Cellists played significant roles in Mendelssohn’s life and career. The composer’s younger brother Paul was a very competent amateur performer on the instrument and the unofficial dedicatee of the Sonata in B-flat op. 45 (MWV Q 27). Another notable amateur cellist was the Russian Count Mateusz Wielhorski (Matvej Viel’gorskij, 1794–1866), who received the dedication of the D-major Sonata op. 58 (MWV Q 32). In his professional capacities Mendelssohn also maintained working relationships with cellists, notably including his close friend Julius Rietz (1812–77), who was his assistant and then succeeded him as music director in Düsseldorf, and the cellists Franz Carl Wittmann and Johann Andreas Grabau (1808–84) of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, who we know played his sonatas. At various times Mendelssohn also encountered prominent cello virtuosos for whom (and in one instance with whom) he created particular works: Viennese cellist Josef Merk (1795–1852) and French player Lisa Barbier Cristiani (1827–53), namesake of the ‘Cristiani’ Stradivarius cello.

Mendelssohn’s substantial works for piano and cello hold a noteworthy place in his output of chamber music for strings and piano, along with the three quartets opp. 1, 2, and 3; the two masterful trios opp. 49 and 66; and the violin sonata op. 4. (Curiously, Mendelssohn did not publish any more mature violin sonata, although he sketched and drafted numerous works for piano and violin.) In a letter to Ferdinand Hiller he mentioned explicitly that the Cello Sonata in B-flat, op. 45, was intended as a self-conscious effort to ‘do something about’ the paucity of contemporary repertoire for ‘trios, quartets, and other things with accompaniment’.Footnote ¹

The two piano and cello sonatas served as material for public performances and for use in salon or even domestic settings where such sophisticated repertoire was cultivated and appreciated. In addition, several less prepossessing compositions represent diverse aspects of musicking in the nineteenth century. Two of these, the Variations concertantes op. 17 (MWV Q 19, 1829), written for Felix and his brother Paul, and the Variations in A major (MWV Q 21, 1830), composed collaboratively with Josef Merk, exemplify the virtuosic and entertaining showpiece literature. The brief Assai tranquillo (MWV Q 25), written as a memento for Julius Rietz at the time when Mendelssohn abandoned his Düsseldorf post to Rietz and moved to Leipzig, exemplifies the social culture of the inscription album. The Romance sans paroles op. 109 (MWV Q 34), for Lisa Cristiani, was a tribute from the composer to a brilliant player, presumably intended to feature her famously elegant style and in its ‘feminine’ lyricism possibly also a nod to contemporary gender images.

For all these reasons Mendelssohn’s works for piano and cello merit their thorough scholarly treatment in R. Larry Todd’s present Bärenreiter edition. The long-relied-upon edition, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene Ausgabe, published in the mid-1870s by Julius Rietz, belonged to the ‘collected edition’ practice of the nineteenth century, in which works of master composers were gathered into series that selected as much of their music as was deemed worthy, presented in the best readings that an editor or editorial team could devise. These selections often did not include juvenilia or incomplete works, nor did they necessarily involve a comprehensive search for overlooked items. The methodology did not hew to modern expectations of the rigorous comparison of concordant sources, careful distinction of editorially supplied notations, tables of variants, or even in many cases substantive commentaries on the music or the editorial process.

For the editions of Mendelssohn’s works for piano and cello, Rietz’s editorship of the old collected edition might seem to have constituted both an advantage and a liability. As a cellist himself and a friend and colleague of the composer, his musical judgment could carry considerable authority. For the same reason, however, the cellist would bring to his edition personal preferences in interpretation – for instance, when slurring in his source was inconsistent or omitted.

Todd’s edition obviously upholds the most rigorous methods of twenty-first-century editorial practice in compiling all the available sources and providing accurate, closely explicated editorial choices. As an accomplished pianist, as well as a musicologist, Todd also brings a performer’s eye, ear and touch to the process. In fact, he has the experience of having recorded all these works except the Mendelssohn/Merk variation set.Footnote ² Todd’s knowledge of Mendelssohn, in a sense even greater than Rietz’s, comes from a career of scholarship that culminated in the writing of the authoritative biography of the composer.Footnote ³

The Bärenreiter edition comprises two volumes. The first includes the two sonatas; the second, the smaller and lighter works. Todd’s introduction is included in its complete form in each volume. His thorough familiarity with the composer’s life and music is manifest in the richness of these discussions. Todd locates each work within the composer’s experience, helped considerably by the recent critical edition of Mendelssohn’s complete correspondence, which has appeared over the past few years and which he cites for a considerable amount of the detail in the history of these works. The Preface, provided in English and German, and the Critical Reports, in English only, provide thorough discussion of all the sources (including ones known or presumed to have existed but no longer extant). The history of the manuscripts and early editions shows a snapshot of the composer’s working processes, his personal and business relationships, and the institutional functioning of international publication in the nineteenth century.

