Mendelssohn

Without really planning to I have heard quite a lot of Mendelssohn in the last couple of weeks.    I caught a performance of the overture Der Schonen Melusine on the radio on the way to work - I don't recall ever hearing it before and I was particularly taken by the delicacy of the opening.  And yesterday I listened to the whole of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Elijah is my mother's favourite choral work and I grew up with the Malcolm Sargent recording as an ever present background.  Yet somehow Mendelssohn is always an overlooked figure when it comes to evaluating the great masters.   He is in many ways the least "flashy" of the great 19th century composers and doesn't have that sense of excitement and daring of many of his contemporaries.  And somehow the comfortable circumstances of his personal life and his association with Queen Victoria don't fit with what we expect of a romantic composer.

Yet he produced at least half a dozen masterpieces which are worthy of comparison with anything else in the repertory.   A good case can be made for saying that the violin concerto is the greatest of all concertos for the instrument and the Octet is one of the masterpieces of the repertoire.   Add to these the Italian symphony, Fingals Cave and the music to A Midsummer Night's Dream (not just the overture) and Mendelssohn's place in the pantheon of the musical gods is secure.

The one piece I have problems with is the Scottish Symphony.  I've played it several time but have never really got to understand it - it always seems a bit heavy and turgid in comparison with the Italian.  And I am afraid that I regard the end - where a wholly new theme is introduced - as one of the two great miscalculation in the symphonic repertory (I"ll leave you guessing what the other one might be until a later post!).  I have a recording of the symphony by Klemperer and he obviously had the same thought because he scrapped Mendelssohn's ending in favour of a new ending of his own composition!  Outrageous of course and the musicologist in me could't possibly approve! - but I think that it works very well.


I remember at University discussing with my tutor which composers were the best orchestrators.  I remember coming up with the obvious names - Berlioz, Wagner, Strauss - and was very surprised when he suggested that I should add Mendelssohn to the list.  But of course he was right.   Being  a great orchestrator is not the same as being the most outrageous or eccentric in the use of the orchestra.  Mendelssohn gives another perspective - the command of the orchestra is so complete that the orchestration does not draw attention to itself - is simply fits the music like a glove.

There is still a  lot of Mendelssohn for me to get my teeth into - I'm gradually discovering the string quartets but I hardly know the other chamber music , the songs or the choral works beyond Elijah.