSchumann’s in his Erinnerungen: “He wrote the Octet inhis 15th [sic] year. No master of the past or present canboast such consummate perfection at such an early age”(“Aufzeichnungen über Mendelssohn,” p. 107).5Examples of later works following Mendelssohn’s modelinclude the Octets of Niels Gade (op. 17, 1848), JohanSvendsen (op. 3, 1866), Joachim Raff (op. 176, 1872),Woldemar Bargiel (op. 15a, 1877), George Enescu (op. 7,1900), Reinhold Gliere (op. 5, 1900), and Max Bruch (op.post., 1920). The Gade and Enescu Octets in particular arenotable works deserving a wider appreciation.

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This approach will lead to the creation of a newmodel for understanding cyclic form by relat-ing it to ideas of subjectivity, memory, time,and history that are also of major importance tomuch of the later cyclic music of the century.

Musical Memoryand Self-Consciousness:

“The Circuitous Journey”

“For beginning and end on the circumferenceof a circle are the same.”6 In its recall of pastmusic, the Octet’s large-scale cyclic trajectorymay be understood to constitute a form of mu-sical self-consciousness—the music’s apparentability to reflect on its own history, akin towhat Michael Steinberg has called musical “sub-jectivity.”7 Previous themes are heard return-ing in later stages of the work as if they werememories arising from within the conscious-ness of the music, a process prefigured in sev-eral of Beethoven’s cyclic designs, includingthose of the Ninth Symphony, the Piano So-nata, op. 101, and the Cello and Piano Sonata,op. 102, no. 1.8 Most notable here is the FifthSymphony, which in the recall of its third move-ment within the finale is often viewed as animmediate precedent for the Octet.9 What isnew about Mendelssohn’s process—the respectto which he takes this model significantly fur-

ther—is that the telos of his work is formed outof the realization of these memories. InBeethoven’s examples the recalled past almostuniformly forms a preface to the finale (or inthe Fifth Symphony, a shock intruding midwaythrough it), but in Mendelssohn’s work the cy-clic recall—the articulation of the music’s self-consciousness—is the goal to which the entirecomposition has been striving.10 The telos isformed out of the synthesis of past and present.

This paradigm would become definitive forlater music: the cyclic model established byMendelssohn in this work would become per-haps the most common type in the next cen-tury.11 By recalling the past movements towardthe end of the finale, binding the work’s sepa-rate parts into one, Mendelssohn creates a de-sign that would be taken up and imitated fromSchumann, Brahms, and Franck to Bruckner,Tchaikovsky, Elgar, and Mahler. To overstatethe case mildly, it is hard to find a large-scaleinstrumental work from the end of the Roman-tic era that does not, in some way, incorporatea brief reminiscence of, or passing allusion to,one of its earlier movements as it nears itsconclusion.

The prevalence of the cyclical design in latermusic points not just to the influence of thisone piece by Mendelssohn but to a deeper affin-ity between the times and this formal idea. Thedesign is particularly fascinating for its reso-nances with a structure that became especiallyprevalent in literature and philosophy at thetime and remained potent well into the twenti-eth century. This circular structure, whichM. H. Abrams calls “the Circuitous Journey,”permeates the writings of contemporary poetsand philosophers and underlies many of theirconceptions of time and history. Abrams out-

6Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragment, Diels-Kranz fragmentB. 103, in Early Greek Philosophy, ed. and trans. JonathanBarnes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 72.7Michael Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjec-tivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004), pp. 4–11.8See, for instance, Elaine Sisman, “Memory and Inventionat the Threshold of Beethoven’s Late Style,” in Beethovenand His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael Steinberg(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 51–87.9The Octet parallels Beethoven’s work directly in the re-turn of its scherzo within the finale’s development, thoughin Mendelssohn this is just the first in a succession ofinstances of cyclic recall. An important distinction be-tween the two works is that Beethoven’s (like his PianoSonata, op. 110 and Mendelssohn’s own Piano Sextet ofthe preceding year) is an example of what I have termed“disruptive” or “non-integrative” cyclicism, differing infunction and effect from the Octet’s “integrative” proce-dure (Cyclic Forms in the Instrumental Music of FelixMendelssohn: Time, Memory and Musical History [Ph.D.diss., Cambridge University, 2006], pp. 10–12 and 26–27).Haydn’s Symphony No. 46 and Dittersdorf’s Symphony inA, K. 119, are closer (if probably unknown) precedents.

10The Beethoven work that provides an end-orientated cy-clic recall is the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, whosedesign approaches most clearly the developments ofMendelssohn and the later Romantics. On the cyclic quali-ties of this work, see Christopher Reynolds in “The Repre-sentational Impulse in Late Beethoven, I: An die ferneGeliebte,” Acta musicologia 60 (1988), 43–61.11For Charles Rosen, for instance, this work of Mendelssohnprovided the “supreme model” for many of the later ex-periments in cyclical form. “Only rarely,” however, “wasa similarly convincing simplicity achieved” (Rosen, TheRomantic Generation [London: Harper Collins, 1996], pp.90–92).

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lines several of these conceptions (almostevery one may be seen to be shared byMendelssohn’s Octet): (1) a self-moving and self-sustaining system; (2) immanent teleology; (3)unity lost and unity regained; (4) progress byreversion—the Romantic spiral; (5) redemptionas progressive self-education; (6) the spiral jour-ney back home.12

Famous examples of this circular journeyare, according to Abrams, found in Hegel’s Phe-nomenology of Spirit, Hölderlin’s Hyperion,Wordsworth’s Prelude, and, in the twentiethcentury, Proust’s À la recherche du temps per-du, and Eliot’s Four Quartets. The beginning ofthe work is the end, but we realize this only atthe end, which is reached through the comingto self-consciousness during the journey to getthere. Indeed, the end can be reached onlythrough this realization of the journey it hastaken.

Mendelssohn’s Octet may be seen as an in-novative musical expression of the notions oftime and historical consciousness that spon-sored the trope of the Circuitous Journey andthe associated figures that recur throughoutthe Romantic era: the retrospective recapitula-tion of a history as a necessary step toward theattainment of a final goal and the recapitula-tion of the past as a means of progressing intothe future.13 As Goethe claimed, “One cannotunderstand the present without knowing thepast, and the relationship between the two.”14

This historical self-consciousness is one of thedefining characteristics of Mendelssohn’s ageand a fundamental category of what may betermed “modernity.”15 Mendelssohn was per-haps the first to articulate fully this modernconception of subjectivity and historical self-consciousness in music, and the Octet is thefirst work in which this project is carried out.

Of all Abrams’s examples, perhaps the mostpromising parallel here is Hegel. The youngMendelssohn knew the philosopher personally,and later, as a student at the University ofBerlin, he attended Hegel’s lectures on aesthet-ics.16 Even before this period of study, it wouldhardly be surprising to find close affinitiesbetween certain aspects of Mendelssohn’swork and the world and ethos of Hegel andHegelianism. Mendelssohn, without doubthighly intelligent, was probably the most deeplycultured and widely read composer in history.The grandson of the “Jewish Socrates,” MosesMendelssohn, and “the spiritual heir” of thehumanist tradition of Goethe and classicalWeimar, Mendelssohn in his grasp of philoso-phy and the classics was far beyond the level of

12M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition andRevolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton,1971), pp. 172–95.13For example, see Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophy of His-tory, trans. James Baron Robertson (London: Bohn, 1846),Lecture 18, esp. pp. 446–47, where the future is to beformed from a regeneration of the past. Hegel’s philoso-phy, it has often been claimed, was spurred by the failureof radical modernism as seen in the French Revolutionand by the consequent need for continuity with the past.Both Schlegel and Hegel were closely connected withMendelssohn: the former was his uncle by marriage, thelatter a frequent guest of the Mendelssohn household inthe 1820s and Mendelssohn’s philosophy lecturer at uni-versity.14Goethe, Italienische Reise, bk. 1, 25 January 1787, inPoetische Werke, IX, 211. See further on this point, JohnLukacs, Historical Consciousness, or the Remembered Past(New York: Harper & Row, 1968); and John Edward Toews,Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and PublicMemory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004).

15From the establishment of museums and national galler-ies, the preservation of early artifacts and paintings, un-precedented philological concern with ancient sources, theGothic revival, and neo-Classical trends in architectureand visual arts, the early nineteenth century witnessed anunparalleled interest in the works of the past. In music,the decades after 1820 saw the Bach revival and the inven-tion of the modern musical canon, in both of whichMendelssohn played a pivotal role. Other examples of thishistorical tendency include the Palestrina revival in musicand the Nazarene movement in art (one of whose mostimportant figures, Philipp Veit, was Mendelssohn’s cousin).See Walter Wiora, Die Ausbreitung des Historismus überdie Musik: Aufsätze und Diskussionen (Regensburg: Bosse,1969); James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Roman-tic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002); and more generally, Reinhart Koselleck, FuturesPast: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. KeithTribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Stephen Bann,Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne,1995); and Susan Crane, Collecting and Historical Con-sciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 2000).16This semester was during the winter 1828–29;Mendelssohn’s notes for these lectures still exist, thoughthey are currently in private hands and scholars have notbeen given the chance to study them in detail.

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any comparable musician of the age.17 (At theage of eleven he took to writing mock-Homericepics; Goethe later commented with approvalon the boy’s translation of Latin authors. Atthe time of the Octet Mendelssohn was busytranslating one of the seminal texts of classicalaesthetics, Horace’s Ars Poetica.) AlthoughMendelssohn was hardly an uncritical followerof Hegel, he could not fail to take on boardaspects of Hegel’s outlook while growing up inthe heady cultural milieu of 1820s Berlin—even if it is fair to assume that he would havebeen unlikely to conceive a musical work as anembodiment of Hegel’s philosophy. As ScottBurnham remarks, in 1820s Berlin, everybodywas “a Hegelian.”18

The closest analogy for Mendelssohn’s de-sign appears in Hegel’s celebrated Phänomeno-logie des Geistes. In the central portion here Iwill take up this Hegelian angle to demon-strate how numerous features of Mendelssohn’sOctet, and the approach to history and timeevinced by them, form remarkable parallels withHegel’s famous work of 1807 and with theHegelian system more generally. Hegel, how-ever, is not Mendelssohn’s only personal ac-quaintance with whose work the Octet formsnotable correspondences. In true dialecticalfashion and after much valuable insight, whentaken to an extreme the connection betweenMendelssohn and Hegel inevitably falters, atwhich point the figure of Goethe, waiting pa-tiently in the wings, will step forward. Thusthe Octet affords us a chance to explore two ofMendelssohn’s extraordinary personal connec-tions and the importance they may have for hismusical aesthetic.

The Octet asa Phenomenology of Spirit

The basic premise of Hegel’s Phenomenologyand indeed his entire philosophy, to which theformer was designed as a prolegomenon, is thenotion of history as a necessary self-sustainingprocess tracing the coming to self-conscious-ness of an idea (namely Spirit or Geist) overtime. “History is nothing other than the con-sciousness of the idea of freedom,” as he was tocontend later in the Lectures on the Philoso-phy of History. “The history of the world isthis evolutionary course and coming to realiza-tion of the spirit.”19 The structure of Hegel’sphilosophy is a circle, or more precisely a spi-ral, moving out dialectically from an initialunity through contradiction and returning to arecognition and awareness of the self: “Onlythis self-restoring sameness, or this reflectionin otherness within itself . . . is the True.”20 Or,as formulated in the Logic: “Advance is theretreat into the ground, to what is primary andtrue. . . . The essential requirement for thescience of logic is not so much that the begin-ning be a pure immediacy, but rather that thewhole of the science be within itself a circle inwhich the first is also the last and the last isalso the first. . . . The line of scientific advancethus becomes a circle.”21

Within this system, art is a mode occupiedby spirit en route to the Absolute, a form or amode of consciousness in which spirit reflectson itself. Art is a manifestation of the Idea insensuous form; its category of Beauty arises outof the convergence of the sensuous and theideal (“the pure appearance of the Idea tosense”).22 Following Kant’s demand that thework of art, to be considered as such, must bean end in itself, complete and self-contained—

17John E. Toews, “Musical Historicism and the Transcen-dental Foundation of Community: Mendelssohn’sLobgesang and the ‘Christian German’ Cultural Politics ofFrederick William IV,” in Rediscovering History: Culture,Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 183.18Scott Burnham, “Criticism, Faith, and the Idee: A. B.Marx’s Early Reception of Beethoven,” this journal 13(1990), 187. A useful survey of early-nineteenth-centurymusical culture in Berlin is given in Studien zur Musik-geschichte Berlins im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. CarlDahlhaus (Regensburg: Bosse, 1980).

19Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J.Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 456–57.20Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 10.21Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allenand Unwin, 1969), pp. 71–72.22Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M.Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, 111.

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to be “purposive yet without purpose”23—theartwork must, for Hegel, embody the qualitiesof self-sustaining inner teleology and organicwholeness. Or, to be more precise, the modernartwork must seek these qualities; for Hegelunderstands art, as he does everything else, inhistorical terms.

The Hegelian notion of a self-generating or-ganic system, coming to self-knowledge at itsend through the recollection of its own historyin a circular or spiral journey, is strongly remi-niscent of the process in Mendelssohn’s Octetand later in the Piano Sonata, op. 6, and theString Quartet, op. 13. John Toews has accord-ingly characterized Mendelssohn’s music inquasi-Hegelian terms as the unfolding of anidea over time. Especially in Mendelssohn’searly cyclic works, unity is provided “by therecognizable continuity of a pre-given musicalsubject through a series of transformative varia-tions or episodes,” a process in which the mu-sical theme or idea evolves toward “full self-disclosure.”24 The subject is initially given in“undeveloped or not fully interpreted form,”the process of the music being to reveal thesubject “as the hidden identity tying togetherits various movements.”25 In Mendelssohn’swork, one could say, spirit has found a way ofreflecting on itself, enacting its own coming-to-self-consciousness within the work of art.26

The Octet operates like a large intercon-nected organic system embodying its own in-ternal teleology and generative process. Thelarge-scale recall of music from past movementsin the course of the finale is only the clearestmanifestation of the interconnection of all fourmovements in this work, an ideal toward whichMendelssohn had been working in his compo-sitions of the previous year, for example, the B-Minor Piano Quartet. This relationship of“all 4, 3, 2 or 1 movement(s) of a sonata toeach other and their respective parts”27 thatMendelssohn set as one of his compositionalprinciples is manifested in a process of “or-ganic” development and growth that occursboth within the movements and at a higherlevel across the multimovement structure ofthe composition. (Organicism, I emphasize, ishere understood as a particular historical idealthat explicitly informed the work of Mendels-sohn, Goethe, and Hegel, not simply as a re-flection of the dominant twentieth-century ana-lytical paradigm.28)

Without delving too deeply into the con-struction of the first three movements, somediscussion of these earlier stages of the Octet isuseful in establishing the nature of the “or-

23Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. JamesCreed Meridith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978),pp. 162–67.24John Toews, “Musical Historicism and the Transcenden-tal Foundation of Community,” pp. 186–90; also cf. p. 185:“In Mendelssohn’s idealized conception . . . sensuous ma-terials and virtuosic techniques were subordinated as meansfor the representation of the musical ‘idea,’ and the effec-tiveness of musical composition and performance wasjudged by their ability to moralize or edify the audience,to elevate individual listeners into the unity and spiritual-ity of the ‘idea’.”25Toews, Becoming Historical, p. 230. Much of Toews’stechnical substantiation is taken from Krummacher’s. Fol-lowing Krummacher’s lead, Toews perhaps exaggeratesthe departure from “traditional” thematic dualism inMendelssohn’s music or, conversely, overstates the casefor the music of Beethoven and others being unreservedly“dualistic” in relation to Mendelssohn’s.26On the role of the “Idea” in the theory of A. B. Marx andits relation to Hegel and Mendelssohn, see Arno Forchert,“Adolf Bernhard Marx und seine ‘Berliner Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung’,” in Studien zur MusikgeschichteBerlins im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Carl Dahlhaus(Regensburg: Bosse, 1980), pp. 381–404.

27Mendelssohn, letter of 22 April 1828 to Adolf Lindblad,in L. Dahlgren, Bref till Adolf Fredrik Lindblad frånMendelssohn och andra (Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1913),p. 20.28The notion of musical organicism—and the related con-cept of thematic growth and unity—is of course a prob-lematic one in modern musical scholarship. See, for in-stance, Ruth Solie, “The Living Work: Organicism andMusical Analysis,” this journal 4 (1980), 147–56; LotteThaler, Organische Form in der Musiktheorie des 19. undbeginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Musikverlag E.Katzbichler, 1984); David L. Montgomery, “The Myth ofOrganicism: From Bad Science to Great Art,” MusicalQuarterly 76 (1992), 17–66; or Severine Neff, “Schoenbergand Goethe: Organicism and Analysis,” in Music Theoryand the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatchand David Bernstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993), pp. 409–33. This should not, however, be taken toimply that the idea is foreign to Mendelssohn’s music; asthe composer’s statement above shows, the relationship ofwhole to parts and the unfolding and growth of musicalmaterial—“so that one must already know, from the simplebeginning, throughout the entire existence of such a piece,the secret that is in the music” (Dahlgren, Bref till AdolfFredrik Lindblad, p. 20)—was a conscious effort on hispart. Mendelssohn’s historical situation and his close friend-ship with such keen advocates of organicism as Goetheindicate just how central this notion is to his composi-tional aesthetic.

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8477

First Group

1.1 1.2 1.1 1.2

a a bb

m. 1 9 21 37 45 52 59 75 88 93 113 127

E V/f B

b a b

2

a

2

(1.2) (1.1a) (2a)

68

� E� V/f V/g �V/Bg � V/g G V/c V/A � g V/B � B�f

Second Group Closing

Figure 1: Thematic and harmonic structure of op. 20, movt. I, exposition.

29“Erstmals aber gelingt es, eine Vermittlung zwischen denThemenkreisen zu schaffen, die Mendelssohns späteremIdeal des ‘Organischen’ nahekommt” (Friedhelm Krum-macher, Mendelssohn—der Komponist: Studien zurKammermusik für Streicher [Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978],p. 156).

ganic system” that will find its consummationin the cyclic recall of the finale. The followinganalytical section charts the organic growth ofmaterial across the Octet.

Cyclic Design and the Organic Growthof Material across the Octet:

First Movement

For Friedhelm Krummacher, the thematic pro-cess of the first movement’s exposition repre-sents the first time Mendelssohn comes closeto the ideal of organicism that is a notablecharacteristic of his mature music.29 Both the-matically and harmonically, this opening move-ment reveals a continual process of growth fromits opening phrase that indeed justifies the anal-ogy with the aesthetic ideal of organic unityclaimed by several commentators. The exposi-tion is built on a double-period construction ofits two main subject groups, a design that con-tributes greatly to the unusually broad scale ofthe movement (fig. 1). (In its scope and breadththe movement immediately asks to be set be-side another work in E�, the first movement ofBeethoven’s Third Symphony, an analogy that,as we will see, is not just incidental.)

The two main periods of the first group (mm.1–20 and 21–37, each split into two asymmetri-cal parts) are immediately repeated (mm. 37–59). This repetition, however, is far from anexact replication of the proceeding music. Theexposition is formed from an ever-increasing

series of harmonic waves expanding out by stepfrom the tonic E�. The supertonic, F minor,implied by the harmonic sequence of the open-ing theme (mm. 1–4 to mm. 5–7) is morestrongly suggested by the V/ii at m. 25. On thereturn to the first period (m. 37), the passingmovement to ii is more strongly articulated,establishing V/F minor for the consequent fivemeasures (41–45). The second phrase of thefirst theme (m. 45) is now given in F minor.This new tonality is used in turn as the startingpoint for another expansion up a step to V/Gminor for the reiteration of the second period(m. 52), which leads to a sustained dominantpedal of B� (mm. 59–67) in preparation for thesecond group.

The second group shows a parallel construc-tion to the first, offering an immediate repeti-tion in G of its initial phrase and thus return-ing to the tonality of the preceding section(mm. 52–57) and transforming it into the ma-jor. This G major then moves, via C minor, to atemporary A� (m. 86), which, however, provesunstable and leads eventually to the confirma-tion of V/V for the closing theme (B�, m. 113). Cminor, the relative minor comparatively ab-sent from the exposition, will become in turnthe focus of the first part of the development.In short, we are presented with a series of over-lapping harmonic expansions up a step of ever-increasing scale, which become progressivelymore firmly established (ex. 1).

Greg Vitercik has likened this pattern to “thevision of organic growth Goethe had pro-pounded in [his] Metamorphose der Pflanzen[1790], in which the development of a plant isheld to reveal the progressive transformation ofa single, fundamental cell.” “It is not . . . unrea-sonable,” he continues, “to find evidence ofGoethe’s influence in the structural organiza-

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� � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � ��

First motivic group (opening subject)

Second motivic group (second subject)68

1

� � � � � � � � � � � � � �1 9 37 45 59 68

E � (f) E � V/f E � V/f f V/g �g V/B B�Example 1: Mendelssohn, Octet in E� Major for Strings, op. 20

(Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Gesamtausgabe,series 3, vol. 5, ed. Ralf Wehner [Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel, 2003]).

Harmonic structure of exposition, opening.

30Greg Vitercik, The Early Works of Felix Mendelssohn: AStudy in the Romantic Sonata Style (Philadelphia: Gor-don and Breach, 1992), p. 75.

31R. Larry Todd, The Instrumental Music of FelixMendelssohn Bartholdy: Selected Studies Based on Pri-mary Sources (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979), pp. 291–92. The same figure is explicit in the upper voice of thetheme’s accompaniment in the second violin. This par-ticular neighbor-note background figure may be related toan archetypal “changing note” schema (3̂–2̂ . . . 4̂–3̂) identi-fied by Leonard B. Meyer among others and treated atlength by Robert O. Gjerdingen in A Classic Turn of Phrase:Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), esp. pp. 55ff.

Example 2: First and second thematic families, movt. I, archetypal versions.

tion of the composer’s first fully maturework.”30

Complementary to this harmonic procedureis the dense process of thematic manipulation,juxtaposition, and development present acrossthe exposition. Thematically, much of the ma-terial of the movement relates back to just twomain families of musical ideas, which may bedescribed in their ideal form as an ascendingarpeggiated figure, typified by the openingtheme, and a turning motive passing by con-junct step, found in its reply (m. 12) and used asthe movement’s second subject (ex. 2). So basicare these two different motives that it is tempt-ing to view them as examples of the Goetheanideale Pflazentypus—an abstract, ideal type thatis not physically present but that lies behindall the representations generated from it, muchlike a Platonic Idea or Schoenbergian Grund-gestalt. Elements from both these families ofideas intercross within each theme group, form-ing contrasts, juxtapositions, and latent rela-tionships. Furthermore, both families derivefrom the same source—the very opening mea-

sures of the Octet. As R. Larry Todd has dem-onstrated, the arpeggiated opening theme, soar-ing from the first violin’s low g up and overthree octaves to a�3, conceals what is essen-tially a four-note turning figure, the underlyingvoice-leading being reducible to the neighbor-note prolongation of scale-degree ^3, G–F–A�–G(ex. 3).31

This subthematic motive may be seen togenerate innumerable related figures across thecourse not only of the exposition but indeed ofall four movements of the work. The windingmotive (mm. 12–13) that follows the answer tothe first phrase clearly incorporates this neigh-bor-note turning figure into what is essentiallya ^1–^2–^3 ascent barely hidden by the octave dis-placement of the final G (ex. 4a). In the conse-quent phrase, this figure is sequenced out across

139


� � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � ��

��

� � � � � � �

��

��

� � � � � � � �

� � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

f.

b motive

12

16

21

24

68

73

Second subject

� � � � ��

� � � � ��

Example 3: Derivation of second (“turn”) family from opening theme, movt. I.

