Luogo e data di registrazione		Lutherse Kerk, Haarlem (Holland) - 25/27 February 1999
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer / Editing		Stephan Schellmann (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 60 766 - (1 CD) - durata 59' 55" - (p) 2000 - DDD
	Cover Art		Auf dem Segler (ca.1818/19) by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - St. Petersburg, The Hermitage Museum
	Note		-

The Certainty of the Uncertain After only a few measures, we are caught up in it. Hardly any other music of the nineteenth century is as direct and immediate. The strings unleash one triumphantly brilliant melody after another, filling our ears with an expressive fullness that makes words superfluous. Melodies as substitutes for emotions flood over us. Of course they are “beautiful”, but beyond that, they are unbelievably intense, emotionally dense, inwardlooking. These impressions are important, even crucial to an understanding of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. Everything else pales in comparison - knowing what inspired the works, how he composed them, even how the two string quintets and Mendelssohn's personal history intersect. Is such a view appropriate, fortuitous, or simply arbitrary? It may astonish us to learn that the quintets have a fairly complicated history. Although they might sound - to an unbiased listener - as if they had been written one right after the other, they were actually created twenty years apart and under vastly different circumstances. The second was composed in one fell swoop and in a festive mood, in June 1845,while Mendelssohn was considering at leisure two positions, one offered by the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and the other by the Saxon king, Friedrich August II. The origins of the first quintet, on the other hand, are so tangled that even the date of composition is uncertain.We do know a version with four movements was completed in 1826. Six years later, affected by the death of violinist Eduard Rietz, to whom the quintet had been dedicated, Mendelssohn switched the sequence of the two middle movements and discarded the minuet in F minor, replacing it with a new movement (Intermezzo, Andante sostenuto in F major), composed in honor of his friend. Thus Mendelssohn did spend a good deal of time revising and refining the form and texture of his string quintets, even if those efforts are not apparent in the “results.” Indeed his approach in composing the quintets, void of any hint of laboriousness, of something achieved or extracted as if by force, lies outside the view of music assumed by a Protestant work ethic. At the same time, his approach revealed a very different sense of how music is constructed, certainly in comparison to the compositional aesthetics of Beethoven's chamber music. For the techniques Mendelssohn used are certainly nowhere to be found in Beethoven's chamber music, particularly his revered string quartets. Rather they are to be found in the works of composers who were rediscovered and revived in the growing historical awareness of Mendelssohn's era, composers who were considered outmoded, or, at least compared to Beethoven, not particularly progressive. This in part accounts for the relative flimsiness of themes and motives in Mendelssohn's string quintets and the lack of dialectic. instead, we find in these works elegant elaboration, broad expansion, concerto-like development, melodic connections, tonal nuances and nuances of the same pitch produced by different strings, fresco-like theme phrasing, and variation and permutation. Mendelssohn's predilection for chamber music arose out of external circumstances dating back to his youth, for in his parent's home he had learned that music was both entertainment and a sophisticated form of social interaction, and he was to cherish it as such throughout life. But there was also a deeper and more personal source for this love, reflected in his relatively well documented study of Beethoven`s chamber music. The way Mendelssohn approached really getting to know Beethoven's music, and indeed the work of any undisputed master, was to delve deeply into, to absorb the techniques used to “make” these great masterpieces. And it is specifically Mendelssohn's grappling with the models of Beethoven's string quartets that shows us which of Mendelssohn's particular interests and conceptions of chamber music guided him. Contrary to the perspective widely held today that touts above all else Beethoven's structure, Mendelssohn was absorbed by the composer's emotionally-charged expressions, and how they were transformed to a new or different state. “Do you know his [Beethoven's] new quartet in B flat major?” Mendelssohn wrote excitedly in April 1828 to his fellow student Adolf Fredrik Lindblad. “The one in C sharp minor? Listen to it, I beg you. The one in B flat has a cavatina in E flat. The first violin sings, and the world sings with it! The second violin imitates the endings, and then you get to the point where it inodulates to C flat with much sighing [!], and after that continues for a while, the E flat begins again with such heavenly modulation [!]. I don't know of anything more lovely.” At first the mythic model of Beethoven's œuvre, especially his later string quartets, filled Mendelssohn with awe and intimidated him. And one has the sense that he proceeded cautiously, “copying” Beethoven's compositional methods before “liberating” himself to compose his own string quartets. But in areas where he did not have to fear competing with this lofty and possibly unattainable idol, his compositions are much freer, more open to experimentation, more selfconfident. Thus, the string quintets feel much more spontaneous, authentic, and independent, so much more “Mendelssohnian,” than the far larger number of his memorable string quartets. Mendelssohn's broad interest in instrumental music, especially chamber music, an interest that helped fuel his own compositions, in a sense forced him to clarify his own understanding of music - this at a time when any music not bound to text of some sort suffered charges of being deliberately abstract, arbitrary, and ambiguous. His feelings on the matter were certainly made clear by 15 October 1842 in a now-famous letter outlining his musical aesthetic and the important role instrumental music played in it. This letter did not come out of a vacuum, however. Twelve years earlier, in 1829/1830, he had declared: “I... consider it impermissible to compose something that I do not feel with every fiber of my being.  It's as specific a meaning as each word does, perhaps even a more distinct one.” This notion brings us to the very core of Mendelssohn's thoughts on music, a notion that became more and more important to him. It appears that at the same time Mendelssohn was seeking to reassure himself of the validity and aesthetic viability of these thoughts, as he went on to elaborate, “This is what I think art is and what I demand of it: that it pull everyone in; that it show one person another's most intimate thoughts and feelings; that it throw open the windows of the soul. Words cannot do that as overwhelmingly as colours or music can.” From there, it was but a small step f though in terms of compositional “output” it represented a giant step - to declaring in the letter of 1842, “So many words are uttered about music, and yet so little is said.I think words are not enough.If I thought they were, I would stop making music. People complain that music is so open to interpretation and that they don't know what they are supposed to think. Words, on the other hand, they think, can be understood by everyone. For me it's exactly the other way around, and not just with long speeches, but with single words, too... What music expresses for me, what I love, are not ideas that are too indefinite to put into words, but too definite... If you ask me what I mean, I mean specifically this song, in and of itself.” And here Mendelssohn was referring to his Songs Without Words. “Even if I thought of some specific word or words, I wouldn't speak them, because a word never means to one person what it means to another. Only a song can say the same thing to everyone, can awaken the same feeling - a feeling that cannot be expressed in words.” Thus, Mendelssohn's musical understanding is rooted in an aesthetic of pure or absolute music. For him, music can assume and communicate an emotional power and clarity that would be destroyed by the addition or substitution of language. Pure music is direct, inexhaustible and inclusive. It is addressed to anyone and therefore to everyone, while music connected to language always hits culturally insurmountable barriers. What does this mean for us in terms of Mendelssohn's string quintets? It means that we can safely give ourselves up to the experience of hearing, as was described earlier. For we are never closer to Mendelssohn's compositions than when we hear them associatively, emotionally, opening ourselves to the effect of the music and letting ourselves be carried away by it. That does not mean that matters of structure, of texture, of which composition technique was used and for what reason are unimportant. They help us understand how Mendelssohn sought to realize the ideas behind his music. And yet, such matters will not help us understand his intentions. Those can only be sensed. Volker Kalisch (Translation: Susan Steiner & Richard Haney-Jardine)