Mendelssohn composed his Andante cantabile and Presto agitato for piano in June 1838, just over a year after his marriage and a year or two before the unhappy fiasco of his employment at the Berlin Academy of Arts. It represents the kind of music that so many people loved in Mendelssohn's day, and that so many critics have hated ever since: mild-mannered, white-gloved music—in some ways the easy listening of its time. Mendelssohn had, like so many other composers, something of a musical split-personality, and for every solid masterpiece like the Violin Concerto there are a handful of genteel pieces like the Andante cantabile and Presto agitato. All subjectivity aside, however, Mendelssohn never put to paper anything less than a masterfully balanced, streamlined piece of music, and this is no exception.

The Andante cantabile and Presto agitato is, as its name suggests, two pieces in one. The first is in B major, patient and rich, with inner-voice oscillations that seem almost to glow and a melody that is so simple and unruffled that a poor pianist's hands can easily make it sound trite. The Presto agitato, on the other hand, is cast in B minor, and its furious eighth notes are interrupted only twice—by a pair of brief Adagios that precede the final paragraph of music.

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