Example 4: Variants of second family of motives, movt. I.

140

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��1 9 13 21 29 34 37

four measures into a linear progression movingin tenths with the bass from e�2 up an octave toeb3 (ex. 4b). The legato phrase (mm. 22–23, ex.4c) that answers the transformation of the open-ing arpeggios into sixteenth notes in m. 21 isboth the inversion of this previous ^1–^2–^3 ascentand a further transformation of the neighbor-note turn of the subthematic motive. This isimmediately followed by a closely derived fig-ure in sixteenth notes (m. 25, ex. 4d), whichretrospectively links the arpeggiated sixteenth-note pattern of m. 21 with the turn-family ofmotives.

At the cadence of the second period (m. 36)the three-note ascent ^1–^2–^3 is heard once again.Throughout the opening pages of the Octet, clearcadential endings are continually undercut bythe predilection for ending phrases on degree ^3in the upper voice. In Schenkerian terms, themiddleground of the first subject group may beread as prolonging this ^3, starting from the firstsonority of the piece—the throbbing measuredtremolo with g1 in violin II—and the first noteof the melody line in the first violin (g), throughthe weak first perfect cadence of m. 9 (againwith G in both upper parts), the momentarycadence of m. 13, and the melodic close of m.21 (violins I and II; ex. 5).

The importance of this procedure lies in thelife and sense of incompletion with which itendows the movement; although the formalarchitectonic construction of phrases remainsintact, the articulation of musical paragraphs isundercut, as if the flow of the music were con-tinuing unabated across the ends of musicalphrases, ever pressing on. This open-ended qual-ity is a much-remarked upon feature of Beet-hoven’s “heroic” style; here Mendelssohn im-bues his work with a similar quality of forward

striving that Scott Burnham has read as a markof the Goethezeit, or age of Hegel.32

The second subject is a further variant of theturning motive, a conjunct winding figure thatunfurls from its pedal B� and returns back to itagain. This idea, whose second half is merely arhythmically altered repetition of the first,changes via successive statements into a pen-dant phrase (mm. 75–77) that is both a modifi-cation of the second theme’s second half andequivalent to this theme’s inversion (ex. 4e andf). Much of the movement’s seemingly “a-the-matic” material—particularly, the extraordinarysixteenth-note scale passage in all eight voicesthat forms the celebrated retransition recapitu-lation, plus numerous similar passages of ap-parently standard passagework—may be con-sidered to grow from this group of motives.

The first group, the arpeggiated family thatgrows from the opening theme, exhibits a com-parable process of development and modifica-tion (ex. 6). The first theme is continued in thebass of m. 9 in a new variant that emphasizesdegree ^6, treated as an appoggiatura to ^5, whichwill form an important feature later in the work(ex. 6b). This figure will be inverted when thesemeasures are reiterated in F minor at m. 45 (ex.6c). The new sixteenth-note figure of m. 21 is,as suggested, a further derivative of the open-ing motive, articulating an E� arpeggio now con-fined to a single octave (ex. 6d). Most memora-bly, the opening theme provides the basis forthe exposition’s closing theme (mm. 113–27,ex. 6e), to be recalled—in a further transforma-tion—at the close of the work.

Example 5: Reduction of exposition, opening group, movt. I.

32Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 112–46.

141

BENEDICTTAYLORMendelssohn’sOctet, Op. 20� � � � � � ��

� � � � ��

� � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

1

9

45

21

113

� � � � � � ��

Example 6: Variants of first family of motives, movt. I.

� � � � ��

86

� � � � � � �� Example 7: Relationship between tail of second subject and first subject theme, movt. I.

As Krummacher has indicated, though, therelationship between themes is not just one ofstatic juxtaposition; it involves the forming ofnew connections between themes that had atone stage seemed unrelated.33 The continua-tion of the second period of the second subjectis a noteworthy example. The sixteenth-notefigure of the first group’s second period (m. 21)had appeared more closely related to thearpeggiated motive than to the turning figure.However, after the pendant to the second themehas continued at m. 84, the sixteenth-note mo-tive enters in inversion, continuing the me-lodic sequence initiated by the preceding theme(m. 88, ex. 7). The two figures—the first drawnopenly from the second subject and conjunct inmotion, the second derived from the first themeand fundamentally arpeggiated save for one pass-ing note—are revealed as interchangeable, es-

tablishing a connection between the first sub-ject and the arpeggiated family of motives andthe second theme.

In this imposing opening movement,Mendelssohn is clearly emulating Beethoven’sachievement, above all in the Eroica, via thedynamic internal teleology and continualgrowth, contrast, opposition, and subsequentrevealing of latent relationships between twobasic subthematic concepts. (For many writersthis feature of Beethoven’s music has provedattractive as a musical presentation of a pro-cess often considered “Hegelian,” although thisview is not without its problems.34) In this way,

33Krummacher, Mendelssohn—der Komponist, p. 302.

34For one of the most celebrated proponents of this view,“Beethoven’s music is Hegelian philosophy” (Theodor W.Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. RolfTiedermann, trans. E. Jephcott [Cambridge: Polity Press,1998], p. 14, my emphasis). The literature on Beethovenand Hegel is prodigious: see, for instance, ChristopherBallantine, “Beethoven, Hegel and Marx,” Musical Review33 (1972), 34–46; Janet Schmalfeldt, “Form as the Process

142

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Mendelssohn is taking up the teleological driveassociated with Beethoven’s “heroic” style; hewill go beyond this model in the subsequentextensive thematic connections he establishesbetween movements, which fuse this linearmomentum with a broader circular movementresulting in a spiral trajectory that is quint-essentially Hegelian, even Goethean.

This process of “organic” unfolding and de-velopment, both thematic and harmonic, is fol-lowed in each of the following movements. AsGreg Vitercik has shown, the second theme ofthe third-movement scherzo grows almost im-perceptibly from a tiny detail of the firsttheme—the B� of m. 4.35 David Montgomeryhas described the second movement, Andante,as an exceptional case of organicism in whichthe larger form of the movement seems to beforeshadowed in a “complex motivic prototypebased upon an abstraction of Goethe’s luxuri-ous super-plant.”36 More specifically pertinentfor this study, many details of the Andantestem from the first-movement material, thusforming the first link in the work’s nexus ofcyclic interconnections.

Thematic Connections betweenMovements—the Andante

and First Movement

The development section of the first move-ment represents a crisis point. After theexposition’s closing theme has continued acrossthe double bar, a transition (ex. 6b) leads to avehement statement of part of the first subject’ssecond period, transformed in a new C-minorcontext (m. 137). While the rushing sixteenthnotes in the lower parts are recognizable, thedouble-dotted descending arpeggio in the trebleand repeated quarter notes seem less familiar.It is only when this two-measure unit is re-peated at m. 139 that we realize that thesethree quarter notes, heard off the beat and nowoutlining a descending third, form a version ofthe lyrical reply to this sixteenth-note figure inm. 22 (cf. ex. 8 with ex. 4c, p. 139). Movingfrom C minor via a diminished seventh imply-ing V7 of F minor, the passage ascends in aseries of movements up a fourth to B�, whichsoon collapses to a six-four of D� major. Thiskey is only transitory, though, and the musicsoon returns to C major, understood as V of theevident goal of F minor (m. 147). The quarter-note figure is gradually liquidated, a forlornhint of a new theme glides over in the firstviolin, and then the music settles on F minorfor a statement of the second subject’s theme(m. 164). This climax, having reached a climac-tic impasse on a dissonant minor ninth andsubsequently disintegrated in trudging quarternotes, unmistakably echoes that in the devel-opment section of the Eroica Symphony. Moreimportant, however, is the material from thisaporia in the first movement, which spills outto become the starting point of the slow move-ment.

The Andante’s opening measures derive intwo respects from the development section ofthe first movement (ex. 9). Starting from anempty fifth that reveals itself in m. 2 to belongto C minor, the repeated eighth-note figure onthe last three beats of m. 1 is a further meta-morphosis of the hammering quarter notes ofthe first movement, while the theme that en-ters in m. 2 is made up of the same descendingthird that went with this rhythm.

In this manner, the development’s material

of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the‘Tempest’ Sonata,” in Beethoven Forum, ed. LewisLockwood and James Webster, vol. IV (Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 37–71; Reinhold Brinckmann,“In the Time(s) of the ‘Eroica’,” in Beethoven and HisWorld, pp. 1–26, and numerous writings of Carl Dahlhaus.

This view can be problematic: as Stephen Rumph hasrightly argued, it is mistaken to connect the notion of anirresistible linear teleology to Hegelian views of history, andthe notion of an evolving organic system is hardly unique toHegel (Rumph, Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Ro-manticism in the Late Works [Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2004], pp. 212–20). The idea of a continuous,unilinear teleological progression might adequately charac-terize mid-eighteenth-century views of history and histori-cal progress—as crystallized, for instance, by French materi-alists like La Mettrie and Turgot—but it is a poor match forthe post-revolutionary theories of thinkers like Hegel. Inthis sense, Beethoven’s “heroic” works could be thought ofas perpetuating an outdated—indeed predominantly French—eighteenth-century ideal, vainly sustaining an already-doomed revolutionary hope throughout the Napoleonic era.A more nuanced reading of this music’s “Hegelian” qualitiesis given by Scott Burnham in Beethoven Hero, pp. 121–24.35Greg Vitercik, “Mendelssohn the Progressive,” Journalof Musicological Research 8 (1989), 335–54.36David L. Montgomery, “The Myth of Organicism: FromBad Science to Great Art,” p. 26.

143


� � � � 68 � � ��

� � � 68 � ��

�

�( 64Fm ) �DCm

Vla. 1 & 2, Vc. I & 2

� � � � ��

� � � � ��

� � � ��

�

�

�

�

� � � �

�

137 � �

� � � � �

� �

� ��m6

4BCm53 �64D

� � ��

Example 8: Climax of first movement development section.

37The connection between the two movements was fur-ther clarified by Mendelssohn in his 1832 revision of theOctet prior to publication; in the original 1825 version thestart of the first movement’s development had returned toa statement of the first theme in the tonic before movingto G minor for the equivalent of m. 137. By excising thesemeasures Mendelssohn downplayed the more literal paral-lel between the events in the development and those inthe exposition, but simultaneously avoided an unneces-sary reduplication of the first theme and tautened thesection’s harmonic progression, making the relation of thispassage to the slow movement even more apparent.

separates into its constituent rhythmic and the-matic elements in the Andante. Furthermore,in harmonic layout, the Andante’s opening sec-tion closely follows that of its development.After its initial presentation in m. 2 the Sicilianotheme is repeated immediately in sequence onthe subdominant, F minor, but then, miracu-lously, its A� is taken up in m. 4 by the violins,which, entering for the first time, reinterpretthe note as ^5 of D� major. Within the space ofits opening four measures the movement passesfrom C minor via F minor to D� major, where itremains for the next twelve measures. The re-markable tonal latitude opened up by the slowmovement is almost exactly that traced in thepreceding movement’s development section,which has already served as the source of itsthematic content.37

Example 9: Start of Andante movement.

38Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 492.

The progression of the work thus far is some-what akin, then, to a dialectical process—orstated in Goethean terms, a process of Polaritätund Steigerung (opposition and enhancement)—in which an initial statement gives way to itscontradiction. The first movement’s expositiongives rise to its Other, the C-minor-dominateddevelopment section, which is taken up at alarger level in the second movement: “The otherside of its Becoming, History, is a conscious,self-mediating process—Spirit emptied out intoTime; but this externalization, this kenosis, isequally an externalization of itself; the nega-tive is the negative of itself.”38

The subtle tonal disjunction found in thecenter of the work, between the second move-ment and the scherzo (a Phrygian cadence in Cheard as V/F minor, followed instead by G mi-nor), forms a type of dialectical step up. Thescherzo and finale will similarly exist in acomplementary relation to each other, theformer subsumed into the latter across itscourse. Finally, the movement of the wholewill turn back into itself in the finale’s coda,which brings again the music of the first and

144

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CENTURYMUSIC

Example 10: Thematic complex opening finale.

