Best known as a keyboard composer for his sometimes too-sentimental "Songs without Words," Mendelssohn produced this excellent set of piano pieces at an earlier age, when he was eighteen. Unusual for a set of character piece of the time is that there are thematic and other links among the movements, making them seem more like an integrated composition.

Nos 1 and 6 are the most closely linked. Both are in e minor, both begin with a nine-measure section, and they have practically the same harmonic progressions. They are very different in mood: The first is obviously patterned on a Bach invention, while the sixth is a nostalgic piece in the rhythm of a sarabande.

No 2 in b minor has the character of a Scarlatti sonata. No 3 is a fugue in D Major, an elegant and pretty example of that form. No 4, in A Major, is rather like a sonata movement on only one theme, but it is more useful to regard it as a completely original form devised by Mendelssohn for the occasion. No 5 is a very dignified and academic double fugue. Technically it is a tour de force, but musically it is the most problematic part of the set. The final piece, in E, is instantly recognizable as a close companion of the young composer's recent overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

© All Music Guide

###

Mendelssohn finishes his once-famous but now somewhat neglected set of Seven Character Pieces, Op. 7 (1827), with No. 7, a Presto of the lightest, breeziest kind—indeed, the marking at the top of the piece, Leicht und luftig, says as much. We have been through much in Opus 7, assuming that we have heard all the pieces together, but Mendelssohn shows no interest in a weighty conclusion or an all-encompassing peroration, and so instead we get to fly happily for a half-dozen bright E major pages (well, the E major is not continuous for six pages—Mendelssohn was of course no minimalist, even if the texture of Op. 7, No. 7 does actually rely on a certain kind of "minimalism"), carried along by the two amiably competing hands of the pianist.

At any given moment in Op. 7, No. 7, each of the pianist's hands plays exactly the same sort of thing as the other—but not at the same time as the other. At the opening, and throughout much of the piece, they engage in a quiet dual of offbeats; and then later each expands the gesture to include more than one note at a time, so that they alternate not once per beat but once per bar. Only two or three times do they actually agree on anything at all. Luckily, one of these times is at the very end, as the left hand at last decides to support the right with some nice chords—but here a wrench is thrown into the works, for, in a moment either of impishness or of raw deceit (who can be sure?), Mendelssohn decided to shift gears in the final bars of the piece, quite abruptly, from E major to E minor.

Or was it neither impishness or deceit, but rather a decision made because the whole of Opus 7 was meant to hold together as a single piece of music, one which begins in E minor, returns to that key two-thirds of the way through, and, from a possible point of view, must end in that key as well?

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.