Le 1er juillet 2017
de 12h00 à 12h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 6
Séance - Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Franck
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Julian Horton
Completed within two months of the composer’s death on 4th November 1847, and frequently interpreted as a response to his sister Fanny’s death in May of that year, the String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 offers a rare opportunity to diagnose a late style for Mendelssohn’s music. Its expressive volatility and formal terseness have attracted comment as reflections on personal tragedy, as part of a broader engagement with cultural-political circumstance (Knepler 1961), and as evidence of a new stylistic path (Todd 2003).
This paper explores the question of late style, as figured in the relationship between form and syntax in the first movement. Paying close attention to strategies of functional transformation (Schmalfeldt 2011), structural non-congruence and cadential evasion, I argue that the movement expresses lateness not through a novel stylistic turn, but via an extreme, self-reflective critical distillation of principles that inform Mendelssohn’s music as far back as the Octet of 1825. Drawing on Hepokoski and Darcy’s consideration of the expressive features of minor-mode sonatas (2006), I read the work’s tragic stance in its dialogue between topic, expression, form-functional dislocation and the systematic dismantling of the cadential trajectory underpinning the high-classical sonata.
