mendelssohn – profundity without angst?

I got back a couple hours ago from working on the great op. 13 quartet of the young Felix Mendelssohn, and it never fails to amaze me how great a composer he is without often falling into the Germanic need for angst and suffering in his art.  One of my favorite parts of the quartet is the slow introduction which opens the work, and which then reappears at the very close, book-ending the piece.  It turns out that the tune of the introduction is borrowed from one of his early op. 9 songs (No. 1 Frage or Question).  It’s a lovely little setting of a text by Mendelssohn’s friend Johnann Heinrich Voss:

Ist es wahr? Ist es wahr?
Daß du stets dort in dem Laubgang,
An der Weinwand meiner harrst?
Und den Mondschein und die Sternlein
Auch nach mir befragst?
Ist es wahr? Sprich!
Was ich fühle, das begreift nur,
Die es mit fühlt,
Und die treu mir ewig,
Treu mir ewig, ewig bleibt.

Is it true? Is it true
that over there in the leafy walkway, you always
wait for me by the vine-draped wall?
And that with the moonlight and the little stars
you consult about me also?
Is it true? Speak!
What I feel, only she grasps —
she who feels with me
and stays ever faithful to me,
eternally faithful.

Translation © Emily Ezust

[click to enlarge]

This also reminds me (the use of this song and its melodic contour) of the Beethoven Op. 135 Quartet, with its Muβ es Sein? and Es Muβ Sein! (Must it Be? It Must Be!) motives.  The shadow of Beethoven is all over this work, but Mendelssohn imbues it with his usual golden sunlight (and elfin moonlight, in the case of the trio to the third movement Intermezzo) and there is little fuss, only endless and effortless beauty.

Here’s how it sounds in the quartet version (in the incomparable version recorded by the Guarneri Quartet in 1966 (now reissued by Sony Classical): [audio:http://www.nobleviola.com/wordpress/audio/op13-01.mp3]