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

�

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

�

�

� � � � � ��

�

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

�

�

a.

b.

c.

d.

1

25

33

51

second movements at a higher level. In thismovement the threads interlaced across theentire work are recalled and bound up togetherin a synthesis of the preceding parts that looksbeyond any prior model and prefigures virtu-ally all future attempts at cyclicism.

Cyclic Recall: The Finale

The finale is, as Krummacher has argued, thefirst irregular structure of Mendelssohn’sœuvre.39 Nearly all of the material is given atthe start in a thematic complex consisting offour main elements (a, b, c, and d, ex. 10).Although each of the four ideas is clearly dis-tinct, all nevertheless share common features:

the rising fourth of b is taken from the immedi-ately preceding answer of a, which is heardcontinuing underneath; the rhythm and phrase-structure of c are virtually identical to those ofthe statement of b that c completes; and dreturns obviously to the eighth notes of a, out-lining a new, cadential-sounding harmonic pro-gression.

The most salient point about this thematicexposition is its terseness; by m. 63 (of a 439-measure Presto movement) all the main mate-rial for the movement has been heard. This ischiefly due to the nature of the themes: thefirst is already given in fugal presentation, leav-ing little potential for development; the secondand third, while open-ended, are likewise tooforthright for intricate development; and thefourth sounds already like an ending, if a curi-ously incomplete one, lacking any real melody.39Krummacher, Mendelssohn—der Komponist, pp. 373–75.

145

BENEDICTTAYLORMendelssohn’sOctet, Op. 20� � � � ��

� � � ��

�

�A major

Countersubject a243

2

In short, it is not immediately obvious that alarge final-movement structure can be createdfrom just these four distinctive motives. Thefollowing section (mm. 63–189) consists merelyof a strophic variation of the first that moves tothe dominant and thus functions as the secondhalf of the exposition.

What the movement really needs is the in-jection of new material to sustain it for longerthan the 190-odd measures taken to reach itssecondary area. This need for fresh thematicsubstance will be fulfilled by way of the rein-troduction of elements from past movements.To put it simply, the cyclic recall in the Octet’sfinale is motivated by the immanent demandsof the movement; the return of past music com-pletes the vacant potential of the finale’s ownthematic material. The nature of the openingthematic complex is thus intrinsically relatedto the finale’s form: the movement demandsthe introduction of further, “new” melodicmaterial.

The exposition has indeed hinted at this re-lationship to music previously heard, prefigur-ing the process of the coda that will be formedfrom the increasingly unambiguous recall ofthese past ideas. Theme a, as Todd suggests,recalls the second subject of the first move-ment, and both themes a and b demonstrateaffinities to the scherzo—the former, to its six-teenth-note accompanimental figure, the lat-ter, to the rising-fourth head-motive of thescherzo’s main theme.40 The twice-heard ca-dence to B� toward the end of the expositionoutlines a plagal cadence familiar as a charac-teristic sonority from movement I (mm. 34–37), preceded by a winding chromatic line in

Example 11: Finale, countersubject (a2).

quarter notes that further recalls that move-ment’s coda (mm. 137–45 and 149–65). Later inthe development section, a fortissimo state-ment of a new countersubject (a2) seems tooffer a distant echo of the first movement’sdevelopment in its strident rhythm and de-scending arpeggiation (m. 243, ex. 11).

The first explicit instance of cyclic recall isthe appearance of the scherzo theme at m. 273.Though its material had been prepared by therising fourth of theme a immediately precedingit and by the accompanimental eighth notes ofb,41 this sudden flashback to the earlier move-ment, set off from its surroundings by an unex-pected drop in dynamic to pianissimo, is none-theless both sudden and startling. It is both anorganic outgrowth of the finale’s material andyet an interruption. Charles Rosen has aptlydescribed the qualitative difference betweenMendelssohn’s procedure here and earlier pre-cedents for this cyclic recall—most famouslyBeethoven’s in his Fifth Symphony. Rather thanoccurring after a fermata, bringing the move-ment to a momentary halt, the cyclical inter-ruption is “integrated seamlessly into the tex-ture.” “We find ourselves back in the scherzoalmost without being able to put our finger onthe exact point that it returns.”42

The scherzo is initially heard twice, in F andE�, interspersed with closely related materialdrawn from themes a and b. The spatial separa-tion created here by the division of the eight

40R. Larry Todd, The Instrumental Music of Felix Mendels-sohn Bartholdy, p. 292.

41This “organic” connection between the two has beenpointed out by several scholars. Krummacher argues thatthe finale’s opening material is inherently scherzo-like fromthe start, so that the lapse into the earlier movement,when it comes, is merely the logical outgrowth of its ownlatent characteristics. (Mendelssohn—der Komponist, p.186.)42Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, pp. 89–90.

146

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC � � � � � � � � � ��

��

� � � � � ��

�

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � ��

��

�

�

355

363

Coda � � � � � ��

Example 12: Coda, finale, first part; allusions to opening movement.

instrumental players into two quartets—onegiven the scherzo theme, still at its originalpianissimo, the other that of the finale—al-most suggests that the scherzo has been goingon in the background throughout the finale,continually present “behind” the movement ata different level of aesthetic presence or time.This passage culminates in a fortissimo state-ment of the scherzo theme in its original key,G minor, alongside the repeated half notes oftheme c with which it is contrapuntally coun-terpoised. After being sequenced from G up toE�, the scherzo theme is then heard in inver-sion in the bass against theme c. From this, abrief passage—inspired, no doubt, by the finaleof Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony—combines fiveof the themes heard so far in a remarkabledisplay of compositional ingenuity. This cli-mactic fusion of scherzo and finale materialleads into the final section of the piece, pre-ceded by a pedal-point of twenty-eight mea-sures on the dominant. This coda marks theculmination of this process of cyclic recall, in-corporating an increasingly clear series of refer-ences to earlier parts of the Octet.

Leading out of the contrapuntal tour de forceof the preceding measures, the music recapitu-

lates the second and third themes of the open-ing thematic exposition over a sustained domi-nant pedal, continuously building tension thatis finally released as the dominant moves downto a I63. The new passage here, the first of thecoda’s three allusions, seems unmistakably toconjure up the first movement without being adirect citation (m. 355, ex. 12). Its first twophrases return to the arpeggiated constructionof the first movement’s main theme, specifi-cally the passage of mm. 32–36, highlighted thesecond time around by the prefatory quarter-note linear ascent (371–73) that matches theeighth notes of movt. I, mm. 32–33.43 Particu-larly characteristic are the D � and C� trills andthe associated I7 and iv harmonies of mm. 357and 361, which recall innumerable instances ofthese—or closely related—sonorities in the firstmovement.44 The soaring line of m. 363 thatanswers this passage likewise seems to hark

43In Mendelssohn’s 1825 version, the first movement waswritten in double note values, so the notated correspon-dence was originally exact.44For example, see the first theme and near-identical half-diminished ii7 at m. 7, or the cadential passage of mm. 34–36.

147

BENEDICTTAYLORMendelssohn’sOctet, Op. 20� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � � � ��

��

�

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � � � � ��

��

� ��

�

�

Finale, 8th notes of387

391

7 ( 7 as substitute V7Fm

Fm

) Pedal�Tonic (E

�

First movement, mm. 138

a

ff.; Andante, mm. 1ff.;

� �)

7 ( 7 as substitute V7� �)E�

Example 13: Coda, finale, second part: recall of rhythm andharmonic progression of movt. I development and movt. II.

back to the closing theme of the first-move-ment exposition, particularly in the upper ap-poggiaturas ^4–^3 and ^6–^5.

Yet elements of this section may also beconsidered to have been prefigured in the fi-nale. The phrase of m. 355 stems from the firstmovement, but it is also a metamorphosis ofthe cadential passage from the finale’s exposi-tion, which had itself seemed to allude to theearlier movement (mm. 137–45 and 149–65). Inaddition, the eighth notes of theme a clearlycontinue in the inner parts throughout the sec-tion, as they will until the very end of thework. In its thematic construction the coda isthus equally close to the finale and to the firstmovement. This equipoise might account forone of the extraordinary attributes of this coda—the fact that it manages to sound familiar with-out having being heard previously.

The second part of the coda returns to theworld left behind in the slow movement. Un-der the eighth notes of a, the lower voices reit-erate the same progression from the first

movement’s development that had spilled outto form the Andante (ex. 13). The rhythm is thesame—the three repeated half notes heard atboth movt. I, m. 138 and movt. II, m. 1—andthe harmonic progression—a diminished sev-enth functioning as C7, moving to F minor—almost identical. Again, this passage is not al-together unfamiliar from the finale, because itsgestures have been echoed earlier in the A-major section of the development (mm. 243ff.).Here, however, as Vitercik has shown, the pro-gression, which has been a recurring agent inso many of the Octet’s themes, is now an-chored in E� major, the E leading to ii in theviolin neutralized by the tonic pedal in the bassand the harmonies returning to E� via a dimin-ished ii7 at m. 392.45

Finally, Mendelssohn gives us the most ex-plicit recall of all—the return of the first-move-

45Vitercik, The Early Works of Felix Mendelssohn, pp. 133–36.

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� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

First movement

113/266

403Finale

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � ��

� � � ��

�

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � ��

�

�

8th notes of Finale, motive

Bass line of Finale,

403

407

d

a/d

Transformation of first-movement closing theme

Example 14: Final transformation, return of first-movement theme alongside finale’s material.

Example 15: Transformation of first-movement theme into that of the finale’s coda.

46“What had seemed to be a carefully controlled drive to-wards closure within the confines of the finale is revealed—in a thrilling instant—to be the beginning of a giganticcadential gesture that encompasses the whole of an un-usually expansive four-movement work” (ibid., p. 136).

ment exposition’s closing theme, in rhythmictransformation, now combined with the eighthnotes of d (m. 403, ex. 14). The fleeting glimpsesof past themes have become clearer and clearer,culminating in this transparent reference tothe first movement in the very last measures.This latter figure (d) had all along seemed to becuriously missing something, to lack a themeof its own. The union of the first-movementtheme with this passage from the finale’s open-ing complex finally reveals that this passagehas all along been the accompaniment to theearlier theme, adumbrating a harmonic pro-gression familiar from the very first measures

of the composition.46 The finale’s closing themefinds its completion in the fusion with thefirst-movement theme, its latent potential nowrealized as it ties the two movements together.And this earlier theme finds its last metamor-phosis in union with the finale’s theme (ex.15). By merging its finale and first movement

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the Octet has found a telos that is the fusion ofthe two.

Far more than in a simple combination ofthemes, both parts are here fused yet trans-formed into something new. The closing sec-tion of the finale contains both the first move-ment and finale together, yet it is neither oneexactly. The music merges the two, dissolvingtheir individual identities simultaneously andhence transcending them. The two movements,in other words, are aufgehoben (preserved, an-nulled, raised up), in Hegel’s celebrated use ofthe term. The goal of the entire work is this all-encompassing synthesis of the separate parts ofthe Octet, where beginning and end are one.

