historic musical bits: Wieniawski – Scherzo Tarantelle, Op.16 – Perlman

Wieniawski – Scherzo Tarantelle, Op.16 – Perlman

UnclaimedFr8

Published on Jul 20, 2014

Violinist Itzhak Perlman, accompanied by pianist Samuel Sanders, serves up a lyrical rendering here. This piece was penned by Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880), and remains a standard in the repertoire.

Straight from the 1979 vinyl.

historic musical bits: MOZART Symphony No 40 in G minor, KV550, LEONARD BERNSTEIN|Boston Symphony Orchestra

MOZART Symphony No 40 in G minor KV550 LEONARD BERNSTEIN

roger bridgland

Published on Feb 23, 2014

Mozart Symphony No.40 in G minor KV550

four movements, in the usual arrangement for a classical-style symphony (fast movement, slow movement, minuet, fast movement):

1. Molto allegro, 2/2

2. Andante in E-flat major, 6/8

3. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio, 3/4

4. Finale. Allegro assai, 2/2

*****Leonard Bernstein (conductor)
*****Boston Symphony Orchestra
***********************************************************

Symphony No. 40 (Mozart)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV. 550, in 1788. It is sometimes referred to as the “Great G minor symphony,” to distinguish it from the “Little G minor symphony,” No. 25. The two are the only extant minor key symphonies Mozart wrote.^[1]

Composition

The 40th Symphony was completed on 25 July 1788. The composition occupied an exceptionally productive period of just a few weeks in 1788, during which time he also completed the 39th and 41st symphonies (26 June and 10 August, respectively).^[2] Nikolaus Harnoncourt argues that Mozart composed the three symphonies as a unified work, pointing, among other things, to the fact that the Symphony No. 40, as the middle work, has no introduction (unlike No. 39) and does not have a finale of the scale of No. 41’s.^[3]

Premiere

As Neal Zaslaw has pointed out, writers on Mozart have often suggested – or even asserted – that Mozart never heard his 40th Symphony performed. Some commentators go further, suggesting that Mozart wrote the symphony (and its companions, #39 and #41) without even intending it to be performed, but rather for posterity; as (to use Alfred Einstein‘s words), an “appeal to eternity”.^[4]

Modern scholarship suggests that these conjectures are not correct. First, in a recently discovered 10 July 1802 letter by the musician Johann Wenzel (1762-1831) to the publisher Ambrosius Kühnel in Leipzig, Wenzel refers to a performance of the symphony at the home of Baron Gottfried van Swieten with Mozart present, but the execution was so poor that the composer had to leave the room.^[5]

There is strong circumstantial evidence for other, probably better, performances. On several occasions between the composition of the symphony and the composer’s death, symphony concerts were given featuring Mozart’s music for which copies of the program have survived, announcing a symphony unidentified by date or key. These include:^[6]

• Dresden, 14 April 1789, during Mozart’s Berlin journey
• Leipzig, 12 May 1789, on the same trip
• Frankfurt, 15 October 1790
• Copies survive of a poster for a concert given by the Tonkünstlersocietät (Society of Musicians) 17 April 1791 in the Burgtheater in Vienna, conducted by Mozart’s colleague Antonio Salieri. The first item on the program was billed as “A Grand Symphony composed by Herr Mozart”.^[7]

Most important is the fact that Mozart revised his symphony (the manuscripts of both versions still exist).^[8] As Zaslaw says, this “demonstrates that [the symphony] was performed, for Mozart would hardly have gone to the trouble of adding the clarinets and rewriting the flutes and oboes to accommodate them, had he not had a specific performance in view.”^[9] The orchestra for the 1791 Vienna concert included the clarinetist brothers Anton and Johann Nepomuk Stadler; which, as Zaslaw points out, limits the possibilities to just the 39th and 40th symphonies.^[9]

Zaslaw adds: “The version without clarinets must also have been performed, for the reorchestrated version of two passages in the slow movement, which exists in Mozart’s hand, must have resulted from his having heard the work and discovered an aspect needing improvement.”^[10][11]

Regarding the concerts for which the Symphony was originally intended when it was composed in 1788, Otto Erich Deutsch suggests that Mozart was preparing to hold a series of three “Concerts in the Casino”, in a new casino in the Spiegelgasse owned by Philipp Otto. Mozart even sent a pair of tickets for this series to his friend Michael Puchberg. But it seems impossible to determine whether the concert series was held, or was cancelled for lack of interest.^[2] Zaslaw suggests that only the first of the three concerts was actually held.

The music

The symphony is scored (in its revised version) for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings. Notably missing are trumpets and timpani.

The work is in four movements, in the usual arrangement for a classical-style symphony (fast movement, slow movement, minuet, fast movement):

1. Molto allegro, 2/2

2. Andante in E-flat major, 6/8

3. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio, 3/4

4. Finale. Allegro assai, 2/2

Every movement but the third is in sonata form; the minuet and trio are in the usual ternary form.

The first movement begins darkly, not with its first theme but with accompaniment, played by the lower strings with divided violas. The technique of beginning a work with an accompaniment figure was later used by Mozart in his last piano concerto (KV. 595) and later became a favorite of the Romantics (examples include the openings of Mendelssohn‘s Violin Concerto and Sergei Rachmaninoff‘s Third Piano Concerto). The first theme is as follows.

The second movement is a lyrical work in 6/8 time, in E flat major, the submediant major of the overall G minor key of the symphony. The contrapuntal opening bars of this movement appear thus in keyboard reduction:

The minuet begins with an angry, cross-accented hemiola rhythm and a pair of three-bar phrases; various commentators have asserted that while the music is labeled “minuet,” it would hardly be suitable for dancing. The contrasting gentle trio section, in G major, alternates the playing of the string section with that of the winds.

The fourth movement opens with a series of rapidly ascending notes outlining the tonic triad illustrating what is commonly referred to as the Mannheim rocket.

The movement is written largely in eight-bar phrases, following the general tendency toward rhythmic squareness in the finales of classical-era symphonies. A remarkable modulating passage in which every tone in the chromatic scale but one is played, strongly destabilizing the key, occurs at the beginning of the development section. The single note left out is in fact a G (the tonic).

The symphony typically has a duration of about 25 minutes.

Reception

This work has elicited varying interpretations from critics. Robert Schumann regarded it as possessing “Grecian lightness and grace”. Donald Francis Tovey saw in it the character of opera buffa. Almost certainly, however, the most common perception today is that the symphony is tragic in tone and intensely emotional; for example, Charles Rosen (in The Classical Style) has called the symphony “a work of passion, violence, and grief.”

Although interpretations differ, the symphony is unquestionably one of Mozart’s most greatly admired works, and it is frequently performed and recorded.

Influence

Ludwig van Beethoven knew the symphony well, copying out 29 bars from the score in one of his sketchbooks.^[12] As Gustav Nottebohm observed in 1887, the copied bars appear amid the sketches for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose third movement begins with a pitch sequence similar to that of Mozart’s finale (see example above).^[13]

In the 1860s, composer Johannes Brahms obtained Mozart’s original score, “the crown of his manuscript collection.”^[14]

Media

The following files contain a digital recording of a performance of the 40th Symphony by the Fulda Symphonic Orchestra. The performance took place on March 18, 2001 in the Orangerie in Fulda, Germany.

historic musical bits: Franz Schubert Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” D 759, Leonard Bernstein

Franz Schubert Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” D 759, Leonard Bernstein

HarpsichordA6

Published on Mar 14, 2015

Franz Schubert Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” D 759
1. Allegro Moderato
2. Andante con moto
Concertgebouw Orchestra
Leonard Bernstein Conductor
******************************************************

Franz Schubert

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

“Schubert” redirects here. For the other composer of the same name, see François Schubert. For other uses, see Schubert (disambiguation).

 

Oil painting of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder (1875), made from his own 1825 watercolor portrait.

Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁant͡s ˈʃuːbɐt]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer. Schubert died at 31 but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical era and early Romantic era and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.

Biography

Early life and education

Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, Archduchy of Austria on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth (Vietz), was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith and had been a housemaid for a Viennese family before marriage. Of Franz Theodor’s fourteen children (one of them illegitimate, born in 1783),^[1] nine died in infancy.

Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental (in Vienna’s ninth district) had numerous students in attendance.^[2] Though he was not recognized or even formally trained as a musician, he passed on certain musical basics to his gifted son.^[3]

The house in which Schubert was born, today Nussdorfer Strasse 54

At age six, Franz began to receive regular instruction from his father, and a year later was enrolled at his father’s school. His formal musical education started around the same time. His father taught him basic violin technique,^[3] and his brother Ignaz gave him piano lessons.^[4] At age seven, he was given his first lessons outside the family by Michael Holzer, organist and choirmaster of the local parish church in Lichtental; the lessons may have largely consisted of conversations and expressions of admiration.^[5] The boy seemed to gain more from an acquaintance with a friendly joiner‘s apprentice who took him to a neighboring pianoforte warehouse where Franz could practice on better instruments.^[6] He also played viola in the family string quartet, with brothers Ferdinand and Ignaz on first and second violin and his father on the violoncello. Franz wrote his earliest string quartets for this ensemble.^[7]

Young Schubert first came to the attention of Antonio Salieri, then Vienna’s leading musical authority, in 1804, when his vocal talent was recognized.^[7] In October 1808, he became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt (Imperial Seminary) through a choir scholarship. At the Stadtkonvikt, he was introduced to the overtures and symphonies of Mozart, and the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and his younger brother Michael.^[8] His exposure to these and lesser works, combined with occasional visits to the opera, laid the foundation for a broader musical education.^[9] One important musical influence came from the songs by Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, an important Lieder composer of the time. The precocious young student “wanted to modernize” them, as reported by Joseph von Spaun, Schubert’s friend.^[10] Schubert’s friendship with Spaun began at the Stadtkonvikt and lasted throughout his short life. In those early days, the financially well-off Spaun furnished the impoverished Schubert with much of his manuscript paper.^[9]

In the meantime, his genius began to show in his compositions. Schubert was occasionally permitted to lead the Stadtkonvikt’s orchestra, and Salieri decided to start training him privately in music theory and even in composition.^[11] It was the first orchestra he wrote for, and he devoted much of the rest of his time at the Stadtkonvikt to composing chamber music, several songs, piano pieces and, more ambitiously, liturgical choral works in the form of a “Salve Regina” (D 27), a “Kyrie” (D 31), in addition to the unfinished “Octet for Winds” (D 72, said to commemorate the 1812 death of his mother),^[12] the cantata Wer ist groß? for male voices and orchestra (D 110, for his father’s birthday in 1813), and his first symphony (D 82).^[13]

Mass No. 2 in G major, D 167 (1815) Kyrie     Gloria   Credo     Sanctus     Benedictus     Agnus Dei   Performance by the MIT Concert Choir Problems playing these files? See media help.

Teacher at his father’s school

At the end of 1813, he left the Stadtkonvikt and returned home for teacher training at the Normalhauptschule. In 1814, he entered his father’s school as teacher of the youngest pupils. For over two years young Schubert endured such drudgery, dragging himself through it with resounding indifference.^[14] There were, however, compensatory interests even then. He continued to take private lessons in composition from Salieri, who gave Schubert more actual technical training than any of his other teachers, before they parted ways in 1817.^[11]

In 1814, Schubert met a young soprano named Therese Grob, daughter of a local silk manufacturer and wrote several of his liturgical works (including a “Salve Regina” and a “Tantum Ergo”) for her; she also was a soloist in the premiere of his Mass No. 1 (D. 105) in September^[15] 1814.^[14] Schubert wanted to marry her, but was hindered by the harsh marriage-consent law of 1815^[16] requiring an aspiring bridegroom to show he had the means to support a family.^[17] In November 1816, after failing to gain a musical post in Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia). Schubert sent Grob’s brother Heinrich a collection of songs retained by the family into the twentieth century.^[18]

One of Schubert’s most prolific years was 1815. He composed over 20,000 bars of music, more than half of which was for orchestra, including nine church works (despite being agnostic^[19][20]), a symphony, and about 140 Lieder.^[21] In that year, he was also introduced to Anselm Hüttenbrenner and Franz von Schober, who would become his lifelong friends. Another friend, Johann Mayrhofer, was introduced to him by Spaun in 1814.^[22] Maynard Solomon suggested that Schubert was erotically attracted to men,^[23] a thesis that has, at times, been heatedly debated.^[24] Musicologist and Schubert expert Rita Steblin claimed that he was “chasing women”.^[25]

Supported by friends

Significant changes happened in 1816. Schober, a student and of good family and some means, invited Schubert to room with him at his mother’s house. The proposal was particularly opportune, for Schubert had just made the unsuccessful application for the post of kapellmeister at Laibach, and he had also decided not to resume teaching duties at his father’s school. By the end of the year, he became a guest in Schober’s lodgings. For a time, he attempted to increase the household resources by giving music lessons, but they were soon abandoned, and he devoted himself to composition. “I compose every morning, and when one piece is done, I begin another.”^[26] During this year, he focused on orchestral and choral works, although he also continued to write Lieder (songs).^[27] Much of this work was unpublished, but manuscripts and copies circulated among friends and admirers.^[28]

