Domus

The boy Mendelssohn's precocity never ceases to amaze: not even Mozart as a teenager was so complete a master of the craft. These quartets contain some of the finest music he wrote during those extraordinary years, dating as they do from 1822 (when he was 13) to 1825. There are many of the characteristics that were always to mark his music: the instinct, shared among nineteenth-century composers virtually only with Weber and Berlioz, for the fleeting scherzo, including the somewhat elliptical, quasi-nocturnal scherzo; the gift for tender, expressive melody, not yet tinged with the sentimentality that could afflict him when the manner overcame the matter; and, which is less often emphasized, the extraordinary instinct for structure.