The coda to Mendelssohn’s Octet thus pre-sents a recollection and summary of the jour-ney of the whole work, an explicit realizationof the music’s own history, whose goal is themusical analogue of self-consciousness. AsHegel wrote, in the penultimate sentence ofhis famous work: “The goal, Absolute Know-ing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has forits path the recollection of the Spirits as theyare in themselves and as they accomplish theorganization of their realm.”47 As we have re-peatedly seen, the form of this coming to self-consciousness is necessarily circular: “It is onlyas this process of reflecting itself into itselfthat it is in itself truly Spirit. . . . The move-ment is the circle that returns into itself, thecircle that presupposes its beginning and reachesit only at the end.”48 The moment in whichthis self-knowledge is attained, in which theunderlying idea that has lain behind all thedifferent surface manifestations is recognized,is the point of supreme synthesis. The linearhas become verticalized, the (“spatial”) tempo-ral progression fused into an instant: “[As to]the moments of which the reconciliation ofSpirit with its own consciousness proper is com-

posed; by themselves they are single and sepa-rate, and it is solely their spiritual unity thatconstitutes the power of this reconciliation.The last of these moments is, however, neces-sarily this unity itself and, as is evident, itbinds them all into itself.”49

In this epiphanic moment when everythingcomes together into a unity and this unity isrecognized by the music, the journey of thespirit through time is completed, and history,in some form, is at an end.

In the Notion that knows itself as Notion, the mo-ments thus appear earlier than the fulfilled wholewhose coming-to-be is the movement of those mo-ments. In consciousness, on the other hand, thewhole, though uncomprehended, is prior to the mo-ments. Time is the notion itself that is there andwhich presents itself to consciousness as empty in-tuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears inTime just so long as it has not grasped its pureNotion, i.e., has not annulled Time.50

Commentators disagree over whether Hegelis seriously suggesting here that time and his-tory are completed when Geist comes to fullself-knowledge, that is, with his own philoso-phy.51 But the passage does seem to suggestthat Time, in some sense, is qualitativelychanged, whether suspended or effectivelyhalted, when this self-knowledge is reached.When, one might ask, does this “moment” oc-cur? Or rather, what happens when it does?The Octet is notable for continually pressingonward to some such final synthesis. But per-haps the ultimate point is never reached. As inso many Romantic works, the supreme recon-ciliation and integration of every individual intothe whole is always imminent but never ar-rives. The two approach each other asymptoti-

47Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 493. See further p.492: “As its fulfillment consists in perfectly knowing whatit is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its with-drawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existenceand gives its existential shape over to recollection. . . . Butrecollection, the inwardizing of that experience, has pre-served it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher formof this substance. So although this Spirit starts afresh . . .it is none the less on a higher level than it starts.”48Ibid., pp. 487–88.

49Ibid., p. 482.50Ibid., p. 487.51Walter Kaufmann, one of the most influential of Hegelianrevisionists, emphasizes the provisional nature of Hegel’sclaims, a feature often overlooked by prewar commenta-tors. For instance, in the Lectures on the History of Phi-losophy Hegel states that “every philosophy . . . belongs toits time and is biased by its limitations. The individual isthe son of his people, his world. He may put on airs asmuch as he pleases, but he does not go beyond it”(Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation [New York:Doubleday, 1966], p. 285).

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cally to produce what Hegel would call a “badinfinity.” More likely, given Mendelssohn’s“classical” leanings—the desire to reconcile andharmonize, the elective affinity to the aestheticmaxims of his friend Goethe and teacherHegel—the final realization of this process isreached in the very last passage that synthe-sizes first movement and finale into one. Thisrealization achieved, the piece ends; time ceases.The “frame” at either side of the music is theannulment of time, the silence at the end ofthe work, the sound of eternity.

The Octet and Musical History

The process of synthesis enacted in the Octetis fascinating given Mendelssohn’s highly de-veloped historical consciousness and his knowl-edge of the musical past. Indeed, one mightwonder if the analogy may be taken further:might Mendelssohn’s work actually outline acomparable process within the context of mu-sical history? Might not the “historical inter-est” within such a cyclical work parallel abroader attitude toward the musical past? Afterall, if the Octet were fully comparable to thePhenomenology of Spirit, Mendelssohn’s workwould have to recapitulate and synthesize theentire previous course of music within itself,forming a summation and apogee.52 As Hegelwould demand of modern philosophy, “every-thing that at first appears as something pastand gone must be preserved and contained; itmust itself be a mirror of the whole history.”53

Such an idea might seem attractive on anumber of counts. The Octet is habitually readas the culmination of Mendelssohn’s musical“apprenticeship,” the first emergence of hismature voice in what is, like the Phenomenol-ogy for Hegel, his first major work. The off-spring of the series of string symphonies andchamber pieces written between the ages ofeleven and fifteen that move from Handel andC. P. E. Bach to Haydn and Mozart, the Octet isusually viewed as growing out of these influ-ences of the past and synthesizing them intosomething unique and individual. This forma-tion seems borne out by Zelter’s famous decla-ration the previous year: “From today on youare a boy no longer; I proclaim you a journey-man in the name of Mozart, in the name ofHaydn, and in the name of the elder Bach.”54

The references and allusions to past histori-cal styles seen by some commentators in theOctet—the Siciliano topic of the Andante’sopening and stile antico suspensions of its sec-ond subject, the Handelian fugue of the finaleand the Beethovenian ambition of the firstmovement, the thoroughly modern (and en-tirely Mendelssohnian) scherzo—encourage thiskind of view.55 Like Hegel’s work, the Octetpresents “a gallery of past images, a movingpageant of historical scenes” that are drawntogether at the end into a higher synthesis.This finale, like that of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Sym-phony that served as a model,56 seems to sumup and crown this glorious history, a trope that

52The finale of Beethoven’s Ninth has been read in notdissimilar fashion by Lawrence Kramer as a possible en-actment of a Hegelian progression of history from East toWest, from ancient Greece, via the Christendom of theGerman Middle Ages to the present day. (“The HaremThreshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven’s‘Ode to Joy’,” this journal 22 [1998], 78–90.) Julie HedgesBrown has suggested a smaller-scale, autobiographical read-ing along these lines for Schumann’s Piano Quartet, op.47, of 1842 (“Higher Echoes of the Past in the Finale ofSchumann’s 1842 Piano Quartet,” Journal of the Ameri-can Musicological Society 57 [2005], 511–64).53Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S.Haldane and F. H. Simson, 3 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,1896), I, 41. See further the close of the lectures, III, 552–53: “The latest philosophy contains therefore those whichwent before; it embraces in itself all the different stagesthereof; it is the product and result of those that precededit.”

54Sebastian Hensel, Die Familie Mendelssohn 1729–1847:Nach Briefen und Tagebüchern, 3 vols. (Berlin: B. Behr,1879), I, 140. This was on the occasion of Mendelssohn’sfifteenth birthday, 3 February 1824. The language used byZelter (“Gesell”) explicitly refers to the tradition of anapprentice, having served his time and learned his craft,being promoted to the status of an independent “Journey-man.”55See R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 151–52. Themeb in particular, as numerous commentators have spotted,bears a striking resemblance to one from Handel’s Mes-siah, “and He shall reign forever.”56Mendelssohn knew Mozart’s work well, having first heardit in 1821 at a performance in Leipzig en route to his firstvisit to Goethe in Weimar (Susanna Großmann-Vendrey,Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und die Musik derVergangenheit [Regensburg: Bosse, 1969], p. 16). The finaleto Mozart’s Symphony is already the model for the StringSymphony No. 8 in C Major (1822).

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was particularly prevalent at the time. As theFrench critic Saint-Foix wrote apropos Mozart’sfinal symphony, “with a sovereign grace, elo-quence, and force, the master in his thirty-second [sic] year gathers up all the elements hismost glorious predecessors have used and re-veals to us all that music has achieved up tohis time, and what it will do nearly a hundredyears later.”57

The idea of embodying the progress of musichistory within the structure of an individualpiece is also found explicitly in the music ofone of Mendelssohn’s leading contemporaries,Louis Spohr, the four movements of whose Sym-phony No. 6 in G Major (Historische Sympho-nie), op. 116, are meant to depict the progres-sion of music from Bach and Handel (1720) toHaydn and Mozart (1780), Beethoven (1810),and the present day (1840).58

The analogy is deceptive, though. For it isonly with great difficulty that one can traceany historical development of styles or topicsacross Mendelssohn’s work. We start out witha soaring “Beethovenian” movement, moveback to the eighteenth century with the sec-ond-movement Siciliano, and continue regress-ing to a polyphonic church style. To outlinethe matter with drastic simplicity, Beethovenleads to Mozart, to Palestrina, via Mendelssohn,to Handel, and back again to Mendelssohn. Themusical order of styles simply does not matchthe historical chronology suggested; the musi-

cal progression is nonchronological. Whateverthe Octet might be thought of in its depiction,it is certainly not the progression of music his-tory to ca. 1825.

On deeper reflection, this is not really thatsurprising. Mendelssohn, for all his highly de-veloped historical sense and the personal andcultural connections with Hegel, was neither abeliever in musical or artistic “progress,” nor,really, a “Hegelian” in the strict sense. TheOctet’s own musical “history,” the recurrenceand synthesis of the past into the music’s telos,is remarkable for closely following a Hegelianprocess, but any wider interpretation that theinternal process of Mendelssohn’s work some-how encapsulates Hegel’s view of history inthe broader sense is doomed to fail. This is thepoint where the analogy between Mendelssohnand Hegel finally becomes strained and pointsto fundamental differences between the twofigures and their attitudes to history. The twomay have a great deal in common, but whentaken too far the congruence between theirviews ultimately breaks down.

Whether Hegel actually believed in the ideaof unremitting progress so often attributed tohim—whether he himself was quite as“Hegelian” as some of his later followers—ismoot. Certainly he hoped that the movementof the spirit through world history was a pro-gressive journey, but his views on art and onthe notion of artistic progress were far lessstraightforward. His love for the Greeks, in com-mon with that of many German intellectualsafter Winckelmann, knew almost no bounds,and he famously declared in the Aesthetics, “ofall the masterpieces of the classical and mod-ern world—and I know nearly all of them, andyou should and can—the Antigone seems tome to be the most magnificent and satisfyingwork of art of this kind.”59 (Some of Hegel’sfollowers similarly worshipped the medievalGerman-Christian past, a tendency on whichMendelssohn was known on occasion to com-

57Saint-Foix, quoted by Elaine Sisman, Mozart: The “Jupi-ter” Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993), p. 34. The idea of music history having reached azenith (and perhaps already passed its high noon) is echoedoften in the critical and journalistic writing of the time.One of the standard contemporary guides to music his-tory, Kiesewetter, Geschichte der europäischabend-ländischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik (Leipzig: Breitkopfand Härtel, 1834), voiced such sentiments, whereas A. B.Marx contended later that the peak had already beenreached: with Beethoven, musical art had “come of age”(Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: SelectedWritings on Theory and Method, ed. and trans. ScottBurnham [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997],pp. 174–75).58Mendelssohn admired Spohr’s Symphony following itsappearance in 1839, though he voiced disapproval of thecomposer’s tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the modern ageas trivial and superficial, denoted by Spohr through themusical parody of the operatic style of Auber.

59Hegel, Aesthetics, II, 1218. Mendelssohn was later towrite incidental music to Sophocles’ tragedy. The role ofthis particular play and its importance in nineteenth-cen-tury culture is explored further by George Steiner in hisAntigones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

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ment sardonically.60) But since art is one par-ticular manifestation of Geist, and Geist is bothhistorical and teleological, Hegel’s system mustmake room for a teleology of art. (WhetherHegel was artistically sensitive enough to do soeffectively is beside the point.)