Caricature of Johann Michael Vogl and Franz Schubert by Franz von Schober (1825)

In early 1817, Schober introduced Schubert to Johann Michael Vogl, a prominent baritone twenty years Schubert’s senior. Vogl, for whom Schubert went on to write a great many songs, became one of Schubert’s main proponents in Viennese musical circles. He also met Joseph Hüttenbrenner (brother to Anselm), who also played a role in promoting Schubert’s music.^[29] These, and an increasing circle of friends and musicians, became responsible for promoting, collecting, and, after his death, preserving his work.^[30]

In late 1817, Schubert’s father gained a new position at a school in Rossau, not far from Lichtental. Schubert rejoined his father and reluctantly took up teaching duties there. In early 1818, he was rejected for membership in the prestigious Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, something that might have furthered his musical career.^[31] However, he began to gain more notice in the press, and the first public performance of a secular work, an overture performed in February 1818, received praise from the press in Vienna and abroad.^[32]

Schubert spent the summer of 1818, as a music teacher to the family of Count Johann Karl Esterházy at their château in Zseliz (now Želiezovce, Slovakia). The pay was relatively good, and his duties teaching piano and singing to the two daughters were relatively light allowing to happily compose alongside. Both Marie and Karoline being his piano students, and the original score of the Marche Militaire in D major (D. 733 no. 1) being a piano duet, lend credence to the view that it may have been at this time that he wrote this now world-famous composition. On his return from Zseliz, he took up residence with his friend Mayrhofer.^[31] The respite at Zseliz led to a succession of compositions for piano duet.^[33]

During the early 1820s, Schubert was part of a close-knit circle of artists and students who had social gatherings together that became known as Schubertiaden. The tight circle of friends with which Schubert surrounded himself was dealt a blow in early 1820. Schubert and four of his friends were arrested by the Austrian police, who (in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars) were on their guard against revolutionary activities and suspicious of any gathering of youth or students. One of Schubert’s friends, Johann Senn, was put on trial, imprisoned for over a year, and then permanently forbidden to enter Vienna. The other four, including Schubert, were “severely reprimanded”, in part for “inveighing against [officials] with insulting and opprobrious language”.^[34] While Schubert never saw Senn again, he did set some of his poems, “Selige Welt” (D. 743) and Schwanengesang (D 744), to music. The incident may have played a role in a falling-out with Mayrhofer, with whom he was living at the time.^[35]

He was nicknamed “Schwammerl” by his friends, which Gibbs describes as translating to “Tubby” or “Little Mushroom”. Schubert, at 1.52 m height, was not quite five feet tall. “Schwamm” is Austrian (and other) dialect for mushroom; the ending “-erl” makes it a diminutive.

Musical maturity

The compositions of 1819 and 1820 show a marked advance in development and maturity of style.^[36] The unfinished oratorio Lazarus (D. 689) was begun in February; later followed, amid a number of smaller works, by the hymn “Der 23. Psalm” (D. 706), the octet “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” (D. 714), the Quartettsatz in C minor (D. 703), and the Wanderer Fantasy in C major for piano (D. 760). Of most notable interest is the staging in 1820 of two of Schubert’s operas: Die Zwillingsbrüder (D. 647) appeared at the Theater am Kärntnertor on 14 June, and Die Zauberharfe (D. 644) appeared at the Theater an der Wien on 21 August.^[37] Hitherto, his larger compositions (apart from his masses) had been restricted to the amateur orchestra at the Gundelhof, a society which grew out of the quartet-parties at his home. Now he began to assume a more prominent position, addressing a wider public.^[37] Publishers, however, remained distant, with Anton Diabelli hesitantly agreeing to print some of his works on commission.^[38] The first seven opus numbers (all songs) appeared on these terms; then the commission ceased, and he began to receive the pittances which were all that the great publishing houses ever paid him. The situation improved somewhat in March 1821 when Vogl performed the song “Der Erlkönig” (D. 328) at a concert that was extremely well received.^[39] That month, Schubert composed a Variation on a Waltz by Diabelli (D 718), being one of the fifty composers who contributed to the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein publication.

	Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960 (1828) I. Molto moderato     II. Andante sostenuto   III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace con delicatezza     IV. Allegro, ma non-troppo Performed by Randolph Hokanson
Problems playing these files? See media help.

The production of the two operas turned Schubert’s attention more firmly than ever in the direction of the stage, where, for a variety of reasons, he was almost completely unsuccessful. All in all, he embarked on twenty stage projects, each of them failures which were quickly forgotten. In 1822, Alfonso und Estrella was refused, partly owing to its libretto.^[40] Fierabras (D 796) was rejected in the fall of 1823, but this was largely due to the popularity of Rossini and the Italian operatic style, and the failure of Carl Maria von Weber‘s Euryanthe.^[41] Die Verschworenen (The Conspirators, D 787) was prohibited by the censor (apparently on the grounds of its title),^[42] and Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern (D 797) was withdrawn after two nights, owing to the poor quality of the play for which Schubert had written incidental music. Of these works, the two former ones are written on a scale which would make their performances exceedingly difficult (Fierabras, for instance, contains over 1,000 pages of manuscript score), but Die Verschworenen is a bright attractive comedy, and Rosamunde contains some of the most charming music that Schubert ever composed. In 1822, he made the acquaintance with both Weber and Beethoven, but little came of it in either case. Beethoven is said to have acknowledged the younger man’s gifts on a few occasions, but some of this is likely legend and in any case he could not have known the real scope of Schubert’s music, especially not the instrumental works, as so little of it was printed or performed in the composer’s lifetime. On his deathbed, Beethoven is said to have looked into some of the younger man’s works and exclaimed: “Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!”,^[43] but what would have come of it, if he had recovered, we can never know.

Watercolor of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder (1825)

Last years and masterworks

Despite his preoccupation with the stage, and later with his official duties, Schubert found time during these years for a significant amount of composition. He completed the Mass in A-flat major (D. 678) and, in 1822, embarked suddenly on a work which more decisively than almost any other in those years showed his maturing personal vision, the Symphony in B minor Unfinished (D. 759). The reason he left it unfinished after two movements and sketches some way into a third remains an enigma, and it is also remarkable that he did not mention it to any of his friends even though, as Brian Newbould notes, he must have felt thrilled by what he was achieving. The event has been debated endlessly without resolution.

In 1823 Schubert, in addition to Fierrabras, also wrote his first large-scale song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795), setting poems by Wilhelm Müller.^[44] This series, together with the later cycle Winterreise (D. 911, also setting texts of Müller in 1827) is widely considered one of the pinnacles of Lieder.^[45] He also composed the song Du bist die Ruh (You are stillness/peace, D. 776) during this year. Also in that year, symptoms of syphilis first appeared.^[46]

In 1824, he wrote the Variations in E minor for flute and piano Trockne Blumen, a song from the cycle Die schöne Müllerin, and several string quartets. He also wrote the Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano (D. 821) at the time when there was a minor craze over that instrument.^[47] In the spring of that year, he wrote the Octet in F major (D. 803), a sketch for a ‘Grand Symphony’; and in the summer went back to Zseliz. There he became attracted to Hungarian musical idiom, and wrote the Divertissement à la hongroise in G minor for piano duet (D. 818) and the String Quartet in A minor Rosamunde (D. 804). It has been said that he held a hopeless passion for his pupil, the Countess Karoline Eszterházy, but the only work he dedicated to her was his Fantasy in F minor for piano duet (D. 940).^[48] His friend Eduard von Bauernfeld penned the following verse, which appears to reference Schubert’s unrequited sentiments:

In love with a Countess of youthful grace,
—A pupil of Galt’s; in desperate case
Young Schubert surrenders himself to another,
And fain would avoid such affectionate pother^[49]

“Ellens Gesang III”, D. 839 (“Ave Maria”) Performed by Dorothea Fayne (voice) and Uwe Streibel (piano)

The setbacks of previous years were compensated by the prosperity and happiness of 1825. Publication had been moving more rapidly, the stress of poverty was for a time lightened, and in the summer he had a pleasant holiday in Upper Austria where he was welcomed with enthusiasm. It was during this tour that he produced the 7-song cycle Fräulein am See based on Walter Scott‘s Lady of the Lake and including “Ellens Gesang III” (“Hymn to the Virgin”) (D. 839, Op. 52, No. 6) with the lyrics of Adam Storck’s German translation of the Scott’s poem now frequently substituted by the full text of the traditional Roman Catholic prayer Hail Mary (Ave Maria in Latin), for which the Schubert’s melody is not an original setting, as it is widely, though mistakenly, thought. The original only opens with the greeting “Ave Maria”, which also recurs only in the refrain.^[50] In 1825, Schubert also wrote the Piano Sonata in A minor (D 845, first published as op. 42), and began the Symphony in C major (Great C major, D. 944), which was completed the following year.^[51]

Portrait of Franz Schubert by Franz Eybl (1827)

From 1826 to 1828, Schubert resided continuously in Vienna, except for a brief visit to Graz in 1827. The history of his life during these three years was comparatively uninteresting, and is little more than a record of his compositions. In 1826, he dedicated a symphony (D. 944, that later came to be known as the Great C major) to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and received an honorarium in return.^[52] In the spring of 1828, he gave, for the only time in his career, a public concert of his own works, which was very well received.^[53] The compositions themselves are a sufficient biography. The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (D. 810), with the variations on Death and the Maiden, was written during the winter of 1825–1826, and first played on 25 January 1826. Later in the year came the String Quartet No. 15 in G major, (D 887, first published as op. 161), the Rondo in B minor for violin and piano (D. 895), Rondeau brillant, and the Piano Sonata in G major, (D 894, first published as Fantasie in G, op. 78). To these should be added the three Shakespearian songs, of which “Ständchen” (D. 889) and “An Sylvia” (D. 891) were allegedly written on the same day, the former at a tavern where he broke his afternoon’s walk, the latter on his return to his lodging in the evening.^[54]

In 1827, Schubert wrote the song cycle Winterreise (D. 911), a colossal peak in art song (“remarkable” was the way it was described at the Schubertiades), the Fantasy in C major for violin and piano (D. 934, first published as op. post. 159), the Impromptus for piano, and the two piano trios (the first in B-flat major (D. 898), and the second in E-flat major, (D. 929);^[55] in 1828 the cantata Mirjams Siegesgesang (Victory Song of Miriam, D 942) on a text by Franz Grillparzer, the Mass in E-flat major (D. 950), the Tantum Ergo (D. 962) in the same key, the String Quintet in C major (D. 956), the second “Benedictus” to the Mass in C major (D. 452), the three final piano sonatas (D. 958, D. 959, and D. 960), and the song cycle 13 Lieder nach Gedichten von Rellstab und Heine for voice and piano, also known as Schwanengesang (Swan-song, D. 957).^[56] This collection, while not a true song cycle, retains a unity amongst the individual songs, touching depths of tragedy and of the morbidly supernatural, which had rarely been plumbed by any composer in the century preceding it. Six of these are set to words by Heinrich Heine, whose Buch der Lieder appeared in the autumn. The Symphony in C major (D. 944) is dated 1828, but Schubert scholars believe that this symphony was largely written in 1825–1826 (being referred to while he was on holiday at Gastein in 1825 – that work, once considered lost, is now generally seen as an early stage of his C major symphony) and was revised for prospective performance in 1828.This was a fairly unusual practice for Schubert, for whom publication, let alone performance, was rarely contemplated for most of his larger-scale works during his lifetime. The huge, Beethovenian work was declared “unplayable” by a Viennese orchestra.^[57] In the last weeks of his life, he began to sketch three movements for a new Symphony in D major (D 936A).^[58]

 

Schubert’s glasses

Impromptu in B-flat major, D 935 no. 3 (1827) This Impromptu is a theme and variations based on a theme from Rosamunde. Performed by Randolph Hokanson.

