Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809 –
1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was
a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of
the early romantic period. Mendelssohn wrote
symphonies, concertos, 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 With...(+)
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809 –
1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was
a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of
the early romantic period. Mendelssohn wrote
symphonies, concertos, 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
antisemitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
his creative originality has been re-evaluated. He is
now among the most popular composers of the romantic
era.
Mendelssohn enjoyed early success in Germany, and
revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach,
notably with his performance of the St Matthew Passion
in 1829. He became well received in his travels
throughout Europe as a composer, conductor and soloist;
his ten visits to Britain – during which many of his
major works were premiered – form an important part
of his adult career. His essentially conservative
musical tastes set him apart from more adventurous
musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard
Wagner, Charles-Valentin Alkan and Hector Berlioz. The
Leipzig Conservatoire, which he founded, became a
bastion of this anti-radical outlook.
The organ music of Felix Mendelssohn represents an
approach gesturing not towards the future but towards
the glorious past of German composition and the work of
J.S. Bach in particular. (Liszt once called him “Bach
reborn.”) The stark dissimilarity in compositional
approach between Mendelssohn and Liszt was heralded by
the coolness of their personal relationship, manifested
for instance at a soirée when Mendelssohn drew a
picture of Liszt playing the former’s music with five
hammers, rather than fingers, on each hand. (This
somewhat childish action is perhaps understandable
given Liszt’s description of preceding events: “The
truth of the matter is that I only played his Concerto
in G minor from the manuscript, and as I found several
of the passages rather simple and not broad enough…I
changed them to suit my own ideas.”) Inherently
conservative in character, Mendelssohn formed a
profound aversion to the iconoclastic work of Liszt and
kindred spirits such as Berlioz, of whose work
Mendelssohn remarked: “one ought to wash one’s
hands after handling one of his scores.” Mendelssohn
was undoubtedly a Romantic composer, but his
Romanticism was often of the Biedermeier kind; he was
capable of composing dramatic and inventive works such
as the Hebrides Overture, yet his individual musical
poetry emerged perhaps most strongly in miniatures such
as the Songs without Words for piano and in those works
(e.g. the Quartet in F minor) wherein he recaptured the
youthful genius that had burst forth so forcefully in
the Octet and Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture.
In common with Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn’s posthumous
reputation in the country of his birth suffered from
Wagner’s pen (this time through the faintest of
praise rather than vitriol) and, in due course, the
Nazi regime’s efforts to expunge his name from
musical history. In England, where Mendelssohn had made
a strong impression on musical life over the course of
ten visits, his stock remained considerably higher.
Mendelssohn enjoyed particular success with his organ
recitals in the late 1830s and early 1840s, leading the
publishers Coventry and Hollier to commission a set of
six “voluntaries” from him in 1844. The planned
voluntaries soon became Mendelssohn’s six Organ
Sonatas Op 65, with the term sonata here implying the
Bachian sense of the term—i.e. suites of varied
pieces which are played instrumentally, as opposed to
sung cantatas—rather than works exhibiting classical
sonata form. The Organ Sonata No 6 in D minor (1845)
demonstrates Mendelssohn’s consummate craftsmanship
and mastery of organ texture in a set of variations
upon the Lutheran Bach chorale Vater unser im
Himmelreich (BWV416). Following a five-part
harmonisation of the Chorale, which pervades the sonata
as a whole, Mendelssohn presents four variations of
increasing brilliance before a restatement of the
Chorale. The sonata concludes with a substantial fugue
and the finale in D major, whose quiet religiosity
symbolises the completion of a journey from stern
Lutheranism to an essentially English brand of
sentiment. In this work and its companion sonatas,
Mendelssohn revitalised the then-moribund European
organ tradition, spurred English organ-builders to new
heights, and, through his particular blend of chorale,
counterpoint and domestic spirituality, substantially
augmented the organ repertoire for the first time since
Bach. Musing on his passion for structural innovation,
Liszt once remarked that “new wine demands new
bottles”; Mendelssohn here demonstrates the continued
potency of an older brew.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_Sonatas_(Mendelsso
hn)).
Although originally composed for Solo Organ, I created
this Interpretation of the Sonata in D Minor from Six
Sonatas for Organ (Op 65 No 6) for String Ensemble (2
Violins, 2 Violas, Cello & Bass).
PARTITION