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.
It was Goethe, linchpin of the German Romantic literary
movement who once declared that "music begins where
words end," and it was Mendelssohn who was to famously
prove the point in his Lieder ohne Worte or Songs
without Words. These works, encompassing some eight
complete volumes in all (the first came out in print
during 1830; five more followed in the years prior to
1845, while the last two were issued after the
composer's death) each containing six pieces, were a
seminal Germanic response to the world of Romantic
miniaturism, and principally, the growing interest
amongst composers to distil the rapture of the moment
through the medium of the keyboard gem.
Karl Schumann, the famous German musicologist and
Lieder scholar, once famously characterized
Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte as not simply "Pillars
of the piano repertoire," but rather as "a household
possession, as widespread in Germany as the Grimm
brothers' fairy tales, Ludwig Richter's pictures, or
Uhland's poetry ... and no less beloved in Victorian
England." During the composer's nineteenth year,
Mendelssohn's sister Fanny noted in her diary that "my
birthday was celebrated very nicely ... Felix has given
me a 'Song without Words' for my album. He has lately
written several very beautiful ones." Later, towards
the tragically premature end of his life aged just
thirty-eight (by which time the Lieder ohne Worte had
already become very popular), Mendelssohn volunteered
precious little substantive fact about their origins,
writing that "even if, in one or other of them, I had a
particular word or words in mind, I would not tell
anyone, because the same word means different things to
different people. Only the songs say the same thing,
arouse the same feeling, in everyone--a feeling that
cannot be expressed in words."
While it has become fashionable in critical circles to
denigrate Mendelssohn's fragile sensibilities as little
more than the manifestation of a kind of upper-class
dilettantism, we should not forget that in his own way,
he was far ahead of the field when it came to
recognizing the future direction that music, especially
the keyboard miniature, would take. In this regard,
Mendelssohn anticipated the new expressive directions
to be pursued by Schumann (whose wife Clara did much to
popularize the Songs in the concert hall) and Liszt.
And beyond these alone, the critic Joan Chissell also
points that composers such as Grieg, Brahms, Fauré,
and even Bizet also held them in high regard.
Of the six Lieder ohne Worte of the sixth volume, Op.
67, 2, two have titles. Op. 67 No. 4 in C major is the
celebrated "Spinnerlied" (Spinning Song) while the last
of the set, Op. 67 No. 6 in E major is entitled
"Wiegenlied" (or "Berceuse"). The set begins with a
straightforward Andante in E flat, and is followed by a
terse F sharp minor Allegro leggiero. No. 3 of the set
is a tranquil Andante in B flat, while the penultimate
"Lied" of the Op. 67 group is a simple B minor movement
headed Moderato.
And finally, while these beguiling, some would say
simplistic pieces have been slighted as representative
of the worst kind of Romantic kitsch, Chissell rightly
reminds us that "without all these pieces, how much
poorer our understanding would have been of the
impressionable heart behind the master-craftsman's
façade."
Although originally composed for Piano, I created this
Interpretation of the Andante Tranquillo from "Lieder
ohne Worte" (Op. 67 No. 3) for Oboe & Piano.
PARTITION