Todd also places these cello and piano works in context with other repertoire, including forerunners such as Beethoven’s Violin Sonata op. 23, in which Todd finds a precedent for the scherzo-like slow movement of Mendelssohn’s B-flat major sonata op. 45. He draws attention to the composition of a movement in chorale style in the op. 58 sonata as one example among numerous others in Mendelssohn’s oeuvre. Looking forward, he notes that features of Mendelssohn’s op. 58 would be found later in Schumann’s Piano Trio in D minor, op. 63, and Violin Sonata op. 121.

As mentioned earlier, Bärenreiter’s two volumes separate the more serious works, the two sonatas, from lighter and occasional ones, and players might choose to purchase one or the other, depending on their intentions for performance. The Sonata in B-flat op. 45, dates from 1838. Although it is certainly true, as Todd states, that this work generally remains within classical conventions, it also shows an intriguing treatment of the structural norms. The first movement applies the process of thematic development throughout, both in the way that the opening melody is handled and in the derivation of new material from it. The exposition leans more toward the mediant than the dominant. The return of the main theme at the reprise is not only presented in an entirely unanticipated scoring but arrives over a dominant pedal rather than being set up by a decisive arrival of the tonic. The second movement, despite its Andante tempo indication, incorporates the magical lightness of a Mendelssohnian scherzo. The relatively brief sonata-rondo third movement provides a counterpart to the first, its main theme incorporating the same dactylic opening and roughly the same pitch vocabulary as that of the first movement but with a less intense effect.

The D-major Sonata op. 58, opens with a driving movement in metre, with an even freer form than the first movement of the previous sonata, providing evidence against the outdated idea that the mature Mendelssohn did not continue to press forward in his musical style. As Todd points out, this movement eschews the conventional repetition of its first part, but that is not merely because it is ‘weighty enough’ (Preface, iii) to do so. Although it is longer in the number of measures, it actually takes less time to perform than the first movement of op. 45 – even disregarding the repetition in the earlier movement. Mendelssohn’s abandonment of the repetition very likely has more to do with the movement’s extremely free approach, in which, among other features, the main thematic material is almost constantly evolving and the developmental coda takes on an unusual scope both in length and harmonic adventurousness. The Allegro scherzando second movement, in B minor, alternates an elfin-scherzo style with that of a song without words. The third movement is a ‘religious adagio’ based on a chorale-style theme in G major. The sonata concludes with an exciting finale, launched from an extended diminished-seventh chord and a long dominant lead-in.

The second volume opens with the Variations concertantes op. 17, composed in 1829 and intended for Mendelssohn to play with his brother. Understandably, given the relative facility of those two players, the piano part is more virtuosic than the cello’s. The plan follows the Beethovenian character-variation approach, increasingly free of the song-like design of the theme. Just before the end, as Todd also observes, comes a surprising dive into C-sharp minor, with an arpeggiated figuration reminiscent of the finale of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata.

The Romance sans paroles for Lisa Cristiani, published posthumously as op. 109, features lyrical outer sections framing a contrasting agitato. It might serve best as an encore piece. The same could be said of the Assai tranquillo for Julius Rietz, composed in 1835. The latter, however, reached no closure in the composer’s autograph in Rietz’s album, breaking off on the second page with a dominant harmony and a fermata, as if to symbolize a promise that the parting of the two friends and colleagues should not mark an ending in their relationship. To enable performance, Todd has written a close that a duo might use, wisely not rushing to a quick cadence but working toward it over 23 measures, about a third more than the length of Mendelssohn’s fragment.

The set of Mendelssohn/Merk variations of 1830 survives only in a manuscript copy of the piano part without the cello’s line. Mendelssohn’s autograph and Merk’s cello part remain lost. In order to recover the work as best one might, Todd has taken an even more creative role as editor by inventing a cello part based on the piano’s music. This entailed the composition of a theme, so the result is entirely hypothetical, yet it gives a reasonable indication of how such an ephemeral piece might have sounded.

Both performers and scholars should eagerly welcome this edition of Mendelssohn’s music for piano and cello on account of its thorough scholarship, critical authority, and clarity of presentation. Regrettably, though, one intriguing possibility remains overlooked. Since Bärenreiter was willing to include Todd’s music together with Mendelssohn’s, it is disappointing that they did not also seize on one additional opportunity. For both sonatas, opp. 45 and 58, Ferdinand David, Mendelssohn’s concertmaster in Leipzig (for whom the Violin Concerto op. 64, was composed, and who served as technical consultant for that work) provided alternate parts for violin in place of the cello. Mendelssohn never published a mature sonata for piano and violin (there are a few juvenile pieces; the early Violin Sonata op. 4, from 1823; one sonata from 1838, left unpublished; and an incomplete draft), so David’s adaptations, both of which Mendelssohn accepted, would help to fill a substantial gap. These alternative versions for piano and violin would certainly have at least as strong a claim to authority as Todd’s ingenious completions of the Rietz album-piece and the Merk variations, and violinists should find them well worthwhile, if Bärenreiter were to release the violin parts as a supplemental publication.