How important the influence of Hegel wasfor Mendelssohn is unclear. Mendelssohn’s re-lationship with Hegel was certainly not as closeas that with figures like Goethe or Zelter, orwith the family circle in which he grew up.Thomas Schmidt states categorically that “Men-delssohn was not a ‘Hegelian’,” though hisdiscussion of Hegel’s influence on Mendels-sohn’s aesthetic views seems to understate thecase.61 Julius Schubring relates that Hegel’s vis-its to the Mendelssohn house in the 1820s, asthe teenage composer was growing up, weremotivated more by the philosopher’s love ofwhist than of wisdom.62 Zelter reports to Goethein a letter that Mendelssohn was very good atmimicking Hegel’s manner of delivering hislectures, though again quite what this proves isunclear.63 Eric Werner, however, suggests thatMendelssohn was indebted in serious ways toHegel’s views. Listing the affinities in theiraesthetic outlooks, Werner cites a letter pur-portedly written by Hegel to Mendelssohn in1829, in which the philosopher responds toquestions the composer had put to him con-cerning the aesthetics of music and in particu-

lar the relationship of music and words. Theformer discussion is not especially convincing,being composed of general points that might beshared by anyone at the time, and the originalsource for the letter—unspecified by Werner—has never been found.64 Others, like SusannaGroßmann-Vendrey, quite sensibly treat Hegelas one of several formative figures whose view-points, while not necessarily matching precisely,are broadly congruous with Mendelssohn’s.65

Mendelssohn was certainly not an unreservedadmirer of Hegel, which in part may be due tothe understandable antagonism Hegel’s pro-nouncement on the death of art and the inde-terminacy of instrumental music would haveproduced in any promising young composer.“It is unbelievable,” Mendelssohn protested af-ter Hegel’s lectures, “Goethe and Thorwaldsenare still living, and Beethoven died only a fewyears ago, and yet Hegel proclaims that Ger-man art is as dead as a rat. Quod non! If hereally feels thus, so much the worse for him,but when I reflect for a while on his conclu-sions they appear to me very shallow.”66 Much

60“One thanks God that these highly-prized middle agesare over never to return. Don’t say this to any Hegelian,but it is true, and the more I read and think on the subject,the more clearly I feel this” (letter to his sisters, Naples,28 May 1831, Reisebriefe von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdyaus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832 [Briefe, 1], ed. PaulMendelssohn Bartholdy [Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn,1861], p. 154).61Thomas Schmidt, Die ästhetischen Grundlagen derInstrumentalmusik Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys(Stuttgart: M & P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung,1996), p. 59. For instance, the fact that Mendelssohn (per-haps intentionally) misspelled Hegel’s name once as“Hägel” in a letter written when the composer was all oftwelve is hardly a clinching argument.62Julius Schubring, “Erinnerungen an Felix MendelssohnBartholdy,” in Daheim 2 (1866), 373, trans. (anon.) in Mu-sical World 31 (12 and 19 May 1866) and rpt. inMendelssohn and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 222.63Letter, Zelter to Goethe, 22 March 1829, Briefwechselzwischen Goethe und Zelter, ed. Max Hecker, 3 vols.(Frankfurt: Insel, 1987), III [1828–32], 153.

64Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Com-poser and His Age, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Free Pressof Glencoe, 1963), p. 80, given as an “unpublished letter,30 June 1829” (a date when Mendelssohn would have beenin England). Werner has become mildly notorious for theunreliability of his scholarship. A debate conducted acrossseveral issues of the Musical Quarterly brought the mat-ter to wider attention in the late 1990s (see the originalarticle by Jeffrey S. Sposato, “Creative Writing: The [Self-]Identification of Mendelssohn as Jew,” Musical Quarterly82 [1998], 190–209, and the responses this prompted). De-spite claims to the contrary, it has never been conclu-sively proved that Werner ever deliberately falsified evi-dence, despite his numerous inaccuracies and conflationswhen transcribing source material.65Susanna Großmann-Vendrey, “Mendelssohn und dieVergangenheit,” in Die Ausbreitung des Historismus überdie Musik: Aufsätze und Diskussionen, ed. Walter Wiora(Regensburg: Bosse, 1969), pp. 73–82.66Letter to his sisters, Naples, 28 May 1831, Briefe, I, 155.For Hegel, art, religion, philosophy, history, and even po-litical institutions and laws are all manifestations of Geist.However, as seen by the supposed decline of Greek artwith the rise of philosophy (a theme later rehearsed byNietzsche), philosophical formulation and self-conscious-ness necessarily follow after art has peaked—in Hegel’sfamous image, “The owl of Minerva spreads her wingsonly at the falling of the dusk” (Philosophy of Right, pref-ace). Since the history of Geist had been philosophicallyformulated for the moment by none other than Hegel, artwas presumably in a necessary period of decline. This washardly going to be music to Mendelssohn’s ears.

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of Mendelssohn’s progress would stem ulti-mately from his desire to rebut Hegel’s “con-clusions.” In both his historical self-conscious-ness and his insistence on the comprehensibil-ity of instrumental music, Mendelssohn maybe regarded as one of, if not, the first of themusical “moderns.”67 As with Goethe, artisticcreation, not dry, obtuse theorizing, was thecritical consideration for Mendelssohn, an atti-tude that would contribute ultimately to thebreakdown of his friendship with a theorist ofsimilar predisposition, A. B. Marx.

In terms of documentary evidence, the caseis inconclusive. Mendelssohn obviously had per-sonal contact with Hegel, undoubtedly knewsomething of his philosophy, and later studiedunder him, but quite how far one can go inrelating their aesthetic and philosophical view-points remains a matter of personal discretion.I have suggested here that the two do have agreat deal in common, though this may be asmuch through common affinities in outlookand mutual interests as from the direct influ-ence of Hegel on the younger composer. Pushedtoo far, the relationship becomes strained. Theparallels between Hegel’s philosophy andMendelssohn’s music can indeed be taken far,but at this last “historical” stage the two fi-nally diverge. At this juncture a new modelmust be formed.

The figure to whom Mendelssohn’s aestheticviewpoint corresponds most closely in the mat-ter of time and history is undoubtedly the othergreat figure of German culture and Mendels-sohn’s major spiritual mentor, Goethe. Goethe’sand Hegel’s viewpoints were not entirely in-congruent, but they differed in several signifi-cant ways. Both Goethe and Hegel, not dis-similarly to Mendelssohn a generation later,constituted the “Klassiker,” not “Romantiker,”in German culture; they favored the classicaland rational, distrusting what they saw as thespiritual and emotional immaturity of Roman-ticism. In Goethe’s famous phrase, “Classicism

is health, Romanticism sickness.”68 Mendels-sohn, likewise living in a generation putativelymarked by a preference for adolescent emo-tions and the shallow quest for novelty at thefrequent expense of lucidity, harmonious bal-ance, and artistic maturity, was wont to com-plain at times of the Pariser Verzweiflungssuchtund Leidenschaftssucherei (a particularly un-translatable phrase, suggesting perhaps “Pari-sian mawkishness and indulgent searching forpassion”) of some of his contemporaries.69

The bond between Goethe and Hegel wasrespectful yet guarded. Hegel, late in life, wouldwrite to Goethe in a spirit of intellectual kin-ship, expressing his profound debt to Goethe’sexample: “When I survey the course of myspiritual development, I see you everywherewoven into it and would like to call myself oneof your sons; my inward nature received fromyou nourishment and strength to resist abstrac-tion and set its course by your images as bysignal fires.”70

Goethe’s relationship to Hegel was morewary. While he was broadly in accord withHegel’s “classical” leanings, love for the an-tique past, and distrust of the youthful Roman-tic movement, he was put off by Hegel’s ab-straction and proverbial philosophical obscu-rity. “Nature does nothing in vain. . . . Herworkings are ever alive, superfluous, and squan-dering in order that the infinite may continu-ally be present because nothing can abide. Withthis I even believe I come close to Hegel’s phi-losophy which, incidentally, attracts and re-

67See on this matter James Garratt, “Mendelssohn and theRise of Musical Historicism,” in The Cambridge Com-panion to Mendelssohn, ed. Peter Mercer-Taylor (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 55.

68Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 1031: “Klassischist das Gesund, romantisch das Kranke” (in PoetischeWerke, II, 588). Also see the conversation reported byEckermann, 2 April 1829, in Johann Peter Eckermann,Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens,ed. Otto Schönberger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), p. 343.Mendelssohn similarly relates a conversation with Goethewhere the poet “complained about the universal tendencyof the young people of the day to be so languishing andmelancholic” (letter, Weimar, 24 May 1830, Briefe, I, 4).69Letter to his mother, 23 May 1834, Briefe aus den Jahren1833 bis 1847 von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy [Briefe,2], ed. Paul and Karl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Leipzig:Hermann Mendelssohn, 1863), p. 41. On this occasionFrédéric Chopin and Ferdinand Hiller had played toMendelssohn on a visit to Düsseldorf.70Hegel to Goethe, Berlin, 24 April 1825. Cited by WalterKaufmann, Hegel, p. 351.

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pels me; may the genius be gracious unto all ofus!”71

Throughout his life, Goethe remained eclec-tic in what he favored from philosophers, tak-ing from them primarily those aspects of theirthought that accorded with his own views. Yethe seemed to sense that he and Hegel sharedsimilar concerns, albeit from opposing angles,and he was eager to hear about Hegel’s Aes-thetics from Mendelssohn on the occasion ofhis young protégé’s last visit to Weimar in 1830.(“Yesterday I had to tell him about Scotland,Hengstenberg, Spontini, and Hegel’s Aesthet-ics.”72) For both Goethe and Hegel, the problemof humanity’s relationship to time, the inter-section of the temporal and the eternal, thecontingent and the absolute, was a paramountquestion.

Mendelssohn and Goethe

“Mein Felix fährt fort und ist fleißig. Er hatsoeben wieder ein Oktett für acht obligateInstrumente vollendet, das Hand und Fußhat.”73 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was un-doubtedly a significant influence on Mendels-sohn and his aesthetic and philosophicalviews.74 As the composer wrote in 1830, fol-lowing his last meeting with the elderly poet,“when he is gone, Germany will take on adifferent form for artists. I have never thoughtof Germany without feeling heartfelt joy andpride that Goethe lived there; and the growinggeneration appears on the whole so weak andsickly that my heart sinks. He is the last, and a

happy, prosperous period for us closes!”75 Laterin life, in his Leipzig apartment, Mendelssohnwould keep a bust of Goethe in his composingstudy. The artistic relationship between thetwo figures, and especially the common out-look demonstrated in their work, has been thefocus of an increasing number of recent stud-ies.76 I would like to look at one topic in par-ticular: Goethe’s views on time and history,and their resonances with Mendelssohn’s aes-thetic conceptions as exemplified in the Octet.

One of the major themes of Goethe’s lifework is the question of man’s relationship totime, including the opposition between the eter-nal and the temporal and the relationship ofthe present time to the achievements of thepast. “My field,” the poet once said, “is time.”77

In brief, Goethe’s interest revolved around theproblem of human ephemerality and the searchfor the eternal within the transient confines ofhuman life in a world where religious certitudewas becoming increasingly problematic. Asmany authors have noted, this was a typicalconcern of the age, but Goethe’s struggle withit was particularly notable.78 Especially given

71Goethe to Zelter, Weimar, 13 August 1831, Briefwechselzwischen Goethe und Zelter, III, 515, this trans. takenfrom Kaufman, Hegel, p. 353.72Letter from Mendelssohn to his family, Weimar, 24 May1830, Briefe, I, 5.73“My Felix goes forward and is hard-working. He has justfinished an Octet for eight obligato instruments, whichmakes a great deal of sense.” (Letter, Zelter to Goethe, 6November 1825, Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter,II [1819–27], 414.)74For detailed accounts of the influence of Goethe onMendelssohn here, see particularly Susanna Großmann-Vendrey, “Mendelssohn und die Vergangenheit,” pp. 77–82, and Thomas Schmidt, Die ästhetischen Grundlagender Instrumentalmusik Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys, pp.46–52.