The works of his last two years reveal a composer increasingly meditating on the darker side of the human psyche and human relationships, and with a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and conception of the ‘beyond’. He reaches extraordinary depths in several chillingly dark songs of this period, especially in the larger cycles. For example, the song “Der Doppelgänger” (D 957, No. 13, “The double”) reaching an extraordinary climax, conveying madness at the realization of rejection and imminent death – a stark and visionary picture in sound and words that had been prefigured a year before by “Der Leiermann” (D 911, No. 24, “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”) at the end of Winterreise – and yet the composer is able to touch repose and communion with the infinite in the almost timeless ebb and flow of the string quintet and his last three piano sonatas, moving between joyful, vibrant poetry and remote introspection. Even in large-scale works he was sometimes using increasingly sparse textures; Newbould cites his writing in the fragmentary Symphony in D major (D 936A), probably the work of his very last two months. In this work, he anticipates Mahler‘s use of folksong-like harmonics and bare soundscapes.^[59] Schubert expressed the wish, were he to survive his final illness, to further develop his knowledge of harmony and counterpoint, and had actually made appointments for lessons with the counterpoint master Simon Sechter.^[60]

Final illness and death

Memorial at the Kalvarienberg Church, Hernals

 

The site of Schubert’s first tomb at Währing

In the midst of this creative activity, his health deteriorated. The cause of his death was officially diagnosed as typhoid fever, though other theories have been proposed, including the tertiary stage of syphilis.^[61] By the late 1820s, Schubert’s health was failing and he confided to some friends that he feared that he was near death.^{[62][page needed]} In the late summer of 1828, the composer saw court physician Ernst Rinna, who may have confirmed Schubert’s suspicions that he was ill beyond cure and likely to die soon.^{[63][page needed]} Some of his symptoms matched those of mercury poisoning (mercury was then a common treatment for syphilis, again suggesting that Schubert suffered from it).^[64] At the beginning of November, he again fell ill, experiencing headaches, fever, swollen joints, and vomiting. He was generally unable to retain solid food and his condition worsened. Schubert died in Vienna, at age 31, on 19 November 1828, at the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. The last musical work he had wished to hear was Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131; his friend, violinist Karl Holz, who was present at the gathering, five days before Schubert’s death, commented: “The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing”.^[65] It was next to Beethoven, whom he had admired all his life, that Schubert was buried by his own request, in the village cemetery of Währing, Vienna.^[66]

In 1872, a memorial to Franz Schubert was erected in Vienna’s Stadtpark.^[66] In 1888, both Schubert’s and Beethoven’s graves were moved to the Zentralfriedhof where they can now be found next to those of Johann Strauss II and Johannes Brahms.^[67] The cemetery in Währing was converted into a park in 1925, called the Schubert Park, and his former grave site was marked by a bust.

Music

 

Franz Schubert Memorial by Carl Kundmann in Vienna’s Stadtpark

See also: List of compositions by Franz Schubert by genre

Schubert was remarkably prolific, writing over 1,500 works in his short career. His compositional style progressed rapidly throughout his short life.^[68] The largest number of his compositions are songs for solo voice and piano (over 600). He also composed a considerable number of secular works for two or more voices, namely part songs, choruses and cantatas. He completed eight orchestral overtures and seven complete symphonies, in addition to fragments of six others. While he composed no concertos, he did write three concertante works for violin and orchestra. There is a large body of music for solo piano, including fourteen complete sonatas, numerous miscellaneous works and many short dances. There is also a relatively large set of works for piano duet. There are over fifty chamber works, including some fragmentary works. His sacred output includes seven masses, one oratorio and one requiem, among other mass movements and numerous smaller compositions.^[69] He completed only eleven of his twenty stage works.^[70]

Style

In July 1947 the 20th-century composer Ernst Krenek discussed Schubert’s style, abashedly admitting that he had at first “shared the wide-spread opinion that Schubert was a lucky inventor of pleasing tunes … lacking the dramatic power and searching intelligence which distinguished such ‘real’ masters as J.S. Bach or Beethoven“. Krenek wrote that he reached a completely different assessment after close study of Schubert’s pieces at the urging of friend and fellow composer Eduard Erdmann. Krenek pointed to the piano sonatas as giving “ample evidence that [Schubert] was much more than an easy-going tune-smith who did not know, and did not care, about the craft of composition.” Each sonata then in print, according to Krenek, exhibited “a great wealth of technical finesse” and revealed Schubert as “far from satisfied with pouring his charming ideas into conventional molds; on the contrary he was a thinking artist with a keen appetite for experimentation.”^[71]

Instrumental music, stage works and church music

See also: Sonatas, duos and fantasies by Franz Schubert, List of solo piano compositions by Franz Schubert and Stage works by Franz Schubert

That “appetite for experimentation” manifests itself repeatedly in Schubert’s output in a wide variety of forms and genres, including opera, liturgical music, chamber and solo piano music, and symphonic works. Perhaps most familiarly, his adventurousness manifests itself as a notably original sense of modulation, as in the second movement of the String Quintet (D. 956) where he modulates from E major through F minor, to reach the tonic key of E major.^[72] It also appears in unusual choices of instrumentation, as in the Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano (D. 821), or the unconventional scoring of the Trout Quintet (D. 667).

Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano, D 821 I. Allegro Moderato     II. Adagio and III. Allegretto   Performed by Hans Goldstein (cello) and Clinton Adams (piano)

While he was clearly influenced by the Classical sonata forms of Beethoven and Mozart (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony, are particularly Mozartean), his formal structures and his developments tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of harmonic drama.^[73] This combination of Classical form and long-breathed Romantic melody sometimes lends them a discursive style: his Great C major Symphony was described by Robert Schumann as running to “heavenly lengths”.^[74] His harmonic innovations include movements in which the first section ends in the key of the subdominant rather than the dominant (as in the last movement of the Trout Quintet). Schubert’s practice here was a forerunner of the common Romantic technique of relaxing, rather than raising, tension in the middle of a movement, with final resolution postponed to the very end.^{[citation needed]}

Lieder and part songs

See also: List of songs composed by Franz Schubert and Schubert’s song cycles

It was in the genre of the Lied, however, that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Leon Plantinga remarks, “In his more than six hundred Lieder he explored and expanded the potentialities of the genre, as no composer before him.”^[75] Prior to Schubert’s influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism.^[76]

Among Schubert’s treatments of the poetry of Goethe, his settings of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (D. 118) and “Der Erlkönig” (D. 328) are particularly striking for their dramatic content, forward-looking uses of harmony, and their use of eloquent pictorial keyboard figurations, such as the depiction of the spinning wheel and treadle in the piano in “Gretchen” and the furious and ceaseless gallop in “Erlkönig“.^[77] He composed music using the poems of a myriad of poets, with Goethe, Mayrhofer and Schiller being the top three most frequent, and others like Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Rückert and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff among many others. Also of particular note are his two song cycles on the poems of Wilhelm Müller, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, which helped to establish the genre and its potential for musical, poetic, and almost operatic dramatic narrative. His last song cycle published in 1828 after his death, Schwanengesang, is also an innovative contribution to German lieder literature, as it features poems by different poets, namely Ludwig Rellstab, Heine, and Johann Gabriel Seidl. The Wiener Theaterzeitung, writing about Winterreise at the time, commented that it was a work that “none can sing or hear without being deeply moved”.^[78]

Antonín Dvořák wrote in 1894 that Schubert, whom he considered one of the truly great composers, was clearly influential on shorter works, especially Lieder and shorter piano works: “The tendency of the romantic school has been toward short forms, and although Weber helped to show the way, to Schubert belongs the chief credit of originating the short models of piano forte pieces which the romantic school has preferably cultivated. […] Schubert created a new epoch with the Lied. […] All other songwriters have followed in his footsteps.”^[79]

Publication – catalogue

 

Interior of museum at Schubert’s birthplace, Vienna, 1914

When Schubert died he had around 100 opus numbers published, mainly songs, chamber music and smaller piano compositions.^[80] Publication of smaller pieces continued (including opus numbers up to 173 in 1860s, 50 installments with songs published by Diabelli and dozens of first publications Peters),^[81] but the manuscripts of many of the longer works, whose existence was not widely known, remained hidden in cabinets and file boxes of Schubert’s family, friends, and publishers.^[82] Even some of Schubert’s friends were unaware of the full scope of what he wrote, and for many years he was primarily recognized as the “prince of song”, although there was recognition of some of his larger-scale efforts.^[83] In 1838 Robert Schumann, on a visit to Vienna, found the dusty manuscript of the C major Symphony (D. 944) and took it back to Leipzig where it was performed by Felix Mendelssohn and celebrated in the Neue Zeitschrift. An important step towards the recovery of the neglected works was the journey to Vienna which Sir George Grove (widely known for the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) and Arthur Sullivan made in the autumn of 1867. The travellers rescued from oblivion seven symphonies, the Rosamunde incidental music, some of the masses and operas, several chamber works, and a vast quantity of miscellaneous pieces and songs.^[82] This led to more widespread public interest in Schubert’s work.^[84]

The complete editions

 

Lithograph of Franz Schubert by Josef Kriehuber (1846)

See also: Franz Schubert’s Works and Neue Schubert-Ausgabe

From 1884 to 1897, Breitkopf & Härtel published Franz Schubert’s Works, a critical edition including a contribution made – among others – by Johannes Brahms, editor of the first series containing eight symphonies. The publication of the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe by Bärenreiter started in the second half of 20th century.

Deutsch catalogue

	Examples of works for violin and piano Rondo in B minor for violin and piano Rondeau brillant, D 895     Fantasy in C major for violin and piano, D 934   Performed by Dénes Zsigmondy (violin) and Anneliese Nissen (piano)
Problems playing these files? See media help.

See also: Schubert Thematic Catalogue, Schubert opus/Deutsch number concordance and List of compositions by Franz Schubert

Since relatively few of Schubert’s works were published in his lifetime, only a small number of them have opus numbers assigned, and even in those cases, the sequence of the numbers does not give a good indication of the order of composition. Austrian musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967) is known for compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of Schubert’s works. This was first published in English in 1951 (Schubert Thematic Catalogue) and subsequently revised for a new edition in German in 1978 (Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge – Franz Schubert: Thematic Catalogue of his Works in Chronological Order).

Numbering issues

See also: Schubert’s symphonies § Numbering issues and Sonatas, duos and fantasies by Franz Schubert § Numbering of the Piano Sonatas

Confusion arose quite early over the numbering of Schubert’s late symphonies. Schubert’s last completed symphony, the Great C major D 944, was assigned the Nos 7, 8, 9 and 10, depending on publication. Similarly the Unfinished D 759 was indicated with the Nos 8, as well as 7 and 9.^[85]

The order usually followed for these late symphonies by English-language sources is:

• No. 7: E major, D 729
• No. 8: B minor, D 759 Unfinished
• No. 9: C major, D 944 Great C major
• No. 10: D major, D 936A

An even broader confusion arose over the numbering of the piano sonatas, with numbering systems ranging from 15 to 23 sonatas.

Recognition

A feeling of regret for the loss of potential masterpieces caused by his early death at age 31 was expressed in the epitaph on his large tombstone written by his friend the poet Franz Grillparzer: “Here music has buried a treasure, but even fairer hopes.”^[86] Some have disagreed with this early view, arguing that Schubert in his lifetime did produce enough masterpieces not to be limited to the image of an unfulfilled promise. This is in particular the opinion of pianists, including Alfred Brendel, who dryly billed the Grillparzer epitaph as “inappropriate”.

Schubert’s chamber music continues to be popular. In a poll, the results of which were announced in October 2008, the ABC in Australia found that Schubert’s chamber works dominated the field, with the Trout Quintet coming first, followed by two of his other works.^[87]

The New York Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, who ranked Schubert as the fourth greatest composer, wrote of him:

You have to love the guy, who died at 31, ill, impoverished and neglected except by a circle of friends who were in awe of his genius. For his hundreds of songs alone – including the haunting cycle Winterreise, which will never release its tenacious hold on singers and audiences – Schubert is central to our concert life…. Schubert’s first few symphonies may be works in progress. But the Unfinished and especially the Great C major Symphony are astonishing. The latter one paves the way for Bruckner and prefigures Mahler.^[88]

Tributes by other musicians

From the 1830s through the 1870s, Franz Liszt transcribed and arranged a number of Schubert’s works, particularly the songs. Liszt, who was a significant force in spreading Schubert’s work after his death, said Schubert was “the most poetic musician who ever lived.”^[89] Schubert’s symphonies were of particular interest to Antonín Dvořák, with Hector Berlioz and Anton Bruckner acknowledging the influence of the Great C major Symphony.^[90] In the 20th century, composers such as Benjamin Britten, Richard Strauss, and George Crumb either championed or paid homage to Schubert in their work. Britten, an accomplished pianist, accompanied many of Schubert’s Lieder and performed many piano solo and duet works.^[90]

In 1977, the German electronic band Kraftwerk recorded a tribute song called “Franz Schubert” on their album Trans-Europe Express.^[91]

Commemorations

 

Austrian 50 Schilling Silver Coin 1978: 150th Anniversary of his death

Portrayal in film

Schubert has featured as a character in a number of films including Schubert’s Dream of Spring (1931), Gently My Songs Entreat (1933), Serenade (1940), The Great Awakening (1941), It’s Only Love (1947), Franz Schubert (1953) and Das Dreimäderlhaus (1958).

 

 

Historic musical bits: Mendelssohn: Symphony no. 3 “Scottish” – Klemperer & Philharmonia Orchestra

Mendelssohn: Symphony no. 3 “Scottish” – Klemperer & Philharmonia Orchestra

Kanal von shostakk

Published on Aug 7, 2012

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)

Symphony no. 3 in A minor op. 56 “Scottish”

I. Andante con moto – Allegro un poco agitato (0:00)
II. Scherzo (Vivace non troppo) (15:16)
III.Adagio (20:29)
IV. Allegro vivacissimo – Allegro maestoso assai (30:04)

*** Philharmonia Orchestra
*** Otto Klemperer

************************************************************

Felix Mendelssohn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

This article is about the German musician. For other people with the same surname, see Mendelssohn (surname) and Bartholdy.

 

Portrait of Mendelssohn by the English miniaturist James Warren Childe (1778–1862), 1839

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (German: [ˈjaːkɔp ˈluːtvɪç ˈfeːlɪks ˈmɛndl̩szoːn baʁˈtɔldi]; 3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn,^{[n 1]} was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period.

A grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family. Although initially he was brought up without religion, he was later baptised as a Reformed Christian. Mendelssohn was recognised early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalise on his talent.

Mendelssohn enjoyed early success in Germany, where he also revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and in his travels throughout Europe. He was particularly well received in Britain as a composer, conductor and soloist, and his ten visits there – during which many of his major works were premiered – form an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes, however, set him apart from many of his more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire (now the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig), which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook.

Mendelssohn wrote symphonies, concerti, oratorios, piano music and chamber music. His best-known works include his Overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the overture The Hebrides, his mature Violin Concerto, and his String Octet. His Songs Without Words are his most famous solo piano compositions. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes and anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his creative originality has now been recognized and re-evaluated. He is now among the most popular composers of the Romantic era.

Life

Childhood

Mendelssohn aged 12 (1821) by Carl Joseph Begas

Felix Mendelssohn was born on 3 February 1809, in Hamburg, at the time an independent city-state,^{[n 2]} in the same house where, a year later, the dedicatee and first performer of his Violin Concerto, Ferdinand David, was to be born. Mendelssohn’s father was the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, the son of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His mother was Lea Salomon, a member of the Itzig family and a sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy.^[1] Mendelssohn was the second of four children; his older sister Fanny also displayed exceptional and precocious musical talent.^[2]

The family moved to Berlin in 1811, leaving Hamburg in disguise fearing French revenge for the Mendelssohn bank‘s role in breaking Napoleon‘s Continental System blockade.^[3] Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn sought to give their children – Fanny, Felix, Paul and Rebecka – the best education possible. Fanny became a well-known pianist and amateur composer; originally Abraham had thought that she, rather than Felix, would be the more musical. However, at that time, it was not considered proper, by either Abraham or Felix, for a woman to have a career in music, so Fanny remained an active but non-professional musician. Abraham was also disinclined to allow Felix to follow a musical career until it became clear that he seriously intended to dedicate himself to it.^[4]

Mendelssohn grew up in an intellectual environment. Frequent visitors to the salon organised by his parents at the family’s home in Berlin included artists, musicians and scientists, amongst them Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (whom Mendelssohn’s sister Rebecka would later marry).^[5] Sarah Rothenburg wrote of the household that “Europe came to their living room”.^[6]

Surname

Abraham Mendelssohn renounced the Jewish religion; he and his wife deliberately decided not to have Felix circumcised, in contravention of the Jewish tradition.^[7] Felix and his siblings were first brought up without religious education, and were baptised by a Reformed Church minister in 1816,^[8] at which time Felix was given the additional names Jakob Ludwig. Abraham and his wife Lea were themselves baptised in 1822, formally adopting the surname Mendelssohn Bartholdy (which they had used since 1812) for themselves and their children.^[9] The name Bartholdy was added at the suggestion of Lea’s brother, Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, who had inherited a property of this name in Luisenstadt and adopted it as his own surname.^[10] In an 1829 letter to Felix, Abraham explained that adopting the Bartholdy name was meant to demonstrate a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses: “There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius”.^[11] On embarking on his musical career, Felix did not entirely drop the name Mendelssohn as Abraham requested, but in deference to his father signed his letters and had his visiting cards printed using the form ‘Mendelssohn Bartholdy’.^[12] In 1829, his sister Fanny wrote to him of “Bartholdy […] this name that we all dislike”.^[13]

Career

Musical education

Like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart before him, Mendelssohn was regarded as a child prodigy. He began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six, and at seven was tutored by Marie Bigot in Paris.^[14] After the family moved to Berlin, all four Mendelssohn children studied piano with Ludwig Berger, who was himself a former student of Muzio Clementi.^[15] From at least May 1819 Felix (and his sister Fanny) studied counterpoint and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin.^[16] This was an important influence on his future career. Zelter had almost certainly been recommended as a teacher by his aunt Sarah Levy, who had been a pupil of W. F. Bach and a patron of C. P. E. Bach. Sarah Levy was a talented keyboard player in her own right, often playing with Zelter’s orchestra at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, of which she and the Mendelssohn family were leading patrons. Sarah had formed an important collection of Bach family manuscripts which she bequeathed to the Singakademie; Zelter, whose tastes in music were conservative, was also an admirer of the Bach tradition.^[17] This undoubtedly played a significant part in forming Felix Mendelssohn’s musical tastes. His works show his study of Baroque and early classical music. His fugues and chorales especially reflect a tonal clarity and use of counterpoint reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach, by whose music he was deeply influenced.^[18]

Early maturity

First page of the manuscript of Mendelssohn’s Octet (1825) (now in the US Library of Congress)

Mendelssohn probably made his first public concert appearance at age 9, when he participated in a chamber music concert accompanying a horn duo.^[19] He was also a prolific composer from an early age. As an adolescent, his works were often performed at home with a private orchestra for the associates of his wealthy parents amongst the intellectual elite of Berlin.^[20] Between the ages of 12 and 14, Mendelssohn wrote 12 string symphonies for such concerts. These works were ignored for over a century, but are now recorded and occasionally played in concerts. He wrote his first published work, a piano quartet, by the time he was 13. It was probably Abraham Mendelssohn who procured the publication of Mendelssohn’s early piano quartet by the house of Schlesinger.^[21] In 1824, the 15-year-old wrote his first symphony for full orchestra (in C minor, Op. 11).

At age 16 Mendelssohn wrote his String Octet in E-flat major, the first work which showed the full power of his genius.^[22] This Octet and his Overture to Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he wrote a year later in 1826, are the best-known of his early works. (He later also wrote incidental music for the play, including the famous Wedding March, in 1842). The Overture is perhaps the earliest example of a concert overture – that is, a piece not written deliberately to accompany a staged performance, but to evoke a literary theme in performance on a concert platform; this was a genre which became a popular form in musical Romanticism.^[23]

In 1824 Mendelssohn studied under the composer and piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, who however confessed in his diaries^[24] that he had little to teach him. Moscheles became a close colleague and lifelong friend. The year 1827 saw the premiere – and sole performance in his lifetime – of Mendelssohn’s opera, Die Hochzeit des Camacho. The failure of this production left him disinclined to venture into the genre again.^[25]

Besides music, Mendelssohn’s education included art, literature, languages, and philosophy. He had a particular interest in classical literature^[26] and translated Terence‘s Andria for his tutor Heyse in 1825; Heyse was impressed and had it published in 1826 as a work of “his pupil, F****” [i.e. “Felix” (asterisks as provided in original text)].^[27] This translation also qualified Mendelssohn to study at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where from 1826 to 1829 he attended lectures on aesthetics by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, on history by Eduard Gans and on geography by Carl Ritter.^[28]

Meeting Goethe and conducting Bach

In 1821 Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his friend and correspondent, the elderly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter:

“Musical prodigies … are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.” “And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?” said Zelter. “Yes”, answered Goethe, “… but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”^[29]

Mendelssohn was invited to meet Goethe on several later occasions, and set a number of Goethe’s poems to music. His other compositions inspired by Goethe include the overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, (Op. 27, 1828) and the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night, Op. 60, 1832).

In 1829, with the backing of Zelter and the assistance of actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance in Berlin of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Four years previously his grandmother, Bella Salomon, had given him a copy of the manuscript of this (by then all-but-forgotten) masterpiece.^[30] The orchestra and choir for the performance were provided by the Berlin Singakademie. The success of this performance – the first since Bach’s death in 1750 – was an important element in the revival of J. S. Bach’s music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe.^[31] It earned Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age of 20. It also led to one of the few references which Mendelssohn made to his origins: “To think that it took an actor and a Jew’s son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!”^[32][33]

Over the next few years Mendelssohn traveled widely, including making his first visit to England in 1829, and also visiting amongst other places Vienna, Florence, Milan, Rome and Naples, in all of which he met with local and visiting musicians and artists. These years proved the germination for some of his most famous works, including the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish and Italian symphonies.^[34]

Düsseldorf

On Zelter’s death in 1832, Mendelssohn had hopes of succeeding him as conductor of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. However, at a vote in January 1833 he was defeated for the post by the less distinguished Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen. This may have been because of Mendelssohn’s youth, and fear of possible innovations; it was also suspected by some to be attributable to his Jewish ancestry.^[35] Following this rebuff, Mendelssohn divided most of his professional time over the next few years between Britain and Düsseldorf, where he was appointed musical director (his first paid post as a musician) in 1833.

In the spring of that year Mendelssohn directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf, beginning with a performance of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt prepared from the original score which he had found in London. This precipitated a Handel revival in Germany, similar to the reawakened interest in J. S. Bach following his performance of the St Matthew Passion.^[36] Mendelssohn worked with dramatist Karl Immermann to improve local theatre standards, and made his first appearance as an opera conductor in Immermann’s production of Mozart‘s Don Giovanni at the end of 1833, where he took umbrage at the audience’s protests about the cost of tickets.^[37] His frustration at his everyday duties in Düsseldorf, and the city’s provincialism, led him to resign his position at the end of 1834. He had offers from both Munich and Leipzig for important musical posts, and decided in 1835 to accept the latter.^[38]

Leipzig and Berlin

 Felix Mendelssohn’s study in Leipzig

In 1835 Mendelssohn was named conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.^[39] He chose this position although he had also been offered direction of the opera house in Munich and the editorship of the prestigious music journal, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.^[40] Mendelssohn concentrated on developing the musical life of Leipzig, working with the orchestra, the opera house, the Choir of St. Thomas Church, and the city’s other choral and musical institutions. Mendelssohn’s concerts included, in addition to many of his own works, three series of “historical concerts” and a number of works by his contemporaries. He was deluged by offers of music from rising composers and would-be composers; amongst these was Richard Wagner, who submitted his early Symphony, which to Wagner’s disgust Mendelssohn lost or mislaid.^[41] Mendelssohn also revived interest in Franz Schubert. Robert Schumann discovered the manuscript of Schubert’s 9th Symphony and sent it to Mendelssohn, who promptly premiered it in Leipzig on 21 March 1839, more than a decade after Schubert’s death.^[42]

A landmark event during Mendelssohn’s Leipzig years was the premiere of his oratorio St. Paul, given at the Lower Rhenish Festival in Düsseldorf in 1836, shortly after the death of the composer’s father, which much affected him; Felix wrote that he would “never cease to endeavour to gain his approval […] although I can no longer enjoy it”.^[43] St. Paul seemed to many of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries to be his finest work, and sealed his European reputation.^[44]

When Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the Prussian throne in 1840 with ambitions to develop Berlin as a cultural centre (including the establishment of a music school, and reform of music for the church), the obvious choice to head these reforms was Mendelssohn. He was however reluctant to undertake the task, especially in the light of his existing strong position in Leipzig.^[45] Mendelssohn did however spend some time in Berlin, writing some church music, and, at the King’s request, music for productions of Sophocles‘s Antigone (1841) and Oedipus at Colonus (1845), Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843) and Racine‘s Athalie (1845). But the funds for the school never materialised, and various of the court’s promises to Mendelssohn regarding finances, title, and concert programming were broken. He was therefore not displeased to have the excuse to return to Leipzig.

In 1843 Mendelssohn founded a major music school – the Leipzig Conservatory, now the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” or (in its own English self-designation) the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre – where he persuaded Ignaz Moscheles and Robert Schumann to join him. Other prominent musicians, including string players Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim and music theorist Moritz Hauptmann, also became staff members.^[46] After Mendelssohn’s death in 1847, his conservative tradition was carried on when Moscheles succeeded him as head of the Conservatory.

