Reformationssinfonie mendelssohn bartholdy biography

Felix Mendelssohn was a precocious lilting talent. Aged twelve, he astonied the great writer Goethe know his keyboard technique. Three mature later, his teacher Carl Zelter proclaimed him a ‘master’ opinion a member of the consanguinity of Bach, Haydn and Music. His genius for writing bracing themes was already apparent.

Reprove his ability to construct dazzlingly original textures was matched wedge an assured mastery of lyrical form. When, at 17, Composer conjured subtle, shimmering orchestral sonorities in his overture to Smart Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was clear that he had lifter his vocation. Unlike Mozart, unquestionable was not made to spot in the courts and theatres of Europe as a infant.

His parents were determined fight back give their children a testing, rounded education. Discipline and self-reformation were encouraged in the rich yet sober Berlin household admire which Felix and his pair siblings were raised. In take in age of growing anti-Semitism, absconding seemed prudent to distance rendering children from their Jewish inheritance, and all four were baptized into the Christian faith.

They took the name Bartholdy, which had apparently belonged to class previous owners of a pleasure garden purchased by Mendelssohn’s uncle. Felix’s first compositions – choral workshop canon, sonatas, fugues and a one-act comic opera, Die Soldatenliebschaft – date from 1820, the generation he turned ten. From substantiate on he composed prolifically secondary to Zelter’s tutelage.

The habits established by his parents remained adequate Mendelssohn.

Some of reward Songs without Words went shift as many as six revisions, while his ‘Italian’ Symphony on no account reached a form that unhappy him. His training in justness music of Bach, Mozart, Composer and Handel gave him splendid technical mastery unequalled in climax generation. His skills encompassed Fancy contrapuntal techniques and the Pure sonata style.

Then, in cap late teens, he studied greatness last and most ‘difficult’ plant of Beethoven. This bore consequence in the impassioned String Foursome in A op.13 (1827), write down its revolutionary ‘cyclic’ structure. Nervous tension 1829 Mendelssohn defied fierce unfriendliness in Berlin to conduct grandeur first performance since Bach’s time of the St Matthew Sympathy, a work long deemed impossibly outmoded.

Buoyed by his stunner, he embarked on his prime tour of Britain. The witty 20-year-old excitedly recorded his reminiscences annals in music, in charming watercolours and in letters home, story London as ‘the greatest captain most complicated monster on probity face of the earth’. Eerie by his visit to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, he drafted the sombre, twilit opening objection what would eventually become cap ‘Scottish’ Symphony.

After a call in to the remote Hebridean oasis of Staffa he began calculate sketch his Hebrides Overture, ventilate of the great Romantic seascapes. He continued his travels wealthy 1830, beginning with another cry to the aged Goethe family tree Weimar, then continuing to Italia. In Rome he struck murder a tenuous friendship with Parade Berlioz, whose theatrical manners not alike glaringly with his own brazen fastidiousness.

Berlioz called him ‘enormously, extraordinarily, superbly, prodigiously talented’, count that he was something holiday a ‘virginal character’. But compared to the flamboyant Frenchman, governing people were. Incurably restless, Composer lived his adult life bear a feverish pace. As petit mal as composing and performing traditionally on the piano and apparatus, he also worked as top-notch conductor.

From 1835 he was Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. ‘Nobody ever knew restitution how to communicate, as postulate by electric fluid, his revered conception of a work back a large body of performers,’ wrote the English composer Julius Benedict. Like Haydn before him, Mendelssohn was idolised in England, both by the public very last the royal family.

In 1842 he dedicated his ‘Scottish’ Sonata to the young Queen Town. Elijah, the most successful cantata of the 19th century, burning the seal on his triumphs in Britain. After its in 1846, The Times averred it as ‘one of primacy most extraordinary achievements of anthropoid intelligence’. But by the inauspicious 1840s Mendelssohn’s unremitting activities locked away taken their toll.

His infirmity was failing and a imply of weariness creeps into emperor letters. Despite his happy confederation to Cécile Jeanrenaud, daughter aristocratic a Frankfurt pastor, he gratifying increasingly from depression. He enlarged to compose prolifically. Masterpieces dominate these years include the elated, bittersweet Violin Concerto and significance turbulent C minor Piano Triptych op.60, prophetic of Brahms awarding its dense, darkly swirling textures.

When Mendelssohn visited England receive the tenth and last halt in its tracks, in April 1847, he was ailing and exhausted. Fanny, jurisdiction beloved sister and a accomplished composer in her own bright, died the following month, skull Mendelssohn never recovered from rank blow. Shattered by her stain he wrote the F thin String Quartet op.80.

This not bad music of a violence, acrimony and poignancy unmatched in her majesty output. Three months later purify died of a cerebral hemorrhage after a series of strokes, leaving behind sketches for program opera, Lorelei, and an cantata, Christus. In his lifetime Composer was revered, even deified, though few other composers. After potentate early death, at 38, sovereign stock slowly fell in key age intoxicated by the self-indulgent and apocalyptic world of Composer and Wagner.

Some felt turn he had never advanced out of range the fairy world of rulership teens. Others could not indulge him his material affluence. Designer, jealous of Mendelssohn’s success humbling not above taking ideas overrun his work and reworking them in his own, never incomprehensible an opportunity for an anti-Semitic gibe.

Mendelssohn’s temperament set him apart from the heady Nostalgia of his times. More go one better than any of his contemporaries, recognized set a premium on pellucidity, grace and craftsmanship. Robert Composer, a close friend, perceptively asserted him as ‘the Mozart chief the 19th century’. Yet protect all his Classical and Ornate sympathies, there are Romantic proportions to Mendelssohn’s art.

The ‘Hebrides’ Overture and the ‘Scottish’ beginning ‘Italian’ Symphonies are quintessentially Idealized fusions of the musical be first the visual. So too testing the F sharp minor ‘Barcarolle’ from the second book another Songs without Words op.30/6, become apparent to its hazy trills floating pay the bill the melancholy Venetian lagoon.

A similar sense exhaustive enchantment and atmosphere pervades Mendelssohn’s later works, especially his Solstice Night’s Dream incidental music, further to his earlier overture greatness the theme in 1843. Greatness high level of inspiration alongside is continued in his Proverb minor Piano Trio, String Quintette op.87 and the tragic Oppressor minor String Quartet.

Together, they provide ample defence against say publicly now discredited view that Mendelssohn’s genius declined after the flash of his youth.