75Letter to his father, Rome, 10 December 1830, Briefe, I,83.76For example, Reinhard Szeskus, “Die erste Walpurgis-nacht, Op. 60, von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,” inBeiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 17 (1975), 171–80; WulfKonold, “Mendelssohn und Goethe,” in Felix MendelssohnBartholdy und seine Zeit (Laaber: Laaber, 1984), pp. 93–110; Lawrence Kramer, “Felix culpa: Mendelssohn, Goethe,and the Social Force of Musical Expression” and “TheLied as Cultural Practice: Tutelage, Gender, and Desire inMendelssohn’s Goethe Songs,” in Classical Music andPostmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1995), pp. 122–42, 143–73; Leon Botstein, “Neo-classicism, Romanticism, and Emancipation: The Originsof Felix Mendelssohn’s Aesthetic Outlook,” in TheMendelssohn Companion, ed. Douglass Seaton (Westport,Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 1–23; Julie D. Prandi,“Kindred Spirits: Mendelssohn and Goethe, Die ersteWalpurgisnacht,” in The Mendelssohns: Their Music inHistory, ed. John Michael Cooper and Julie D. Prandi (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 135–46; and JohnMichael Cooper, Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the WalpurgisNight: The Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007).77Literally, “Ich hatte Zeit, mich zu fassen,” a celebratedline written by Goethe’s character Wilhelm Meister to hiswife Natalie (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, bk. I, chap.1, in Poetische Werke, VII, 391).78For example, see Friedrich Kummel, Über den Begriffder Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1962). For a generalintroduction to Goethe’s thought in relation to that of hiscontemporaries, see Deirdre Vincent, The Eternity of Be-

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the infancy of Germany’s entry onto the stageof European culture and the dawning historicalself-consciousness of the age, a pressing con-cern for the young author in the 1770s and 80swas the relationship of the new literary tradi-tion he hoped to build with the glories of thevanished classical past.

The famous journey to Italy in 1786–88seemed to provide him with an answer. Thejourney helped persuade him that the key ques-tion was one of situating the past within aliving tradition. Parting ways with the effortsof the youthful Sturm und Drang movement,of which he had been perhaps the leading liter-ary embodiment, the poet now began to realizethe full importance of an artistic tradition.79

This realization partly explains the classicizingstrain in Goethe’s work from the late 1780sonward, the movement away from the adoles-cent rebellion and Promethean striving of Götzvon Berlichingen, Die Leiden des jungenWerthers, and the Urfaust to a more mature,harmonious, consciously “classical” art that isnot afraid to allude to and grow from its illus-trious predecessors.80 History and artistic tradi-tion are conceived as the constituents of a dy-namic process, each part of which is imbuedwith both continuity and an ongoing organicgrowth and development from what has pre-ceded it, in a vision not unlike that of Hegel. Incontradistinction to Hegel, however, the past,for Goethe, never is and can never be super-seded.

Goethe’s outlook, as Susanna Großmann-Vendrey has shown, is remarkably similar toMendelssohn’s.81 Großmann-Vendrey has calledattention to a letter the composer wrote fromItaly articulating his views on the relationshipof his music to the past. The past, he insists,

can never be repeated but only continuedthrough an inner spiritual necessity. Any simi-larity between his own music and that of hisgreat predecessors results not from “dry, sterileimitation” but from a spiritual penetration intothe essence of the past and a shared empathywith the eternal truth that gives rise to thiscorrespondence.82 The paradox here, as JamesGarratt points out, is that in defending himselfagainst the charge of imitation, Mendelssohnis almost directly paraphrasing one of Goethe’sown letters from Italy.83

Likewise, the notion that assumed great im-portance for Mendelssohn is the existence ofan artistic tradition and one’s position as acontinuation of and outgrowth from this heri-tage. In the conversations reported by J. C. Lobe,the composer insists that there are no com-pletely new paths in music, only a “continua-tion slightly farther” down the one true path.84

The series of “historical concerts” that Mendels-sohn organized in Leipzig, where the music ofthe past was presented in chronological orderup to the present day, played an important roleboth in deepening the public’s awareness oftheir cultural past and in the formation of theAustro-German symphonic “canon.”85 Alsosignificant here were the young composer’s per-sonal encounters with Goethe himself, inwhich, as Mendelssohn relates, he played onthe piano the music of the various great com-

ing: On the Experience of Time in Goethe’s Faust (Bonn:Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1987), pp. 159–74.79For example, see Michael Beddow, “Goethe on Genius,”in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 98–112.80For instance, E. M. Wilkinson has suggested that Goethe’sFaust is the first great modern work that tries to keep theEuropean tradition alive by constantly alluding to and re-calling it (“Goethe’s Faust: Tragedy in the DiachronicMode,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 42[1971–72], 116–74).81Susanna Großmann-Vendrey, “Mendelssohn und dieVergangenheit,” pp. 77–82: “Goethe und das geschichtlicheVerständnis Mendelssohns.”

82Letter to Zelter, Rome, 18 December 1830, Briefe [5thedn., 1863], I, 97; also see the composer’s letter of 13 July1831 to Eduard Devrient (Eduard Devrient, MeineErinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und seineBriefe an mich [Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869], p. 115).83James Garratt, “Mendelssohn and the Rise of MusicalHistoricism,” pp. 66–67. Garratt has further suggested how“Hegelian” Mendelssohn’s argument concerning this pointseems to be (“Mendelssohn’s Babel: Romanticism and thePoetics of Translation,” Music & Letters 80 [1999], 29–31).The two passages in question were originally discussed bySusanna Großmann-Vendrey in “Mendelssohn und dieVergangenheit,” p. 80.84See Johann Christian Lobe, “Conversations with FelixMendelssohn,” trans. Susan Gillespie in Mendelssohn andHis World, pp. 193–94. Similarly, Mendelssohn’s politicaland artistic views were strongly characterized by the ideaof liberal “reform,” as opposed to revolution (see thecomposer’s letter to his sister Rebecca, Düsseldorf, 23 De-cember 1837, Briefe, II, 72; also cf. pp. 38–47).85On this point and Mendelssohn’s historical activities ingeneral as a performing musician, see Großmann-Vendrey’slarger study, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und die Musikder Vergangenheit.

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posers “in chronological order” so that the eld-erly poet could understand the development ofmusic.86

This deeply respectful attitude to the greatachievements of the past is characteristic ofMendelssohn’s aesthetic outlook throughout hislife.87 His principles on this matter and theirrelation to the aesthetic idea of the “classical”have been subject to much inquiry, especiallyin German scholarship. Carl Dahlhaus has con-jectured that for Mendelssohn certain modelsof composition stood out as ideal paradigms:the classici auctores Bach and Handel for theliturgical passion and oratorio, Gluck andMozart for the opera seria and buffa, Haydnand Beethoven for the string quartet and sym-phony.88 Garratt has drawn an analogy betweenthis historical tendency in Mendelssohn’s mu-sic and the idea of “translation” between thepast and present—the idea of the partial appro-priation of a historical style in dialogue withthe composer’s own contemporary idiom—toexplain some of this composer’s more “histori-

cist” works.89 Similarly, Michael Steinberg hasargued that Mendelssohn’s conception of the“classical” was the antithesis of the historic-izing strain of thought that arose in the nine-teenth century and found a culmination in thehistorical performance movement, that is, inthe wish to situate each document from thepast within its historical context, thus turninghistory into a desiccated archive of marmorealrelics from the past.90 For Mendelssohn, thegreat works of the past were constantly alive,reinventing themselves anew. There is no an-tithesis between the classical and the modern;the truly classical is the eternally modern (thetraditional stile antico e moderno), as summedup in Mendelssohn’s words “daß alles Alte Guteneu bleibt” (that everything old and good re-mains new).91 This attitude is demonstratedperfectly in the music Mendelssohn wrote forthe revivals of Sophoclean tragedy, the settingsof Antigone and Oedipus Coloneus.

Goethe’s views on time and history are per-haps crystallized most profoundly in Faust, be-gun in the early 1770s and completed only theyear before the poet’s death in 1832. As IlseGraham has suggested, “Faust’s understandingof and relation to time is at the heart of Goethe’sdrama,” even “the central theme of the play.”92

After all, Faust’s wager—the linchpin of thestory—is concerned with the joys of the fleet-ing moment and the desire to clasp hold of this,an entirely original addition of Goethe’s to theoriginal sixteenth-century morality tale:

Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:Verweile doch! du bist so schön!93

86Letter, Mendelssohn to his family, Weimar, 25 May 1830,Briefe, I, 8: “Vormittags muß ich ihm ein Stündchen Cla-vier vorspielen, von allen verschiedenen großenComponisten, nach der Zeitfolge, und muß ihm erzählen,wie sie die Sache weiter gebracht hätten; und dazu sitzt erin einer dunklen Ecke, wie ein Jupiter tonans, und blitztmit den alten Augen.” Goethe later related the incident toZelter: “wer versteht irgendeine Erscheinung, wenn er sichvon dem Gang des Herankommens [nicht] penetriert? Dazuwar denn die Hauptsache, daß Felix auch diesen Stufengangrecht löblich einsieht und glücklicherweise sein gutesGedächtnis ihm Musterstücke aller Art nach Beliebenvorführt. Von der Bachischen Epoche heran hat er mirwieder Haydn, Mozart und Gluck zum Leben gebracht,von den großen neuern Technikern hinreichende Begriffegegeben und endlich mich seine eigenen Produktionenfühlen und über sie nachdenken machen” (letter, Goetheto Zelter, Weimar, 3 June 1830, Briefwechsel zwischenGoethe und Zelter, III, 338). Also cf. Karl Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Goethe und Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy(Leipzig: Hirtel, 1871), p. 41.87Note Mendelssohn’s angry response to those disrespect-ful to or inclined to destroy others in order to further theirown aims: “the first qualification for an artist is that heshould have respect for greatness and be humble in itspresence . . . and not try to blow out the great lights sothat his own little tallow-candle can shine a little brighter”(letter, 27 August 1831, cited by Werner, Mendelssohn: ANew Image, p. 181).88Carl Dahlhaus, “Mendelssohn und die musikalischeGattungstradition,” in Das Problem Mendelssohn, ed. CarlDahlhaus (Regensburg: Bosse, 1974), pp. 56–60; see alsoWulf Konold, “Funktion der Stilisierung: VorläufigeBemerkungen zum Stilbegriff bei Mendelssohn,” in FelixMendelssohn Bartholdy, pp. 4–5.

89James Garratt, “Mendelssohn’s Babel,” pp. 34–46. Foranother slant on this “historicist” tendency, see Peter Mer-cer-Taylor, “Rethinking Mendelssohn’s Historicism: A Les-son from St. Paul,” Journal of Musicology 15 (1997), 208–30.90Michael P. Steinberg, “Schumann’s Homelessness,” inSchumann and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 57–65, also con-densed in Listening to Reason, pp. 100–22.91Mendelssohn, letter to his sister Rebecca, 23 December1834, Briefe, II, 73. See Großmann-Vendrey, “Mendelssohnund die Vergangenheit,” p. 81.92Ilse Graham, “The Grateful Moment: The Element ofTime in Faust,” in Goethe: Portrait of the Artist (Berlin:de Gruyter, 1977), p. 315.93Goethe, Faust I, ll. 1699–700. This idea of the transient“beautiful moment” is alluded to by Nietzsche to charac-

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(Were I to say to the fleeting moment:“Yet stay a while! You are so beautiful!”)

Now this is especially interesting since, aswe know, there is a direct connection betweenGoethe’s drama and Mendelssohn’s Octet. Thescherzo of Mendelssohn’s work, on his sister’sauthority, was inspired by the Walpurgisnacht’sDream episode of part I of Faust:

Wolkenzug und NebelflorErhellen sich von oben.Luft im Laub und Wind im Rohr—Und alles ist zerstoben.

(The train of clouds and veil of mistLighten from above,A wind sweeps through the grass and leaves—And everything has vanished.)