Mendelssohn in Britain

In 1829 Mendelssohn paid his first visit to Britain, where his former teacher Ignaz Moscheles, already settled in London, introduced him to influential musical circles. In the summer he visited Edinburgh, where he met among others the composer John Thomson, whom he later recommended to be Professor of Music at Edinburgh University.^[47] On his eighth visit in the summer of 1844, he conducted five of the Philharmonic concerts in London, and wrote:

[N]ever before was anything like this season – we never went to bed before half-past one, every hour of every day was filled with engagements three weeks beforehand, and I got through more music in two months than in all the rest of the year.^[48]

On subsequent visits he met Queen Victoria and her musical husband Prince Albert, who both greatly admired his music.^[49][50]

 

Felix Mendelssohn’s grave

In the course of ten visits to Britain during his life, totalling about 20 months, Mendelssohn won a strong following, sufficient for him to make a deep impression on British musical life.^[51] He composed and performed, and he edited for British publishers the first critical editions of oratorios of Handel and of the organ music of J.S. Bach. Scotland inspired two of his most famous works: the overture The Hebrides (also known as Fingal’s Cave); and the Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3).^[52]

Mendelssohn also worked closely with his protégé, the British composer and pianist William Sterndale Bennett (whom he had first heard in London in 1833 when Bennett was 17), both in London and Leipzig, where Bennett appeared throughout the 1836/1837 season.^[41] Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah was commissioned by and premiered at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival on 26 August 1846, composed to a German text translated into English by William Bartholomew, who authored and translated many of Mendelssohn’s works during his time in England.^[53] On his last visit to Britain in 1847, Mendelssohn was the soloist in Beethoven‘s Piano Concerto No. 4 and conducted his own Scottish Symphony with the Philharmonic Orchestra before the Queen and Prince Albert.^[54]

Death

Mendelssohn suffered from poor health in the final years of his life, probably aggravated by nervous problems and overwork. A final tour of England left him exhausted and ill from a hectic schedule. The death of his sister Fanny on 14 May 1847 caused him great distress. Less than six months later, on 4 November, Mendelssohn himself died in Leipzig after a series of strokes. He was 38. His grandfather Moses, his sister Fanny and both his parents had died from similar apoplexies.^[55] Felix’s funeral was held at the Paulinerkirche, Leipzig, and he was buried at the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof I in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The pallbearers included Moscheles, Schumann and Niels Gade.^[56] Mendelssohn had once described death, in a letter to a stranger, as a place “where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings”.^[57]

Personal life

Personality

 

View of Lucerne – watercolour by Mendelssohn, 1847

Although the image was cultivated, especially after his death in the detailed family memoirs by his nephew Sebastian Hensel,^[58] of a man always equable, happy and placid in temperament, this was misleading. The nickname “discontented Polish count” was given to Mendelssohn because of his aloofness, and he referred to the epithet in his letters.^[59] Mendelssohn was frequently given to alarming fits of temper which occasionally led to collapse. On one occasion in the 1830s, when his wishes had been crossed, “his excitement was increased so fearfully … that when the family was assembled … he began to talk incoherently, and in English, to the great terror of them all. The stern voice of his father at last checked the wild torrent of words; they took him to bed, and a profound sleep of twelve hours restored him to his normal state”.^[60] Such fits may be related to his early death.^[61]

Mendelssohn was a fine and enthusiastic artist in pencil and watercolour, a skill which he used throughout his life for his own amusement and that of his friends.^[62][63] His enormous correspondence shows that he could also be a witty writer in German and English – sometimes accompanied by humorous sketches and cartoons in the text.

Religion

On 21 March 1816, at the age of seven years, his parents prompted the baptism of Mendelssohn and his brother and sisters in a home ceremony by Johann Jakob Stegemann, minister of the Evangelical congregation of Berlin’s Jerusalem Church and New Church. Although Mendelssohn was a conforming (if not over-zealous) Christian as a member of the Reformed Church,^{[n 3]} he was both conscious and proud of his Jewish ancestry and notably of his connection with his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn. He was the prime mover in proposing to the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus a complete edition of Moses’s works, which continued with the support of his uncle Joseph Mendelssohn.^[64] Mendelssohn was notably reluctant, either in his letters or conversation, to comment on his innermost beliefs; his friend Devrient wrote that “[his] deep convictions were never uttered in intercourse with the world; only in rare and intimate moments did they ever appear, and then only in the slightest and most humorous allusions”.^[65] Thus for example in a letter to his sister Rebecka, Mendelssohn rebukes her complaint about an unpleasant relative: “What do you mean by saying you are not hostile to Jews? I hope this was a joke […] It is really sweet of you that you do not despise your family, isn’t it?”.^[66] Some modern scholars have devoted considerable energy to demonstrate either that Mendelssohn was deeply sympathetic to his ancestors’ Jewish beliefs, or that he was hostile to this and sincere in his Christian beliefs.^{[n 4]}

Mendelssohn and his contemporaries

Throughout his life Mendelssohn was wary of the more radical musical developments undertaken by some of his contemporaries. He was generally on friendly, if sometimes somewhat cool, terms with the likes of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but in his letters expresses his frank disapproval of their works, for example writing of Liszt that his compositions were “inferior to his playing, and [..] only calculated for virtuosos”;^[67] of Berlioz’s overture Les francs-juges “the orchestration is such a frightful muddle […] that one ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores”;^[68] and of Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable “I consider it ignoble”, calling its villain Bertram “a poor devil”.^[69] When his friend the composer Ferdinand Hiller suggested in conversation to Mendelssohn that he looked rather like Meyerbeer – they were actually distant cousins, both descendants of Rabbi Moses Isserlis – Mendelssohn was so upset that he immediately went to get a haircut to differentiate himself.^[70]

In particular, Mendelssohn seems to have regarded Paris and its music with the greatest of suspicion and an almost puritanical distaste. Attempts made during his visit there to interest him in Saint-Simonianism ended in embarrassing scenes.^[71]

It is significant that the only musician with whom he remained a close personal friend, Ignaz Moscheles, was of an older generation and equally conservative in outlook. Moscheles preserved this outlook at the Leipzig Conservatory until his own death in 1870.

Marriage and children

Mendelssohn’s wife Cécile (1846) by Eduard Magnus

Mendelssohn married Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud (10 October 1817 – 25 September 1853), the daughter of a French Reformed Church clergyman, on 28 March 1837.^[72] The couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Lilli and Felix. The second youngest child, Felix August, contracted measles in 1844 and was left with his health impaired; he died in 1851.^[73] The eldest, Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (7 February 1838 – 23 February 1897), became a distinguished historian, and professor of history at Heidelberg and Freiburg universities, dying in 1897 in a psychiatric institution in Freiburg.^[74] Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1841–1880) was a noted chemist and pioneered the manufacture of aniline dye. Marie married Victor Benecke and lived in London. Lili married Adolph Wach, later Professor of Law at Leipzig University.^[75] The family papers inherited by Marie and Lili’s children form the basis of the extensive collection of Mendelssohn manuscripts, including the so-called ‘Green Books’ of his correspondence, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.^[76]

Cécile Mendelssohn Bartholdy died less than six years after her husband, on 25 September 1853.^[77]

Jenny Lind

 Jenny Lind

In general Mendelssohn’s personal life seems to have been fairly conventional compared to those of his contemporaries Wagner, Berlioz, and Schumann – except for his relationship with Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whom he met in October 1844, and with whom, it was rumoured, he became emotionally involved. Papers confirming this were alleged to exist, although their contents had not been made public.^{[78][n 5]} In 2013 George Biddlecombe confirmed in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association that “The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death.”^[80]

Mendelssohn met and worked with Lind many times, and started an opera, Lorelei, for her, based on the legend of the Lorelei Rhine maidens; the opera was unfinished at his death. He is said to have tailored the aria “Hear Ye Israel” in his oratorio Elijah to Lind’s voice,^[81] although she did not sing this part until after his death, at a concert in December 1848.^[82] In 1847 Mendelssohn attended a London performance of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable – an opera which musically he despised – in order to hear Lind’s British debut, in the role of Alice. The music critic Henry Chorley, who was with him, wrote “I see as I write the smile with which Mendelssohn, whose enjoyment of Mdlle. Lind’s talent was unlimited, turned round and looked at me, as if a load of anxiety had been taken off his mind. His attachment to Mlle. Lind’s genius as a singer was unbounded, as was his desire for her success”.^[83]

Upon Mendelssohn’s death Lind wrote, “[He was] the only person who brought fulfillment to my spirit, and almost as soon as I found him I lost him again”. In 1849 she established the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation, which makes an award to a British resident young composer every two years in Mendelssohn’s memory.^[78] The first winner of the scholarship was Arthur Sullivan, then aged 14, in 1856. In 1869 Lind erected a plaque in Mendelssohn’s memory at his birthplace in Hamburg.

Mendelssohn as musician

See also: List of compositions by Felix Mendelssohn and Category:Compositions by Felix Mendelssohn

Composer

Richard Taruskin points out that, although Mendelssohn produced works of extraordinary mastery at a very early age,

he never outgrew his precocious youthful style. […] He remained stylistically conservative […] feeling no need to attract attention with a display of ‘revolutionary’ novelty. Throughout his short career he remained comfortably faithful to the musical status quo – that is, the “classical” forms, as they were already thought of by his time. His version of romanticism, already evident in his earliest works, consisted in musical “pictorialism” of a fairly conventional, objective nature (though exquisitely wrought).^[84]

In this way he differed substantially from contemporaries such as Wagner and Berlioz, and even from Schumann and Chopin. The absence of real stylistic ‘development’ during Mendelssohn’s career makes it appropriate to consider his works by genre, rather than in order of composition.

Early works

The young Mendelssohn was greatly influenced in his childhood by the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, traces of whom can be seen in the 12 early string symphonies, which were mainly written for performance in the Mendelssohn household and not published or publicly performed until long after his death. He wrote these from 1821 to 1823, when he was between the ages of 12 and 14.

Mendelssohn’s first published works were his three piano quartets, (1822–1825; Op. 1 in C minor, Op. 2 in F minor and Op. 3 in B minor); but his capacities are especially revealed in a group of works of his early maturity:

• the String Octet (1825)
• the Overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), which in its finished form also owes much to the influence of Adolf Bernhard Marx, at the time a close friend of Mendelssohn.
• the two early quartets: Op. 12 (1829) and Op. 13 (1827), which both show a remarkable grasp of the techniques and ideas of Beethoven’s last quartets that Mendelssohn had been closely studying^[85]

These four works show an intuitive grasp of form, harmony, counterpoint, colour, and compositional technique, which justify claims frequently made that Mendelssohn’s precocity exceeded even that of Mozart in its intellectual grasp.^[86]

Symphonies

Mendelssohn’s mature symphonies are numbered approximately in the order that they were published, rather than the order in which they were composed. The order of actual composition is: 1, 5, 4, 2, 3. The placement of No. 3 in this sequence is problematic because he worked on it for over a decade, starting sketches for it soon after beginning work on No. 5, but completing it after both Nos. 5 and 4.

The Symphony No. 1 in C minor for full-scale orchestra was written in 1824, when Mendelssohn was aged 15. This work is experimental, showing the influences of Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber.^[87] Mendelssohn conducted this symphony on his first visit to London in 1829, with the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. For the third movement he substituted an orchestration of the Scherzo from his Octet. In this form the piece was a success, and laid the foundations of his British reputation.^[88]

During 1829 and 1830 Mendelssohn wrote his Symphony No. 5, known as the Reformation. It celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Lutheran Church. Mendelssohn remained dissatisfied with the work and did not allow publication of the score.^[89]

The Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3 in A minor) was written and revised intermittently between 1829 (when Mendelssohn noted down the opening theme during a visit to Holyrood Palace)^[90] and 1842, when it was given its premiere in Leipzig, the last of his symphonies to be performed in public. This piece evokes Scotland’s atmosphere in the ethos of Romanticism, but does not employ any identified Scottish folk melodies.^[91]

Mendelssohn’s travels in Italy inspired him to write the Symphony No. 4 in A major, known as the Italian Symphony. Mendelssohn conducted the premiere in 1833, but did not allow the score to be published during his lifetime, as he continually sought to rewrite it.^[92]

Mendelssohn wrote the symphony-cantata Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise) in B-flat major, posthumously named Symphony No. 2, to mark the celebrations in Leipzig of the 400th anniversary of the invention of the printing press; the first performance took place on 25 June 1840.^[93]

Other orchestral music

Trumpet part, including main theme, of the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Op. 61

Mendelssohn wrote the concert Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave) in 1830, inspired by visits to Scotland around the end of the 1820s. He visited Fingal’s Cave, on the Hebridean isle of Staffa, as part of his Grand Tour of Europe, and was so impressed that he scribbled the opening theme of the overture on the spot, including it in a letter he wrote home the same evening.

Throughout his career he wrote a number of other concert overtures. Those most frequently played today include an overture to Ruy Blas, commissioned for a charity performance of Victor Hugo‘s drama, which Mendelssohn hated; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt), inspired by a pair of poems by Goethe; and The Fair Melusine.

The incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Op. 61), including the well-known Wedding March, was written in 1843, seventeen years after the overture.

Opera

Mendelssohn wrote some Singspiels for family performance in his youth. His opera Die beiden Neffen (The Two Nephews) was rehearsed for him on his 15th birthday.^[94] 1829 saw Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (Son and Stranger or Return of the Roamer), a comedy of mistaken identity written in honor of his parents’ silver anniversary and unpublished during his lifetime. In 1825 he wrote a more sophisticated work, Die Hochzeit des Camacho (Camacho’s Wedding), based on an episode in Don Quixote, for public consumption. It was produced in Berlin in 1827, but coolly received. Mendelssohn left the theatre before the conclusion of the first performance, and subsequent performances were cancelled.^[95]

Although he never abandoned the idea of composing a full opera, and considered many subjects – including that of the Nibelung saga later adapted by Wagner – he never wrote more than a few pages of sketches for any project. In Mendelssohn’s last years the opera manager Benjamin Lumley tried to contract him to write an opera from Shakespeare’s The Tempest on a libretto by Eugène Scribe, and even announced it as forthcoming in 1847, the year of Mendelssohn’s death.^[96] The libretto was eventually set by Fromental Halévy. At his death Mendelssohn left some sketches for an opera on the story of the Lorelei.

