Octet

The Octet for Strings in C major, Op. 7, is a composition by the Romanian composer George Enescu, completed in 1900. Together with the Octet by Niels Gade, it is regarded as amongst the most notable successors to Felix Mendelssohn's celebrated Octet, Op. 20 (Taylor 2008, 132).

Following the completion of his Second Violin Sonata in 1899, composition of the Octet occupied Enescu for a year and a half. The complexity of a structure spanning forty minutes in performance caused him considerable difficulty, though he found the challenge exciting. "I wore myself out trying to make work a piece of music divided into four segments of such length that each of them was likely at any moment to break. An engineer launching his first suspension bridge over a river, could not feel more anxiety than I felt when I set out to darken my paper" (Gavoty 1955, 85). Once he had completed the Octet, Enescu offered it to Édouard Colonne for performance in his Concerts Colonne. However, after five rehearsals, the impresario removed it from the program on grounds that it was too risky, a decision that Enescu regarded bitterly (Hoffman and Raţiu 1971, 265). The belated premiere finally took place on 18 December 1909 in the Salle des Agriculteurs in Paris, as part of a festival concert of Enescu’s chamber works in the Soirées d'Art concert series. The performers were the combined members of the Géloso and Chailley Quartets, conducted by the composer. Enescu’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 16, completed only a few days earlier, also received its premiere on this concert, which also included a performance of his Sept chansons de Clement Marot, for tenor and piano, Op. 15, composed the previous year (Hoffman and Raţiu 1971, 352–53). The Octet is dedicated to André Gedalge, one of Enescu’s professors at the Conservatory, whose support in convincing the firm of Enoch & Cie to publish the score was deeply appreciated by the composer (Hoffman and Raţiu 1971, 265).

The conductor Karl Krueger reported that, when he asked the composer how he felt about having the work played by a larger body of string players, Enescu enthusiastically replied, "That's how it should be!" (Anon. [1950]). When Enoch reprinted the score in 1950, Enescu added a new preface in which he endorsed this option, but with some qualifications:

This work can be played with a full string orchestra on condition that certain singing parts [passages chantants] be entrusted to soloists. I leave it to the judicious choice of the conductor to decide which passages are to be played solo. (Enescu 1950)

Enescu's composition stands in contrast to Felix Mendelssohn's Octet, which sets a soloistic violin part against an accompaniment of the other stringed instruments. Enescu's work on the other hand is "a genuine octet that finds its most natural expression just in its hallucinatory convergent and divergent contrapuntal voices" (Bentoiu 2010, 16). Stylistically, the Octet stands outside the categories into which most of Enescu's works from before the end of the First World War fall, when he was still working his way through a wide range of styles and influences, including those of César Franck, Ernest Chausson, Henri Duparc, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss (Malcolm 1982, 32).

The form is described by the composer as cyclic, and divided into four movements:

A typical performance of the work takes around 40 minutes.

However, these four sections are linked together to form a single large sonata-allegro form movement (Enescu 1950). The first movement functions as the exposition and the finale as recapitulation, while development is pursued in the inner two movements. The idea of cyclically integrating all of the movements of a symphony into a single overarching form can be traced back to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and was developed further by Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt. The most likely model for Enescu's organization of the Octet is the latter's Piano Concerto in E-flat major (1855) which, even more than Liszt's B-minor Sonata pursues the outline of a sonata form throughout its four movements (Bentoiu 2010, 24).

There are between nine and as many as twelve melodic themes used in the work, depending on the analysis (Hoffman and Raţiu 1971, 259; Bentoiu 2010, 13). The greatest number of them (six or seven) are presented in the exposition of the first part. The second part is a kind of demonic scherzo, tumultuous and whirling, while the third is a lyrical, slow movement; in both of them new themes are added (Hoffman and Raţiu 1971, 259).