String Octet in E flat major, Op. 20

The Octet unfolds in four movements, played by eight string players who often sound like a full orchestra.

I. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco opens with a soaring, upward-leaping theme in the first violin that immediately sets a tone of youthful urgency, all eight instruments soon swept into its momentum.

II. Andante is calmer and more inward, a songlike movement that lets individual voices step forward in conversation before the texture thickens again.

III. Scherzo, allegro leggierissimo is the movement Mendelssohn himself linked to a passage from Goethe's Faust describing airy, flickering spirits. Played very softly and quickly, it flits by like a breath, with rapid, whispered figures passed between instruments.

IV. Presto bursts in without pause from the scherzo's hush, a fugue, meaning the instruments enter one after another with the same racing theme, building to a dense, joyful climax that eventually brings back a theme from the first movement before the final dash to the end.

Mendelssohn composed the Octet in 1825, at age sixteen, as a birthday gift for his friend and violin teacher Eduard Rietz. It stands as one of the most remarkable works ever written by so young a composer, combining formal command with irrepressible high spirits. The piece was first performed privately among friends and family before reaching a wider public. Mendelssohn later noted that the scherzo was inspired by lines from Goethe's Faust describing flickering, ghostly figures. He also arranged the work for orchestra, but it is the original version for eight solo strings, four violins, two violas and two cellos, that has remained the standard concert version, prized as a landmark of chamber music.