In addition to being born with the proverbial silver spoon, Felix Mendelssohn was virtually bestowed a golden baton as a natal gift. His parents’ household was among the most cultured and affluent in all of Berlin, but his family saw to it that his privilege was well tempered by discipline and responsibility. Young Felix arose at 5:00 every morning (6:00 on Sunday), and spent several hours in private tutoring with the best available teachers. When his musical talents became evident in his early years, he was first given instruction in piano, and soon thereafter in theory and composition by the distinguished pedagogue Carl Friedrich Zelter. Mendelssohn’s earliest dated composition is a cantata completed on January 3, 1820, three weeks before his eleventh birthday, though that work was almost certainly preceded by others whose exact dates are not recorded. To display the boy’s blossoming musical abilities, the Mendelssohn mansion was turned into a twice-monthly concert hall featuring the precocious youngster’s achievements. A large summer house was fitted as an auditorium seating several hundred people, and every other Sunday the city’s finest musi- cians were brought in to perform both repertory works and the latest flowers of Mendelssohn’s creativity. Those matinees — complemented with an elegant luncheon — began in 1822, when Mendelssohn was thirteen. He selected the programs, led the rehearsals, appeared as piano soloist, played violin in the chamber pieces, and even conducted, though in those early years he was still too short to be seen by the players in the back rows unless he stood on a stool. With sister Fanny participating as pianist, sister Rebecca as singer and brother Paul as cellist, it is little wonder that invitations to those happy gatherings were among the most eagerly sought and highly prized of any in Berlin society. By 1825, Mendelssohn had written over eighty works for those concerts, including operas and operettas, string quartets and other chamber pieces, concertos, motets and a series of thirteen symphonies for strings.

The D major Sextet for Piano, Violin, Two Violas, Cello and Bass, written for the Sunday household musical matinees, was completed on May 10, 1824, when Mendelssohn was fifteen. (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was premiered in Vienna only three days earlier.) The work, Classical in design and spirit but possessing those distinctive qualities of lightness and translucence that characterize so much of his music, is more a little concerto for piano with strings that Mendelssohn composed for himself than a fully democratic integration of all the instruments of the ensemble. The main theme area of the opening, sonata-form movement is filled with an entire clutch of melodic motives tripping one upon another; the second theme is announced by the piano alone and repeated by the strings. The movement is rounded out by a full development section and the return of the earlier themes in the recapitulation. The Adagio, in the Romanti- cally remote key of F-sharp major, is a small sonatina of hymnal nature. The following Minuetto is a true scherzo in all but name. A youthful impetuosity in- fects the finale, yet another sonata-form structure. (Mozart had a similar absorp- tion with sonata forms.) A recall of the music of the Minuetto after the recapitulation and a dashing coda bring this charming Sextet to a vigorous close.

The late-18th-century Divertimento — like its close relatives, the Serenade, Cassation and Notturno — was music for entertainment. Such compositions were ordered by the wealthy of Mozart’s time along with the catering and the party decorations for their wedding receptions, family reunions, dinner parties and other festive gatherings, and were performed as background music to the meal (as a sort of 18th-century Muzak), or to accompany the promenading of the guests as they exchanged pleasantries, or to provide the centerpiece of the occasion’s entertainment. The Divertimento, etc. were popular at garden parties during the summer and throughout the year in the ballrooms of palaces and elegant homes, where the individual movements were often separated by long pauses to allow for conversation, refreshment, flirtation and similar amusements.

There was no standard instrumentation or length for 18th-century Serenades. They were written for ensembles ranging from string or wind trio to full orchestra, and contained three to ten movements, which were mostly based on dance and sonata forms, with an occasional variations or rondo thrown in for variety. Often a march was played before and after the entire work to accompany the entry and exit of the musicians (Mozart’s father, Leopold, complained in his old age that he could no longer participate in these pieces because he had difficulty memorizing the music for this little processional) or to usher the guests into the hall or dining room. The music was appropriately light in style and pleasant in expression, and it was a genre that Wolfgang Mozart, who adored parties, found particularly congenial. He wrote some two dozen works titled “Divertimento” or “Serenade” — including the best-known, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525 — as well as many others under a variety of names. Of this ingratiating music, John N. Burk wrote, “For the most part, Mozart used simple means to please his casual listeners, capturing their attention with wit, attain- ing distinction with his sensitivity to balance and color, his lively and unfailing imagination.... He neither wrote above the heads of his audience, nor did he demean his art.” Mozart always gave his patrons more than their money’s worth.