Concertos

Violin Concerto op.64, main theme of second movement

The Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), written for Ferdinand David, has become one of the most popular of all of Mendelssohn’s compositions. David, who had worked closely with Mendelssohn during the piece’s preparation, gave the premiere of the concerto on his Guarneri violin.^[97]

Mendelssohn also wrote a lesser-known, early concerto for violin and strings in D minor (1822); four piano concertos (“no. 0” in A minor, 1822; 1 in G minor, Op. 25, 1831; 2 in D minor, Op. 40, 1837; and 3 in E minor, Op. posth., a fragment from 1844); two concertos for two pianos and orchestra, E major (MWV O5), which he wrote at 15, and A-flat major (MWV O6), at 17; and another double concerto, for violin and piano (1823). In addition, there are several single-movement works for soloist and orchestra. Those for piano are the Rondo Brillante, Op. 29, of 1834; the Capriccio Brillante, Op. 22, of 1832; and the Serenade and Allegro Giocoso Op. 43, of 1838. He also wrote two concertinos (Konzertstücke), Opp. 113 and 114, originally for clarinet, basset horn and piano; Op. 113 was orchestrated by the composer.^[98]

Chamber music

Mendelssohn’s mature output contains numerous chamber works, many of which display an emotional intensity lacking in some of his larger works. In particular, his String Quartet No. 6, the last of his string quartets and his last major work – written following the death of his sister Fanny – is both powerful and eloquent. Other mature works include two other string quintets; sonatas for the clarinet, cello, viola and violin; and two piano trios. For the Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Mendelssohn uncharacteristically took the advice of his fellow composer, Ferdinand Hiller, and rewrote the piano part in a more romantic, “Schumannesque” style, considerably heightening its effect.^[99]

Choral works

 Part of the overture to ‘Elijah’ arranged by Mendelssohn for piano duet (manuscript in the Library of Congress)

Mendelssohn’s two large biblical oratorios, St Paul in 1836 and Elijah in 1846, are greatly influenced by Bach. His unfinished oratorio, Christus, consists of a recitative, a chorus “There Shall a Star Come out of Jacob,” and a male trio; the chorus is sometimes performed.

Strikingly different is the more overtly romantic Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night), a setting for chorus and orchestra of a ballad by Goethe describing pagan rituals of the Druids in the Harz mountains in the early days of Christianity. This remarkable score has been seen by the scholar Heinz-Klaus Metzger as a “Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity”.^[100]

Mendelssohn also wrote many smaller-scale sacred works for unaccompanied choir and for choir with organ. Most are written in or translated into English, and remain highly popular. Amongst the most famous is Hear My Prayer, whose second half contains “O for the Wings of a Dove,” which became extremely popular as a separate item. The piece is written for full choir, organ, and a treble or soprano soloist who has many challenging and extended solo passages. As such, it is a particular favourite for choirboys in churches and cathedrals and has frequently been recorded as a treble solo. Mendelssohn’s biographer Todd comments “The very popularity of the anthem in England […] later exposed it to charges of superficiality from those contemptuous of Victorian mores“.^[101]

The hymn tune Mendelssohn – an adaptation by William Hayman Cummings of a melody from Mendelssohn’s cantata Festgesang (Festive Hymn) – is the standard tune for Charles Wesley‘s popular hymn Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. This extract from an originally secular 1840s composition, which Mendelssohn felt unsuited to sacred music,^[93] is ubiquitous at Christmas.

Songs

Mendelssohn wrote many songs, both for solo voice and for duet, with piano. Many of these are simple, or slightly modified, strophic settings. Some, including Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (On Wings of Song), became popular. Nine of Mendelssohn’s songs, including Auf Flügeln des Gesanges and Neue Liebe (New Love, set to a poem by Heinrich Heine) were transcribed for piano solo, in a virtuoso style, by Franz Liszt.

A number of songs written by Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny originally appeared under her brother’s name; this may have been partly due to the prejudice of the family, and partly to her own retiring nature.^[102]

Piano music

Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (Lieder ohne Worte), eight cycles each containing six lyric pieces (two published posthumously), remain his most famous solo piano compositions. They became standard parlour recital items even during the composer’s lifetime,^[103] and their overwhelming popularity has itself caused many critics to underrate their musical value.^[104] Other composers who were inspired to produce similar pieces of their own, included Charles-Valentin Alkan (his five sets of Chants, each ending with a barcarole), Anton Rubinstein, Ignaz Moscheles, and Edvard Grieg.

Other notable piano pieces by Mendelssohn include his Variations sérieuses, Op. 54 (1841), the Rondo Capriccioso, the set of six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35 (written between 1832 and 1837), and the Seven Characteristic Pieces, Op. 7 (1827).

Organ music

 Advertisement for the Organ Sonatas in the Musical World, 24 July 1845

Mendelssohn played the organ and composed for it from the age of 11 to his death. His primary organ works are the Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 37 (1837), and the Six Sonatas, Op. 65 (1845), of which Eric Werner wrote “next to Bach’s works, Mendelssohn’s Organ Sonatas belong to the required repertory of all organists”.^[105]

Performer

Mendelssohn was renowned during his lifetime as a keyboard performer, both on the piano and on the organ. One of his obituarists noted:

First and chiefest we esteem his pianoforte-playing, with its amazing elasticity of touch, rapidity, and power; next his scientific and vigorous organ playing […] his triumphs on these instruments are fresh in public recollection.^[106]

In his concerts and recitals Mendelssohn performed both his own works and those of his predecessor German composers, notably works of Weber, Beethoven and (on the organ) J.S. Bach.^[107]

Both in private and public performances, Mendelssohn was also renowned for his improvisations. On one occasion in London, when asked by the soprano Maria Malibran after a recital to extemporise, he created a piece which included the melodies of all the songs she had sung. The music publisher Victor Novello who was present remarked ‘He has done some things that seem to me impossible, even after I have heard them done.’^[108] At another recital in 1837, where Mendelssohn played the piano for a singer, Robert Schumann ignored the soprano and wrote ‘Mendelssohn accompanied like a God’.^[109]

Conductor

Mendelssohn was a noted conductor, both of his own works and of other composers. At his London debut in 1829, he was noted for his innovatory use of a baton (then a great novelty).^[110] But his novelty also extended to taking great care over tempo, dynamics and the orchestral players themselves – both rebuking them when they were recalcitrant and praising them when they satisfied him.^[111] It was his success at conducting at the Lower Rhine music festival of 1836 that led to him taking his first paid professional position as director at Düsseldorf. Amongst those who appreciated Mendelssohn’s conducting was Hector Berlioz, who in 1843, invited to Leipzig, exchanged batons with Mendelssohn, writing “When the Great Spirit sends us to hunt in the land of souls, may our warriors hang our tomahawks side by side at the door of the council chamber”.^[112] At Leipzig, Mendelssohn led the Gewandhaus orchestra to great heights; although concentrating on the great composers of the past (already becoming canonised as the ‘classics’) he also included new music by Schumann, Berlioz, Gade and many others (including of course his own music).^[113] One critic who was not impressed however was Richard Wagner; he accused Mendelssohn of using tempos in his performances of Beethoven symphonies that were far too fast.^[114]

Editor

Mendelssohn’s interest in baroque music was not limited to the Bach St Matthew Passion which he had revived in 1829. He was concerned in preparing and editing such music, whether for performance or for publication, to be as close as possible to the original intentions of the composers, including wherever possible a close study of early editions and manuscripts. This could lead him into conflict with publishers; for instance, his edition of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt for the London Handel Society (1845) evoked an often contentious correspondence, with Mendelssohn refusing for example to add dynamics where not given by Handel, or to add parts for trombones. Mendelssohn also edited a number of Bach’s works for organ, and apparently discussed with Robert Schumann the possibility of producing a complete Bach edition.^[115]

Teacher

Although Mendelssohn attributed great importance to musical education, and made a substantial commitment to the Conservatoire he founded in Leipzig, he did not greatly enjoy teaching and undertook only a very few private pupils; these he took only if he believed they had notable qualities or potential.^[116] Amongst such students were composer William Sterndale Bennett, the pianist Camille-Marie Stamaty, the violinist and composer Julius Eichberg, and Walther von Goethe (grandson of the poet).^[117] At the Leipzig Conservatoire Mendelssohn taught classes in composition and ensemble playing.^[118]

Reputation and legacy

The first century

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Mendelssohn monument in 1900 (removed in 1936)

In the immediate wake of Mendelssohn’s death, he was mourned both in Germany and England. However, the conservative strain in Mendelssohn, which set him apart from some of his more flamboyant contemporaries, bred a corollary condescension amongst some of them toward his music. Mendelssohn’s relations with Berlioz, Liszt and others had been uneasy and equivocal. Listeners who had raised questions about Mendelssohn’s talent included Heinrich Heine, who wrote in 1836 after hearing the oratorio St. Paul that his work was “characterized by a great, strict, very serious seriousness, a determined, almost importunate tendency to follow classical models, the finest, cleverest calculation, sharp intelligence and, finally, complete lack of naïveté. But is there in art any originality of genius without naïveté?”^[119][120]

Such criticism of Mendelssohn for his very ability – which could be characterised negatively as facility – was taken to further lengths by Richard Wagner. Mendelssohn’s success, his popularity and his Jewish origins irked Wagner sufficiently to damn Mendelssohn with faint praise, three years after his death, in an anti-Jewish pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik:

[Mendelssohn] has shown us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and tenderest sense of honour – yet without all these pre-eminences helping him, were it but one single time, to call forth in us that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from art […] The washiness and the whimsicality of our present musical style has been […] pushed to its utmost pitch by Mendelssohn’s endeavour to speak out a vague, an almost nugatory Content as interestingly and spiritedly as possible.^[121]

This was the start of a movement to downgrade Mendelssohn’s status as a composer which lasted almost a century, the echoes of which still survive today in critiques of Mendelssohn’s supposed mediocrity.^{[n 6]}

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed consistent admiration for Mendelssohn’s music, in contrast to his general scorn for “Teutonic” Romanticism:

At any rate, the whole music of romanticism [e.g. Schumann and Wagner] … was second-rate music from the very start, and real musicians took little notice of it. Things were different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who, thanks to his easier, purer, happier soul, was quickly honored and just as quickly forgotten, as a lovely incident in German music.^[122]

Some readers, however, have interpreted Nietzsche’s characterization of Mendelssohn as a ‘lovely incident’ as condescending.^[123]

In the 20th century the Nazi regime and its Reichsmusikkammer cited Mendelssohn’s Jewish origin in banning performance and publication of his works, even asking Nazi-approved composers to rewrite incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Carl Orff obliged.)^[124] Under the Nazis, “Mendelssohn was presented as a dangerous ‘accident’ of music history, who played a decisive role in rendering German music in the 19th century ‘degenerate’.”^[125] The German Mendelssohn Scholarship for students at the Leipzig Conservatoire was discontinued in 1934 (and not revived until 1963). The monument dedicated to Mendelssohn erected in Leipzig in 1892 was removed by the Nazis in 1936. A replacement was erected in 2008.^[126] His grave however remained unmolested during the National Socialist years.^[127]

 The reconstructed Mendelssohn monument near Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, dedicated in 2008^[128]

Mendelssohn’s reputation in England remained high throughout the 19th century. Prince Albert inscribed (in German), a libretto for the oratorio Elijah in 1847:

To the noble artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of false art, has been able, like a second Elijah, through genius and study, to remain true to the service of true art.^[129]

In 1851 an adulatory novel by the teenaged Sarah Sheppard was published, entitled Charles Auchester.^[130] The book features Mendelssohn as the “Chevalier Seraphael”, and remained in print for nearly 80 years. In 1854 Queen Victoria requested that the Crystal Palace include a statue of Mendelssohn when it was rebuilt.^{[n 7]} Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was played at the wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, The Princess Royal, to Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1858, and it remains popular at marriage ceremonies.^[131] Mendelssohn’s sacred choral music, particularly the smaller-scale works, remains popular in the choral tradition of the Church of England. However many critics, including Bernard Shaw, began to condemn Mendelssohn’s music for its association with Victorian cultural insularity; Shaw in particular complained of the composer’s “kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio-mongering”.^[132] In the 1950s the scholar Wilfrid Mellers complained of Mendelssohn’s “spurious religiosity which reflected the element of unconscious humbug in our morality”.^[133]

A contrasting opinion came from the pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, who considered Mendelssohn “a master of undisputed greatness” and “an heir of Mozart”.^[134] Busoni and other pianists such as Anton Rubinstein^[135] and Alkan^[136] all regularly included Mendelssohn’s piano works in their recitals.

