It is hard to believe that this Octet was composed in the autumn of 1825 and completed on October 15, when the composer was just 16. He wrote the octet as a birthday gift for his friend and violin teacher Eduard Ritz and was only slightly revised in 1832 before the first public performance on 30 January 1836 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Conrad Wilson summarizes much of its reception ever since: “Its youthful verve, brilliance and perfection make it one of the miracles of nineteenth-century music.”

The work comprises four movements:

• I      Allegro moderato ma con fuoco (E-flat major)
• II     Andante (C minor)
• III    Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo (G minor)
• IV    Presto (E-flat major)

A typical performance of the work lasts around thirty minutes, with the first movement usually comprising roughly half of this.

The scherzo, later scored for orchestra as a replacement for the minuet in the composer’s First Symphony at its premiere, is believed to have been inspired by a section of Goethe’s Faust entitled “Walpurgis Night’s Dream”.Fragments of this movement recur in the finale, as a precursor to the “cyclic” technique employed by later 19th-century composers. The entire work is also notable for its extended use of counterpoint, with the finale, in particular, beginning with an eight-part fugato. In this section, Mendelssohn quotes the melody of “And he shall reign forever and ever” from the “Hallelujah Chorus” of Handel’s Messiah.

Instrumentation

The original score is for a double string quartet with four violins and pairs of violas and cellos. Mendelssohn instructed in the public score, “This Octet must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style. Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed and more strongly emphasized than is usual in pieces of this character.”

The piece is sometimes played by full string sections using more players for each part as well as an added double bass part which usually (but not always) doubles the second cello part an octave lower.

The composer also transcribed the piece as a piano duet with violin and cello ad. lib. and orchestrated the third movement Scherzo (with compositional alterations) as an alternative third movement to his Symphony No. 1 in C minor.

Johannes Brahms’ String Sextet No. 2 in G major, Opus 36 was composed during the years of 1864–1865 (although it drew on material from earlier times) and published by the firm of Fritz Simrock. It was first performed in Boston, Massachusetts on October 11, 1866, with the European premiere following the next month in Zurich. The work is scored for two violins, two violas, and two celli, and has four movements:

• I       Allegro non troppo (G major)
• II      Scherzo – Allegro non troppo – Presto giocoso (G minor)
• III     Adagio (E minor)
• IV    Poco allegro (G major)

Written in 3 days the eighth quartet was written shortly after Shostakovich reluctantly joined the Communist Party. According to the score, it is dedicated “to the victims of fascism and the war”; his son Maxim interprets this as a reference to the victims of all totalitarianism, while his daughter Galina says that he dedicated it to himself, and that the published dedication was imposed by the Russian authorities. Shostakovich’s friend, Lev Lebedinsky, said that Shostakovich thought of the work as his epitaph and that he planned to commit suicide around this time. Peter J. Rabinowitz has also pointed to covert references to Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in the Eighth Quartet.

The work was written in Dresden, where Shostakovich was to write music for the film Five Days, Five Nights, a joint project by Soviet and East German filmmakers about the bombing of Dresden in World War II.