Out of all the composers to whom the term "late style" might reasonably apply, Felix Mendelssohn, it is fair to say, is not the name that most readily comes to mind.It might seem more than a little curious in the case of a composer who died in his thirties, but as with Mozart and Schubert before him, the specter of lateness has nevertheless been raised in relation to the music of Mendelssohn's final years.Foremost among such accounts has been that by the German musicologist Friedhelm Krummacher, who hears a new, "late" manner being developed in certain of Mendelssohn's compositions from the mid-1840s onward, but the idea is not entirely absent from other scholars' writings. 1 Krummacher is referring specifically to two chamber works written in the last two years of Mendelssohn's life and published posthumously, the String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 87/MWV R 33 (1845), and String Quartet No. 6 in F Minor, Op. 80/MWV R 37 (1847), though the 1846 oratorio Elijah in some respects inhabits the same orbit, while the two pieces for string quartet written in 1847 and published (again posthumously) as Opus 81, Nos. 1 and 2 (MWV R 34 and 35), might similarly be adduced to bolster this category. 2More essentially, I would propose we are really talking about one of these works, the F-minor Quartet, whose unusual expressive and dramatic qualities compel writers to seek out any trace of these properties in its neighboring compositions.For Krummacher, revealingly, the Opus 87 Quintet is an only partially successful realization of principles that would find their consummation in Opus 80, characterized by him as the "perfected late work."
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Benedict Taylor (2023) studied this question.