Modern opinions

 German postage stamp issued on the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth

Charles Rosen in a chapter on Mendelssohn in his 1995 book The Romantic Generation both praises and criticizes the composer, calling him a “genius” with a “profound” comprehension of Beethoven and “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known”. Although Rosen feels that in his later years, without losing his craft or genius, the composer “renounced … his daring”, he calls Mendelssohn’s relatively late Violin Concerto in E minor “the most successful synthesis of the Classical concerto tradition and the Romantic virtuoso form”. Rosen calls the Fugue in E minor (later included in Mendelssohn’s Op. 35 for piano) a “masterpiece”; but in the same paragraph calls Mendelssohn “the inventor of religious kitsch in music”.^[137]

Such opinions are evidence of how a more nuanced appreciation of Mendelssohn’s work has developed over the last 50 years, together with the publication of a number of modern biographies placing his achievements in context.^[138] Mercer-Taylor comments on the irony that “this broad-based reevaluation of Mendelssohn’s music is made possible, in part, by a general disintegration of the idea of a musical canon”, an idea which Mendelssohn “as a conductor, pianist and scholar” had done so much to establish.^[139]

A large portion of Mendelssohn’s 750 works still remained unpublished in the 1960s, but most of them have now been made available.^[140] A scholarly edition of Mendelssohn’s complete works and correspondence is in preparation but is expected to take many years to complete, and will be in excess of 150 volumes. This includes a modern and fully researched catalogue of his works, the Mendelssohn-Werkverzeichnis (MWV).^[141] All of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre – including the most popular works such as the E minor Violin Concerto and the Italian Symphony – has been explored more deeply, and prior concepts about the Victorian conventionality of the oratorio Elijah have been shed.^{[n 8]} The frequently intense and dramatic world of Mendelssohn’s chamber works has been more fully recognized. Virtually all of Mendelssohn’s published works are now available on CD, and his works are frequently heard in the concert hall and on broadcasts.^[142] An English Heritage blue plaque commemorating Mendelssohn was placed at 4 Hobart Place in Belgravia, London, in 2013.^[143] As the critic H. L. Mencken concluded, if Mendelssohn indeed missed true greatness, he missed it “by a hair”.^[144]

historic musical bits: Kabalevsky 24 Preludes opus 38 — Yakov Flier (complete) rec. 1955

Kabalevsky 24 Preludes opus 38 — Yakov Flier (complete)

pianopera

Published on Apr 9, 2012

Yakov Flier (1912-1977) plays Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904-1987)
24 Preludes opus 38 (1944)

1. Andantino. C major. 0:16
2. Scherzando. A minor. 1:56
3. Vivace leggiero. G major. 2:29
4. Andantino. E minor. 3:39
5. Andante sostenuto. D major. 5:17
6. Allegro molto. B minor. 7:08
7. Moderato e tranquillo. A major. 8:13
8. Andante non troppo. Semplice e cantando – Poco Agitato – Tempo I. F-sharp minor. 10:37
9. Allegretto scherzando – Poco più mosso. E major. 12:47
10. Non troppo allegro ma agitato. Recitando, rubato – Largo – Come prima – Largo. C-sharp minor. 13:53
11. Vivace scherzando. B major. 16:27
12. Adagio. G-sharp minor. 17:10
13. Allegro non troppo. F-sharp major. 20:10
14. Prestissimo possibile. E-flat minor. 22:35
15. Allegretto marcato. D-flat major. 24:22
16. Allegro tenebroso. B-flat minor. 25:10
17. Andantino tranquillo. A-flat major. 26:47
18. Largamente con gravita. F minor. 29:00
19. Allegretto. E-flat major. 30:21
20. Andantino semplice. C minor. 31:10
21. Festivamente. Non troppo allegro. B-flat major. 33:43
22. Scherzando. Non troppo allegro. G minor. 35:10
23. Andante sostenuto. F major. 36:57
24. Allegro feroce – Meno mosso. Marciale. – Pochissimo più mosso – Poco meno mosso. D minor. 39:13
Rec. ca. 1955
Illustrations by Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin (1876-1942)

historic musical bits: Rudolf Firkušný: Humoresques op. 101, Antonín Dvořák

Rudolf Firkušný: Humoresques op. 101, Antonín Dvořák

Tournesol Hélianthème

Published on Jun 14, 2013

The Humoresques in the “right” order!

00:00 n°1
02:19 n°2
04:43 n°3
08:24 n°4
10:46 n°6
13:44 n°7
16:25 n°8

Enr. 1972

http://www.bruceduffie.com/firkusny.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfgID..

historic musical bits: Paul Tortelier “Cello Sonata in D minor” by Debussy (1959)

Paul Tortelier “Cello Sonata D minor” Debussy

Addiobelpassato

Published on Jun 12, 2013

Cello Sonata in D minor by
Claude Debussy
1. Prologue
2. Sérénade
3. Finale
Paul Tortelier, cello
Ernest Lush, piano
10.II.1959

Historic Musical Bits: Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op. 21 | The Philharmonia Orchestra Conductor: Otto Klemperer

Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op. 21

panharmonicon

Published on Mar 21, 2012

Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op. 21

The Philharmonia Orchestra
Conductor: Otto Klemperer

historic musical bits: Prokofiev: Symphony no. 1 op. 25 “Classical” – Carlo Maria Giulini & Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Prokofiev: Symphony no. 1 op. 25 “Classical” – Carlo Maria Giulini & Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Kanal von shostakk

Published on Aug 2, 2012

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Symphony no. 1 in D major op. 25 “Classical”

I. Allegro (0:00)
II. Larghetto (4:42)
III. Gavotta. Non troppo allegro (8:32)
IV. Finale. Molto vivace (10:05)

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Carlo Maria Giulini

Chicago, Medinah Temple, April 1976

 

Historic musical bits: Paganini: Violin Concerto no. 2, op. 7 “La Campanella” (1969 Ashkenasi/Vienna Symph. Orch./Esser)

Paganini: Violin Concerto no. 2, op. 7 “La Campanella” (1969 Ashkenasi/Vienna Symph. Orch./Esser)

VinylRecordSound

NICOLÒ PAGANINI (1782-1840)

Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, op. 7
“La Campanella”

I. Allegro maestoso (Cadenza by Shmuel Ashkenasi) (0:07)
II. Adagio (13:27)
III. Rondo (La Campanella) (19:02)

SHMUEL ASHKENASI, violin
VIENNA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
conducted by HERIBERT ESSER

Vinyl LP – “Deutsche Grammophon” Label – Catalogue number 2535 207
Recorded in 1969
LP released in 1976

historic musical bits: Hamilton Harty – Carl Maria von Weber: Abu Hassan Overture

Hamilton Harty – Carl Maria von Weber: Abu Hassan Overture

2ndviolinist

Published on Aug 2, 2011

Recorded in 1927, Hallé Orchestra

Thanks to Damian Rogan for use of this transfer.
Find this and other very fine selections at 78rpmcommunity.com/profile/damians78s

Sir (Herbert) Hamilton Harty (4 December 1879 — 19 February 1941) was an Irish and British composer, conductor, pianist and organist. In his capacity as a conductor, he was particularly noted as an interpreter of the music of Berlioz and he was much respected as a piano accompanist of exceptional prowess. Harty still stands as one of the most significant musicians that Northern Ireland has ever produced.

Harty was born in Hillsborough, County Down, Ireland, the fourth of ten children of church organist William Michael Harty (1852–1918) and his wife, Annie Elizabeth, the daughter of Joseph Hamilton Richards, a soldier from Bray. Raised an Anglican, Harty played viola, piano, and organ as a child. Initially following in his father’s footsteps, he held positions as a church organist from age twelve. He moved to London in 1901 to pursue a musical career as accompanist, and accompanied an impressive list of soloists, among them John McCormack, W.H. Squire, Joseph Szigeti, Fritz Kreisler, and soprano Agnes Nicholls, whom he married on 15 July 1904. His considerable abilities as a performer were further highlighted when he appeared as the soloist in the premiere performance of his virtuosic “Piano Concerto”, one of his finest works.

Nicholls’ professional relationship with the Hungarian conductor Hans Richter was of great importance to Harty. After performing in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen under Richter in 1908, she approached him on her husband’s behalf. It was through this connection that Harty secured his first important conducting engagement: a performance of his tone poem With the Wild Geese with the London Symphony Orchestra in March 1911. The performance was a success, and he was engaged to conduct the orchestra again during its 1912–13 season. Hoping to reinforce his status as a composer–conductor, Harty gave the first performance of his Variations on a Dublin Air with the same orchestra in February 1913. Unfortunately, neither the critics nor the public shared his enthusiasm for his music: his concerts made a loss and he was not invited back for the following season. Nevertheless, his reputation as a conductor continued to grow, and he was invited to perform Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Bizet’s Carmen at Covent Garden in 1913. But he had little sympathy with opera, preferring symphonic music instead. In January 1914 he conducted the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and in April he made his début with the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester. His career was interrupted briefly by the First World War: in June 1916 he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was posted for duties in the North Sea, and he rose to the rank of lieutenant in 1917 before leaving in June 1918. In December he substituted for an indisposed Sir Thomas Beecham at a performance of Handel’s Messiah with the Hallé Orchestra, and on 27 March 1919 he again replaced Beecham at a performance of J. S. Bach’s Mass in B minor.

Harty did most of his composing between 1901 and 1920, including his Irish Symphony, his tone poem With the Wild Geese, his Violin Concerto, and his setting of Ode to a Nightingale for soprano and orchestra, premiered by Nicholls.

After short stints with the London Symphony Orchestra and elsewhere in England, Harty became permanent conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in 1920, a position that he held until 1933. Under his baton, the Hallé became one of the premier orchestras in England. He was knighted in 1925. In 1926 he commissioned a symphony from Ernest John Moeran. The Symphony in G minor (1937) was the result, but by then Harty was too ill to conduct the premiere. He did, however, eventually accept the dedication of the work, after initially falling out with Moeran.

From 1931 to 1936, Harty toured in America and elsewhere, conducting in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Rochester, and Sydney.

Harty’s health began to deteriorate sharply in 1936: a malignant brain tumour was discovered and surgery was required. After both the growth and his right eye were removed, Harty convalesced in Ireland and Jamaica during 1937 and 1938. His illness continued to trouble him, and he conducted for the last time on 1 December 1940. Because of Harty’s estrangement from his wife, the conductor was nursed through his final illness by his secretary and intimate friend, Olive Elfreda Baguley. Harty died in Hove; after cremation his ashes were placed in Hillsborough parish church.

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  • Music

Historic Musical Bits: , Mendelssohn:, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Berliner Philharmoniker conductor: Ferenc Fricsay) Rita Streich & Diana Eustrati (1950)

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ferenc Fricsay) Rita Streich & Diana Eustrati

Muzikazaile

Published on Aug 10, 2013

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1874)

Ein Sommernachtstraum, op. 21 & op. 61
Musik zu Shakespeares Schauspiel
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Le Songe d’une nuit d’été

Ouverture, op 21: Allegro di molto
Zwischenaktmusik op. 61
1. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
2. L’istesso tempo
[Elfenmarsch]: Allegro vivace (Marche des fées / March of the Fairies)
3. Lied mit Chor: Allegro ma non trppo (Song with chorus): “Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt”
5. [Intermezzo:] Allegro appassionato
7. Nocturne:] Con molto tranquillo
9. Hochzeitsmarsch: Allegro vivace (Wedding March . Marche nuptiale)
11. Ein Tanz von Rïpeln: Allegro di molto (A dance of Clowns . Danse declowns)
13. Finale: Allegro di molto

Rita Streich, soprano
Diana Eustrati, contralto
RIAS Kammerchor
Berliner Philharmoniker
Conducted by Ferenc Fricsay
1950
_

• Music

  • “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61: I. Overture – Allegro di molto” by Rita Streich, Diana Eustrati, The Berlin Philarmonic Orchestra (Google Play • iTunes • AmazonMP3 • eMusic)

 

historic musical bits, Vladimir Horowitz plays Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.3 (live 1978), great compositions/performances

Vladimir Horowitz plays Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No.3 (live 1978)

Nebojsa Maksimovic

Vladimir Horowitz, Pianist / New York Philharmonic Orchestra / Zubin Mehta, Conductor

Live at Avery Fisher Hall, New York, 24.9.1978

---

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, or colloquially the Rach 3, Op. 30 composed in 1909 by Sergei Rachmaninoff has the reputation of being one of the most technically challenging piano concertos in the standard classical repertoire.

Form

Following the form of a standard concerto, the piece is in three movements:

A portion of the original cadenza (ossia)

1. Allegro ma non tanto (D minor)

   The first movement revolves around a diatonic melody that soon develops into complex pianistic figuration. The second theme opens with quiet exchanges between the orchestra and the piano before fully diving into a slower theme in a major key. The first part of the first theme is restated before the movement is pulled into a loud development section which opens with toccata like quavers in the piano and reaches a loud chordal section. The whole development exhibits features similar to a canon, such as an eighth note passage in the piano in which the left hand and the right hand play overlapping figures. The movement reaches a number of ferocious climaxes, especially in the cadenza. Rachmaninoff wrote two versions of this cadenza: the chordal original, which is commonly notated as the ossia, and a second one with a lighter, toccata-like style. Both cadenzas lead into a quiet solo section where the flute, clarinet and horn restate the first theme of the exposition, accompanied by delicate arpeggios in the piano. The cadenza then ends quietly, but the piano alone continues to play a quiet development of the exposition’s second theme before leading to the recapitulation, where the first theme is restated by the piano, with the orchestra accompanying, soon closing with a quiet, rippling coda reminiscent of the second theme.

2. Intermezzo: Adagio (F sharp minor/D flat major)

   The second movement is opened by the orchestra and it consists of a number of variations around a single lush, heavily romantic melody following one another without a rigid scheme. The melody soon moves to the tonic major which is the second theme. After the first theme development and recapitulation of the second theme, the main melody from the first movement reappears, before the movement is closed by the orchestra in a manner similar to the introduction. Then the piano gets the last word with a short “cadenza-esque” passage which moves into the last movement without pause. Many melodic thoughts of this movement allude to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, third movement, noticeably the Russian-like, E-flat major melody.

