Mozart & Enescu

The Winterthur String Quartet is getting some reinforcements! The ensemble, consisting of the four principal players on the violins, violas and cellos, is being doubled in size: the result is an octet, a formation made famous above all by the famous Opus 20 by the 16-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, composed in 1825. Georges Enescu was just three years older when he completed his no less monumental string octet in 1900. The four movements, whose motifs are arranged cyclically, flow directly into one another, thus forming a single large movement – a form that was not uncommon in Paris, where Enescu spent a large part of his life. Like Schoenberg’s sextet ‘Verklärte Nacht’, composed a year earlier, the octet stands on the threshold between Romanticism and Modernism, yet is far more firmly rooted in classical counterpoint. Given this consistently polyphonic structure, it is hardly surprising that Enescu spent a good year and a half working on this piece. Anyone unfamiliar with the work must hear it at least once in their lifetime. However, it only truly reveals itself after repeated listening. What a stroke of luck, then, that the octet will also be performed at the subscription concert on 21/22 April, this time with a choral line-up!

Mozart’s work on his three ‘Prussian’ quartets took a similarly long time. When his trip to the court of King Frederick William II in Potsdam ended without any concert engagements, Mozart hoped at least to impress the cello-playing monarch with his quartets. He was able to complete the first string quartet, featuring appropriately rewarding solos for the cello, as early as June 1789. Yet back in Vienna, financial worries plagued him once more; the ‘laborious work’ on the two further quartets dragged on until the summer of the following year. Moreover, they never fulfilled their purpose – they were premiered during Mozart’s quartet subscription concerts in Vienna in 1790 and 1791, and were published, admittedly without any dedication to the Prussian king, only shortly after Mozart’s death.