The Divertimento in D major, K. 136, is one of a set of three works (K. 137, 138 are the others) that Mozart wrote for string quartet in January 1772. He was at home in Salzburg after his second trip to Italy, and these pieces seem to have been written in preparation for a return visit scheduled to begin the following autumn. Knowing that he would be busy later in the year with the opera that had been commissioned for Milan, Lucio Silla, he put these charming works together in advance so that he would have ready some compositions that could provide a pleasant evening’s diversion, or could be easily expanded to modest symphonic proportions through the addition of wind parts on the spot. Unlike most diver- timentos, this D major work has only three movements rather than the four or five most common in the genre. Significantly, the title “Divertimento” on the manuscript is not in Mozart’s hand, so we are left to speculate on what his exact classification of this music would have been. It mixes elements of quartet, symphony, sinfonia concertante and the various entertainment forms into a pleasing and mellifluous whole.

The opening movement is something of a virtuoso piece for the violins, almost a concertante duet; the lower strings provide continuous eighth-note pulsations that mask a certain paucity of harmonic activity. The main theme is announced immediately in long notes, with a complementary idea — a two- octave fall through the D major chord — following quickly. The second theme is announced by melodic trills and quick imitations among all the parts. The brief development section utilizes the long notes of the main theme, after which the recapitulation of the earlier materials proceeds as expected. The Andante, more pretty than profound, is in sonatina form (i.e., sonata without a develop- ment section). The finale, again a sonata form, races along with a quicksilver gait. The charming opening motive gives way to an energetic rhythmic trot from which emerges the second theme, a quiet tour up one side of the scale and down the other. The music bounds jovially through a brief development and a proper recapitulation to bring this delightful work to a lighthearted conclusion.

Füsun Köksal, born in Bursa, Turkey in 1973, received her undergraduate degree in theory and composition at Bilkent University in Ankara before taking advanced training in composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne. She returned to Bilkent University to teach composition for three years and then continued her graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where she earned her doctorate in 2013. After teaching at the University of Chicago, University of Pittsburgh and Middlebury College, Köksal was appointed to the faculty of Yașar University in İzmir in 2014. She has composed prolifically for orchestra, chamber ensembles and solo instruments, been performed widely at concert series and festivals across Europe and America, held several residencies, participated in numerous master classes, and won international honors, including a Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship, International Henri Dutilleux Composition Competition, International German-Polish Composition Prize, and nomination for the Pablo Casals Composition Prize. Köksal is also a published scholar on contemporary music, and has presented papers at conferences in Edinburgh, Rimini, Helsinki, Barcelona and Moscow.

Köksal wrote, “Music for String Quintet and Piano was composed for the Pantheon Ensemble on a commission from CityMusic Cleveland in 2021- 2022, during the extraordinary Covid-19 pandemic, a period in which multiple humanitarian crisis in various parts of the world took place, the latest being the war in Ukraine. The way I write music mostly finds its roots in the culture of contemporary music, which I have researched to understand and internalize it. On the other hand, music also reflects the circumstances in which we exist, and of the circumstances to which we are subjected. Sometimes these link up with the piece in unexpected ways, rather than being just reflected in it. The pandemic affected all of us, mostly the ones who had to keep working on the frontlines, but also many of us who lost loved ones and some of us who survived the ill- ness, with greater or lesser lasting effects. These are the times that the real value of freedom, justice and equality is being tested.

“Music for String Quintet and Piano is not a program music. However, throughout the piece my intention was to elaborate the idea of ‘light’ — light as a symbol, which reminds us that even in the most challenging of times, hope never recedes. Each of the three movements focuses on a different display of light. The first movement (Aflicker) is rhythmic, lively music, almost in a dance character, reminding us of a type of twinkling light reaching us from the stars. The second one (Noctiluscence) suggests the night. It revolves around a constantly circling four-note melodic line. Based on harmonics and non-vibrato performance technique, the movement delivers a strong expression of clarity and simplicity, reminding us of moonlight. The last movement (Flash) is a strong, constant, repetition-based utterance that suggests sunlight.”