3. Finale: Alla breve (D minor → D major)

   The third movement is quick and vigorous and contains variations on many of the themes that are used in the first movement, which unites the concerto cyclically. However, after the first and second themes it diverges from the regular sonata-allegro form. There is no conventional development; that segment is replaced by a lengthy digression using the major key of the third movement’s first theme, which leads to the two themes from the first movement. After the digression, the movement recapitulation returns to the original themes, building up to a toccata climax somewhat similar but lighter than the first movement’s ossia cadenza and accompanied by the orchestra. The movement concludes with a triumphant and passionate second theme melody in D major. The piece ends with the same four-note rhythm – claimed by some to be the composer’s musical signature – as both the composer’s second concerto and second symphony.^[1]

Rachmaninoff, under pressure, and hoping to make his work more popular, authorized several cuts in the score, to be made at the performer’s discretion. These cuts, particularly in the second and third movements, were commonly taken in performance and recordings during the initial decades following the Concerto’s publication. More recently, it has become commonplace to perform the concerto without cuts. A typical performance of the complete concerto lasts about forty minutes.

History

 Proofing copies of the concerto (1910)

Rachmaninoff composed the concerto in the peaceful setting of his family’s country estate, Ivanovka,^[2] completing it on September 23, 1909. Contemporary with this work are his First Piano Sonata and his tone poem The Isle of the Dead.

The concerto is respected, even feared, by many pianists. Josef Hofmann, the pianist to whom the work is dedicated, never publicly performed it, saying that it “wasn’t for” him. Gary Graffman lamented he had not learned this concerto as a student, when he was “still too young to know fear”.^[3]

Due to time constraints, Rachmaninoff could not practice the piece while in Russia. Instead, he practiced it on a silent keyboard that he brought with him while en route to the United States.

The concerto was first performed on November 28, 1909 by Rachmaninoff himself with the now-defunct New York Symphony Society with Walter Damrosch conducting, at the New Theater (later rechristened the Century Theater). It received a second performance under Gustav Mahler several weeks later, an “experience Rachmaninoff treasured.”^[4] Rachmaninoff later described the rehearsal to Riesemann:

At that time Mahler was the only conductor whom I considered worthy to be classed with Nikisch. He devoted himself to the concerto until the accompaniment, which is rather complicated, had been practiced to perfection, although he had already gone through another long rehearsal. According to Mahler, every detail of the score was important — an attitude too rare amongst conductors. … Though the rehearsal was scheduled to end at 12:30, we played and played, far beyond this hour, and when Mahler announced that the first movement would be rehearsed again, I expected some protest or scene from the musicians, but I did not notice a single sign of annoyance. The orchestra played the first movement with a keen or perhaps even closer appreciation than the previous time.^[5]

The manuscript was first published in 1910 by Gutheil. Rachmaninoff called the Third the favorite of his own piano concertos, stating that “I much prefer the Third, because my Second is so uncomfortable to play.” Nevertheless, it was not until the 1930s and largely thanks to the advocacy of Vladimir Horowitz that the Third concerto became popular.

Orchestration

The concerto is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, piano and strings.    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> More

 

Historic Musical Bits, Sviatoslav Richter – Schumann – Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op 82 , (recorded 1956), great compositions/performances

Sviatoslav Richter – Schumann – Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op 82

Classical Vault 1

Published on May 5, 2013

Robert Schumann
Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op 82

1 Eintritt
2 Jäger auf der Lauer
3 Einsame Blumen
4 Verrufene Stelle
5 Freundliche Landschaft
6 Herberge
7 Vogel als Prophet
8 Jagdlied
9 Abschied

Sviatoslav Richter, piano

Recorded live, 1956

• Music

  • “Waldszenen, Op. 82: III. Einsame blumen. Einfach” by Sviatoslav Richter (Google Play • eMusic • AmazonMP3 • iTunes)

• Artist

  • Sviatoslav Richter

historic musical bits, Liszt – Sonetto 104 del Petrarca – pianista Dinu Lipatti, great compositions/performances

Liszt – Sonetto 104 del Petrarca – pianista Dinu Lipatti

kurwenal63

Jascha Heifetz plays Wieniawski Polonaise No. 1 in D Major , great compositions/performances

Jascha Heifetz plays Wieniawski Polonaise No. 1 in D Major

Sam Lee

Jascha Heifetz plays Wieniawski Polonaise No. 1 in D Major, Op. 4.
Accompanist: Emanuel Bay

historic musical bits, : Sviatoslav Richter – Bach – Keyboard Concerto No 3 in D major, BWV 105, great compositions/performances4

Sviatoslav Richter – Bach – Keyboard Concerto No 3 in D major, BWV 1054

Classical Vault 1

Johann Sebastian Bach
Keyboard Concerto No 3 in D major, BWV 1054

1 Allegro
2 Adagio e piano sempre
3 Allegro

Sviatoslav Richter, piano

Students’ Orchestra of the Moscow State Conservatory
Yuri Nikolayevsky, conductor

historic musical bits: Leonid Kogan – Fritz Kreisler – Liebesfreud ,great compositions/performances

Leonid Kogan – Fritz Kreisler – Liebesfreud

Grandesmusicos

Published on May 28, 2012

Canal Grandes Músicos FACEBOOK: http://migre.me/5SDfK
Siga-me no TWITTER : http://twitter.com/#!/GrandeesMusicos
Leonid Kogan Borisovich (17 de novembro de 1924 – 17 de dezembro de 1982) ( em hebraico : בוריסוביץ ‘קוגן לאוניד, russo : Леонид Борисович Коган, ucraniano : Леонід Борисович Коган) foi um violino virtuoso e um do século 20 é o mais famoso Soviética violinistas. Ele classificou entre os maiores representantes da União Soviética Escola de tocar violino.

–Vida e carreira

Kogan nasceu em Dnipropetrovsk , na Ucrânia , filho de um fotógrafo que foi um violinista amador. Depois de mostrar um interesse precoce e capacidade para tocar violino, sua família mudou-se para Moscou , onde ele foi capaz de aprofundar seus estudos. A partir dos dez anos ele estudou com o famoso violino pedagogo Abrão Yampolsky. Em 1934, Jascha Heifetz feito shows em Moscou. “Eu participei de cada um”, disse Kogan tarde “, e me lembro até agora todas as notas que tocava. Ele era o artista ideal para mim”. Kogan Quando tinha 12 anos, Jacques Thibaud estava em Moscou e ouvi-lo tocar. O virtuoso francês previu um grande futuro para Kogan.

Kogan estudou na Escola Central de Música de Moscovo (1934-1943), em seguida, no Conservatório de Moscou (1943-1948), onde estudou como uma pós-graduação (1948-1951).

Na idade de 17 anos, e enquanto ainda era estudante, ele se apresentou em toda a URSS . Ele foi co-ganhador do primeiro prêmio no Festival Mundial da Juventude em Praga . Em 1951 Kogan ganhou o primeiro prêmio no Concurso da Rainha Elizabeth , em Bruxelas, com uma performance deslumbrante de Paganini ‘s primeiro concerto que incluiu uma interpretação excepcional de Sauret ‘s cadenza.

Sua estréia oficial foi em 1941, tocando Brahms Concerto com a Filarmônica de Moscou, na Grande Sala do Conservatório de Moscovo .

Suas turnês solo internacional o levou a Paris e Londres , em 1955, e depois a América do Sul e os EUA nos anos seguintes. Kogan tinha um repertório de mais de 18 concertos e uma série de concertos de compositores modernos foram dedicadas a ele.

Em 1952, Kogan começou a ensinar no Conservatório de Moscou, e em 1980 ele foi convidado para lecionar na Accademia Musicale Chigiana em Siena , Itália .

Kogan, um violinista brilhante e convincente, evitava publicidade. Faltava-lhe também alguns dos estágios e carisma calor de David Oistrakh , seu irmão mais velho de 16 anos. Sua carreira sempre foi ofuscada pela de Oistrakh, que foi fortemente promovido pelas autoridades soviéticas. Kogan foi feito um Artista Homenageado em 1955 e um de Artista do Povo da URSS em 1964. Ele recebeu o Prêmio Lenin em 1965.

Kogan casados ​​Elizabeth Gilels (irmã do pianista Emil Gilels ), também um violinista de concerto. Seu filho, Pavel Kogan (b. 1952) tornou-se um famoso violinista e maestro . Sua filha, Nina Kogan (b. 1954), é um pianista de concerto e se tornou o parceiro e sonata acompanhante de seu pai em uma idade adiantada.

Kogan morreu de um ataque cardíaco na cidade de Mytishchi , enquanto viajava de trem entre Moscou e Yaroslavl a um show que iria realizar com o filho. Dois dias antes, ele havia tocado o Concerto de Beethoven em Viena.

Kogan foi o violinista clássica apenas da nota, que preferiu jogar em todas as cordas de aço (marca Thomastik). O mais grave jogadores clássicos preferem um aço E-corda, e talvez também de aço A-corda (como no caso de David Oistrakh), enquanto usando intestino ou sintéticos nas cordas G e D. Aço deu Kogan mais clareza e poder, enquanto sacrificar a profundidade, calor e doçura associados intestino ou sintéticos.

–Instrumentos

Kogan utilizados dois Guarneri del Gesù violinos: o ex-Colin 1726 e 1733 o ex-Burmester. Ele usou arcos francês por Dominique Peccatte . Kogan nunca possuiu realmente estes instrumentos, que foram fornecidos a título de empréstimo do governo soviético. Hoje elas valem mais de US $ 4 milhões de dólares.

“Pinchas Zukerman” “Frank Peter Zimmermann” “Leonidas Kavakos” “Alexander Markov” violino “Erick Friedman” “Vadim Repin” “Henryk Szeryng” “Joshua Bell” “Isaac Stern” “David Oistrakh” “Prihod Vasa” “Zino Francescatti” “Juila Fischer” “Nathan Milstein” “jascha heifetz” “Maxim vengerov” “ruggiero ricci” “hilary hahn” “itzhak perlman”

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  • Music

historic musical bits: Arturo Toscanini “Scherzo: La Reine Mab” Berlioz

Arturo Toscanini “Scherzo: La Reine Mab” Berlioz

Addiobelpassato

Published on Jun 3, 2012

Scherzo: La Reine Mab from
Romèo et Juliette, op 17 by Hector Berlioz
NBC Symphony Orchestra
Arturo Toscanini, conductor
05.II.1938

Historic Musical Bits: Dinu Lipatti – Chopin Grande Valse Brillante Op. 34 n. 2 in A minor (n. 3D)

Dinu Lipatti – Chopin Grande Valse Brillante Op. 34 n. 2 in A minor (n. 3)

GiovanniEMB

Uploaded on Jul 22, 2009

Dinu Lipatti, piano.
Frédéric Chopin: Grande Valse Brillante Op. 34 n. 2 in A minor n. 3
Genava, studio recording of 1950
(not from Besançon).

Historic Musical Bits ,Rubinstein Mozart Concerto 17, 20, 21, 23 & 24, great compositions/performances

Rubinstein Mozart Concerto 17, 20, 21, 23 & 24.wmv

mightysmeagol

Published on May 9, 2012

17 II — 0:12:23 , III — 0:24:06 , 20 I — 0:32:06 , II – 0:45:57 , III — 0:55:03 , 21 I — 1:02:57 , II — 1:17:40 , III – 1:24:17 , 23 I – 1:31:06 , II – 1:42:34 , 23 III — 1:49:56 , 24 I — 1:58:00 , II — 2:12:45 , III — 2:21:09

• Music

  • “Concerto No. 17 for Piano and Orchestra, K.453 in G: Allegretto” by Arthur Rubinstein;Alfred Wallenstein (Google Play • iTunes • eMusic • AmazonMP3)

Historic musical bits, Mozart Violin Concerto N°4 in D major, K218. David Oistrakh, violin, great compositons/performances

Mozart Violin Concerto N°4 in D major, K 218. David Oistrakh, violin )

Alex cello

Mozart Violin Concerto N°4 in D major.
David Oistrakh, violin,  RAI Symphony Orchestra

Historic Musical bits, 12 Variations in G Major on “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus for Cello and Piano, WoO 45, Serkin/Casals, great compositions/performances

12 Variations in G Major on “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus for Cello and Piano, WoO 45

Various Artists – Topic

Published on September 25, 2014

12 Variations in G Major on “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus for Cello and Piano, WoO 45

Rudolf Serkin / 魯道夫塞爾金
Pablo Casals / 卡薩爾斯

℗ Originally released 1953 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Released on: 1993-11-08

Associated Performer, Piano: Rudolf Serkin / 魯道夫塞爾金
Associated Performer, Cello: Pablo Casals / 卡薩爾斯
Producer: Producer not documented on available sources
Composer: Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) / Ludwig Van Beethoven

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• Music

  • “12 Variations in G Major on “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus for Cello and Piano, WoO 45″ by Rudolf Serkin;Pablo Casals (AmazonMP3)