The Name He Never Gave It

Track ten ended with a man who refused a word, composed, and got his name on the cover anyway.

Track eleven is about the opposite refusal. Felix Mendelssohn was happy to be called the composer of this piece. What he would not do was tell you what it was about. And the piece has spent nearly two hundred years being told anyway.

First, the facts. Track eleven runs two minutes and fifty seconds. After the longest track so far, it is back to something you could hold in one breath. It is in E major, marked Andante con moto, “at a walking pace, with motion”, written when Mendelssohn was barely into his twenties, and it is the first piece in the first book of what the world now calls Songs without Words.

Now look at the credit, because on this album that is where the story is, and this time three official sources print three different things.

Garrett’s own site leads with it in capitals: SWEET REMEMBRANCE — Lieder ohne Worte I, Op. 19b: I. in E Major. Andante con moto, MWV U86. Deutsche Grammophon’s catalogue puts it last, inside quotation marks: I. Andante con moto, MWV U86 “Sweet Remembrance”. And the DG store, which has the least room, keeps only the tempo marking: Mendelssohn: I. Andante con moto.

So one prints the name as a headline, one prints it at arm’s length, and one leaves it out. Only one of those three is what Mendelssohn wrote on the page, and it’s the shortest.

Mendelssohn never called this piece “Sweet Remembrance”. He never called the one after it “Regrets”, or the fifth “Restlessness”. Those names were added by later editions, and he never authorized them. In the whole first book he gave exactly one piece a title of his own: the sixth, a Venetianisches Gondellied, a Venetian gondola song. The other five he left with nothing but a tempo marking and a key.

He didn’t even hand over the name of the set. When the first book came out in 1832, London got it as Original Melodies for the Pianoforte and Paris as Romances sans paroles. “Songs without Words” in English is the world’s phrase, not his. The one name he did use is the German one, Lieder ohne Worte. And Deutsche Grammophon’s English catalogue, you’ll notice, keeps that name in German.

He had a reason, and it isn’t the one you’d guess. Ten years after the first book, an eighteen-year-old distant cousin, Marc-André Souchay, wrote to him with titles of his own for some of these pieces. Mendelssohn’s answer is one of the most quoted things any composer ever said about music:

“What the music I love expresses to me is not thoughts too indefinite to put into words, but too definite.”

Read that twice, because it turns the usual idea upside down. We tend to think music needs words to become precise, as if the melody were a blur and the title brought it into focus. Mendelssohn thought it worked the other way round. The music was the exact thing, and any word you put on it would be a blur. Call it “remembrance” and you’ve said something vaguer than what the notes already say.

It is easy to see why. Play the opening and the name almost suggests itself: a warm, unhurried melody over a gently rocking accompaniment, the kind of music that sounds as if someone is thinking about something that has already happened. “Sweet Remembrance” isn’t a wrong description. It’s just someone else’s. It has stuck so well that it now arrives on a 2026 record in capital letters, while the composer’s own marking, Andante con moto, sits in the small print.

This series has been circling the same point for three tracks now. On track nine, a melody went through two names and never chose between them. On track ten, a composer refused the credit and got it anyway. On track eleven, the composer refused the name, and posterity supplied one.

• • •

There’s a reason this music asked to be called a song, even by a man who wouldn’t give it a title.

Look at how it’s built on the page. The melody sits on top, long-breathed and vocal, the way a singer would phrase it. Underneath, broken chords ripple steadily through both hands. A pianist has to do two things at once with the same hands: carry a tune that wants to breathe like a voice, and keep the accompaniment moving underneath it like a harp. The whole art of the piece is making one instrument sound like two, a singer and someone accompanying them.

That’s what Lied ohne Worte means. It isn’t really a song without words. It’s a song without a singer. The piano pretends to be the voice, and the pretending is the point.

The violin doesn’t need to pretend. When the melody moves to the violin, the song gets what the piano could only imitate: one line, bowed and sustained, with breath at the ends of phrases and nothing else to do. On the violin, the song finally has a singer.

Garrett isn’t the first violinist to notice. Jascha Heifetz made his own arrangement for violin and piano, and it went out under the nickname, Sweet Remembrance. So the name Mendelssohn never gave the piece is the one it travelled under when it moved to the violin.

Garrett’s version keeps the piano and adds to it. The credit reads Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra: Julien Quentin at the piano, Franck van der Heijden on guitar, Orchestra the Prezent. And after three tracks of Garrett and van der Heijden, the name next to Garrett’s has changed. It’s John Haywood, who conducts the whole album, and who co-arranges the Sibelius and the Mozart that follow too.

It is worth thinking about what that means for this piece in particular. The piano doesn’t disappear when the violin arrives; it keeps its rocking accompaniment, now shared with a guitar and an orchestra. The song has its singer, and the piano, which carried both parts for two centuries, gets to just accompany.

Track eight ended on a single word Paganini wrote over a melody: Sing. Track eleven is a piece that spent its whole life being sung by an instrument that can’t.

• • •

Which brings us to the choice.

Say “Mendelssohn” to a violinist and you get one answer before you’ve finished the name: the Violin Concerto in E minor. It is one of the three or four concertos every violinist grows up with, and one of the best-loved pieces ever written for the instrument.

David Garrett already has it. All three movements are on Classic Romance, from 2009, the same record that holds the Méditation he passed over on track nine. So for the fourth track running, a famous name arrives without its famous piece, for the same reason: he has already recorded it. And this time he didn’t just pass over the obvious violin work. He left the violin repertoire altogether and took a piano piece, the first page of a book of piano pieces, the kind of thing a talented teenager might be working through at home.

And it lands in a telling spot. Track twelve is Perpetuum mobile, the single, the piece that never stops moving. Garrett has put the gentlest walking pace on the record right in front of it. Andante con moto is still, give or take, “with motion”. The difference is that this piece remembers to breathe.

This series keeps asking a single question: what actually carries music past the people who made it?

Track nine’s answer was that immortality doesn’t care what you call it. Track ten’s was that it hands out the credit whether you want it or not.

Track eleven goes a step further. Immortality doesn’t just ignore the name you gave something. It will give your music a name you never gave it.

Mendelssohn left this piece unnamed because he thought the music said something more exact than any word could. The world couldn’t leave the gap alone. It named the piece after a feeling, printed the name on the cover, and for most listeners the name has become part of the music. Only the quotation marks still show that it was added afterwards.

So when the line begins on track eleven, that is a song that was never given words, or a singer, or a name. On this album the violin gives it the singer. The name is still in quotation marks.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: the album credit as david-garrett.com, the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue and the DG store print it; composition and publication history from the PTNA Piano Encyclopedia and the Hyperion notes to Lieder ohne Worte I, Op. 19b, which also record that Mendelssohn never authorized titles such as “Sweet Remembrance”, “Regrets” or “Restlessness”; Mendelssohn’s letter to Marc-André Souchay of 15 October 1842 — „Das, was mir eine Musik ausspricht, die ich liebe, sind mir nicht zu unbestimmte Gedanken, um sie in Worte zu fassen, sondern zu bestimmte.“ — translated in the text above (handwritten copy, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, N.Mus.ep. 3231); the Heifetz arrangement from the Carl Fischer catalogue; Garrett’s recording of the Violin Concerto from Classic Romance (2009). We have not given a year of composition: sources divide between 1830 and 1831.