To me alone, he told his secret. The whole piece isto be played staccato and pianissimo, the individualtremolos coming in here and there, the trills passingaway with the quickness of lightning; everything isnew, strange, and yet so insinuating and pleasing.One feels so near the world of spirits, lightly carriedup into the air; one would like to take up a broom-stick and follow the aerial procession. At the end thefirst violin takes flight with feather-like lightness—and all has vanished.94

This piece of evidence has inspired R. LarryTodd to propose a Faustian reading of the Octetas a whole, based on the first part of Goethe’sdrama, which had been published in 1808.95

This kind of theory, naturally, is intriguing.While there is no proof that anything morethan the scherzo was connected with Goethe’splay, one cannot rule out a wider association,

especially given Mendelssohn’s habitual reti-cence concerning disclosure of the extramusical“content” of his music. At the time of theOctet, Mendelssohn was just beginning his briefthough fruitful artistic friendship with A. B.Marx, an advocate of basing musical composi-tions on “extramusical” literary or historicalideas, and numerous works from the followingyears would indeed be based on literary texts—even on two of Goethe’s poems in Meeresstilleund glückliche Fahrt. Perhaps the most cel-ebrated work written under this aesthetic,the overture to Shakespeare’s A MidsummerNight’s Dream, was written less than a yearafter the Octet.

The extent to which one wishes to take thisFaustian analogy is obviously a matter of opin-ion, but the intimate link between Mendels-sohn’s work and Goethe’s, together with theirclose artistic and spiritual relationship, is un-deniable. At any rate, the connection providesa nice “hermeneutic window,” in Kramer’sphrase, on to the Octet.96 In 1825, the year inwhich Mendelssohn composed the Octet,Goethe had resumed work on the second partof the magnum opus that had been projected asearly as 1796; the elderly poet even gaveMendelssohn an autograph copy of excepts fromthe first act of Faust, part II in 1830 (plate 1).

In this context it is hardly surprising to dis-cover that the views on time held by Goetheand articulated by him in Faust are echoed inthe process of his protégé’s Octet. The Octet,as demonstrated above, enacts an organic, evolv-ing spiral that is not only strongly “Hegelian”but also comparable to the broad temporal dy-namism theorized by Goethe and seen, argu-ably, in Faust.97 But more than this, the treat-ment of historical time found in Goethe’s writ-ings and above all in Faust is mirrored in theOctet.

terize both Mendelssohn and Goethe, whose work, toogood for the diseased, décadent Romanticism of the laternineteenth century, was in both cases effectively ignored.In Beyond Good and Evil, Mendelssohn—“that halcyonmaster,” the “beautiful incident [schöne Zwischenfall] ofGerman music”—is characterized in terms virtually iden-tical with those applied to Goethe in Twilight of the Idols(“So daß Goethe . . . bloß ein Zwischenfall, ein schönesUmsonst gewesen wäre”). Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits vonGut und Böse, § 245; Götzen-Dämmerung, § 50 (Gesam-melte Werke, ed. Wolfgang Deninger [Bindlach: Gondrom,2005], p. 1095).94Faust, I, ll. 4395–98; Fanny Mendelssohn, in SebastianHensel, Die Familie Mendelssohn, I, 154.95R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, pp. 149–52.

96Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 6–20.Leon Botstein has claimed in this context that we mightprofitably hear all of Mendelssohn’s music as a “parallelto the second part of Goethe’s Faust” (“Neoclassicism,Romanticism, and Emancipation,” p. 4).97For an example of this “organic” approach in relation toGoethe’s play, see Peter Salm, The Poem as Plant: A Bio-logical View of Goethe’s Faust (Cleveland: Press of CaseWestern Reserve University, 1971).

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The presence of aspects of the music of thepast within Mendelssohn’s music should beunderstood in relation to the allusive nature ofGoethe’s work.98 This incorporation of earliermusical styles, both in the Octet and in Men-delssohn’s music in general, reveals the eternalpresence of the past in the present, the contin-ued validity for the present of the great achieve-ments of history. In the same sense thatMendelssohn’s work, like Goethe’s before him,participates in the great artistic tradition lying

behind it through its intertextual references tothat tradition, the present moment containsand to an extent validates all previous mo-ments by its growth from and participation inthe historical continuum. To be refound, totake up its new existence in the present, thepast must first become fully aware of its ownhistorical status.99 This past is not presented asit actually existed historically “but as it ex-isted, and could therefore continue to exist, inessence.”100 It is a product of an unrepeatablemoment in history, yet it contains the essenceof that entire history, an idea that is infinitelyrepeatable. This recapturing of the past revealsthe “higher unity” of time that Goethe claimedto have found in part II of Faust—the sense ofthe past and present as one.101 But there is nosense in which the past is ever superseded.Mendelssohn’s piece charts no historical pro-gression and claims no culmination or “im-provement” over what has preceded it. This iswhere Mendelssohn demonstrates his fidelityto Goethe’s maxims and where he departs fromHegel.

The process of the Octet continually pressestoward this transcendent moment of fusion subspecie aeternitatis, the höchste Augenblick(highest instant) spoken of by Faust, in timebut above it.102 As in Faust, this envisaged mo-

98Jane K. Brown has even suggested that “allusiveness perse is the defining quality of art for Goethe” (Goethe’sFaust: The German Tragedy [Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1986], p. 177).

99See Walter Wiora, Die Ausbreitung des Historismus überdie Musik, “Diskussion,” p. 84.100Vincent, The Eternity of Being, p. 39. Goethe frequentlyarticulates the idea of the intransience and incorruptibil-ity of the essential truth of an artwork. A good example isfound in Wilhelm Meister, where the organic relationshipsthat Wilhelm finds in Hamlet and that in themselves aretimelessly valid are contrasted with the “accidental,” his-torically specific external context surrounding this essen-tial core (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, bk. V, chap. 4, inPoetische Werke, VII, 187–89).101Note Goethe’s famous account of his impressions onseeing Cologne Cathedral in Dichtung and Wahrheit III/14: “one feeling did get a powerful grip on me and becomeinexpressibly fascinating: it was the sensation of past andpresent being one, a perception that introduced a spectralquality into the present” (Poetische Werke, VIII, 401; trans.taken from Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth I–III(Collected Works IV), trans. Robert R. Heitner [Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1987], p. 457). See, likewise,Mendelssohn’s response to the ruins of the Forum in Rome(letter, 8 November 1830, Briefe, I, 51).102Goethe, Faust II, l. 11586. This idea of the “moment” inmusic has been taken up by Berthold Hoeckner in Pro-gramming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Mu-sic and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2002).

Plate 1: Autograph dedication page fromGoethe to Mendelssohn, containing

excerpts from part II of Faust.(Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. M.

Deneke Mendelssohn d. 8, fol. 17v,reproduced by kind permission.)

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ment is the realization of the participation ofthe contingent individual with the whole. Itscapacity to encapsulate all of life within thesingle instant of its span allows us “to adoptthat perspective of eternity that [Goethe] re-garded as the ultimate achievement of all greatart.”103

To take the analogy a step further: whenFaust, in act V of part II, attains this highestmoment, he dies. He thus loses his wager withMephistopheles, but he does so in a way thattranscends the wager’s terms and allows himto overcome the finite limitations of humanstriving. Likewise, on the realization of eter-nity within the instant, the music of the Octetceases. The rest is silence. In this conclusionwe can see the meeting of the ideas of Goetheand Hegel. The analogy with Faust and thepoet’s views on time and history offers us analternative—though not entirely incompat-ible—perspective from that of Hegelian syn-thesis and the path to self-consciousness.104

Perhaps the temporal nature of music, itsability to suggest an immanent unity within amultiplicity of temporal events, predisposes itto encapsulate eternity in the moment.105

Goethe thought as much, and said so in a letterwritten barely a week before his death toMendelssohn’s teacher, Zelter: “Fortunately thecharacter of your talent relies on tones, i.e., onthe moment. Now, since a sequence of succes-sive moments is always itself a kind of eter-nity, it was given to you to be ever constant inthat which passes and thus to satisfy me aswell as Hegel’s spirit, insofar as I understand it,completely.”106

This abiding idea of Goethe’s—“permanencein transience” (Dauer im Wechsel)107—is per-

fectly crystallized in the process of Mendels-sohn’s piece. The eternal is represented in thefinite through art. Music, with its unique powerto enact the temporal states of human con-sciousness, can offer a glimpse of eternal unityeven through its transience, and thus serve as arevelation of the hidden unity and harmony ofnature in which Goethe found the idea of thebeautiful.108

The Octet is not only “the first work ofMendelssohn’s maturity” but also the first workin which his historical attitude is encapsulatedwithin the music’s actual structure. The “his-torical interest” within the Octet reveals theeternal verity of the past, not just in this onework but in the entire past tradition of musicthat Mendelssohn inhabited so fully. Throughits cyclical structure, the Octet captures andrenews its own past and in so doing establishesthe model that Mendelssohn and manyothers would rely on in the future.

Abstract.The historical past played perhaps a more importantrole in Mendelssohn’s music than in that of anyother composer. This article approaches the worktraditionally seen as his first major compositionalachievement, the Octet in E� Major for Strings, op.20 (1825), from the perspective of the composer’sstrong historical sense and takes up ideas of musicalmemory, history, and circular narrative journey asembodied in the cyclical structure of the piece. TheOctet enacts a coming to self-consciousness of itsown musical history, a process with close parallelsin the writings of Goethe and Hegel, both of whomMendelssohn knew personally. In its cyclical ma-nipulations of musical time, Mendelssohn’s Octetsets up a new formal and expressive paradigm for amusical work that would be of major significancefor the instrumental music of the later nineteenthcentury.Key words: Mendelssohn, Goethe, Hegel, Octet in E�Major, cyclic form.

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103Vincent, The Eternity of Being, p. 38.104Walter Kaufmann has outlined several parallels toGoethe’s Faust in Hegel’s Phenomenology and tabulatedthe numerous debts the philosopher acknowledged to hiselder colleague (Hegel, pp. 116–19).105On this aspect of music, see Jeremy Begbie, Theology,Music, and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000).106Goethe to Zelter, 11 March 1832; Briefwechsel zwischenGoethe und Zelter, III, 639, trans. from Kaufmann, Hegel,p. 357. This was Goethe’s last letter to Zelter; the poetdied eleven days later.107Ilse Graham, Goethe: Portrait of the Artist, p. 2. Com-pare Goethe’s poem of the same name (Poetische Werke, I,

69, 440): “Laß den Anfang mit dem Ende / Sich in einszusammenziehn! / Schneller als die Gegenstände / Selberdich vorüberfliehn!”108“Das Schöne ist eine Manifestation geheimer Natur-gesetze, die ohne dessen Erscheinung ewig wären verborgengeblieben” (Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 183,in Poetische Werke, II, 502).

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COMMUNI-CATIONS

Benedict Taylor is currently Alexander vonHumboldt Research Fellow at the HumboldtUniversity, Berlin. He studied music at Cam-bridge, King’s College London and Heidelbergand subsequently held the Proctor Fellowshipat Princeton University. His research concen-trates on the idea of musical temporality in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries and its im-plications for conceptions of subjectivity,memory, and musical history.

19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 2, p. 209. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.209.

19th-Century Music invites submissions for a special issue on film music, conceived broadly asmusic for moving pictures. As our regular readers know, the journal’s interests go well beyondthe chronological limits of the nineteenth century. The presence of nineteenth-century musicin twentieth-century music and culture is a topic we have explored before and would like toexplore further. The development of cinema offers an especially rich opportunity because thispreeminently twentieth-century medium was deeply engaged from the outset with the previ-ous century’s music. Articles submitted for the special issue may have a historical, analytical,or critical focus. The range of topics available includes (but is not limited to) the archeology offilm in nineteenth-century dioramas, panoramas, and tableaux vivants; the ongoing influenceof late-Romantic music on film scoring; the extradiegetic use of nineteenth-century music infilm generally or in specific films; and the diegetic appearance of nineteenth-century works,composers, and performers in motion pictures from the silent era until today. There is no fixeddeadline for submissions; articles on this topic are welcome at any time.

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Contributors

Adrian Daub is assistant professor of GermanStudies at Stanford University. He is the au-thor of a German-language monograph on four-hand piano-playing in the nineteenth centuryand is currently completing a project on themetaphysics of marriage in German Idealismand Romanticism.

Steven Rings is an assistant professor of musicand the humanities at the University of Chi-cago. His book Tonality and Transformation isforthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Musical History and Self-Consciousness in Mendelssohn's Octet, Op. 20