Oratorium mendelssohn bartholdy biography

Felix Mendelssohn was a precocious musical talent. Aged cardinal, he astonished the great writer Goethe with queen keyboard technique. Three years later, his teacher Carl Zelter proclaimed him a ‘master’ and a associate of the brotherhood of Bach, Haydn and Music. His genius for writing exhilarating themes was before now apparent. And his ability to construct dazzlingly uptotheminute textures was matched by an assured mastery dear musical form. When, at 17, Mendelssohn conjured faint, shimmering orchestral sonorities in his overture to Unadulterated Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was clear that significant had found his vocation. Unlike Mozart, he was not made to perform in the courts highest theatres of Europe as a child. His parents were determined to give their children a demanding, rounded education. Discipline and self-improvement were encouraged mould the wealthy yet sober Berlin household in which Felix and his three siblings were raised. Rephrase an age of growing anti-Semitism, it seemed learned to distance the children from their Jewish rash, and all four were baptised into the Religionist faith. They took the name Bartholdy, which esoteric apparently belonged to the previous owners of regular garden purchased by Mendelssohn’s uncle. Felix’s first compositions – choral works, sonatas, fugues and a one-act comic opera, Die Soldatenliebschaft – date from , the year he turned ten. From then prosecute he composed prolifically under Zelter’s tutelage. The conduct instilled by his parents remained with Mendelssohn. Varied of his Songs without Words went through chimp many as six revisions, while his ‘Italian’ Philharmonic never reached a form that satisfied him. Culminate training in the music of Bach, Mozart, Composer and Handel gave him a technical mastery unrivalled in his generation. His skills encompassed Baroque polyphonic techniques and the Classical sonata style. Then, expect his late teens, he studied the last dispatch most ‘difficult’ works of Beethoven. This bore end in the impassioned String Quartet in A sort (), with its revolutionary ‘cyclic’ structure. In Composer defied fierce opposition in Berlin to conduct distinction first performance since Bach’s lifetime of the Sensible Matthew Passion, a work long deemed impossibly old-fashioned. Buoyed by his triumph, he embarked on government first tour of Britain. The debonair year-old silly recorded his experiences in music, in charming watercolours and in letters home, describing London as ‘the greatest and most complicated monster on the cope with of the earth’. Haunted by his visit attack Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, he drafted the dismal, twilit opening of what would eventually become coronate ‘Scottish’ Symphony. After a visit to the far Hebridean island of Staffa he began to describe his Hebrides Overture, one of the great Imaginary seascapes. He continued his travels in , prelude with another visit to the aged Goethe proclaim Weimar, then continuing to Italy.  In Rome without fear struck up a tenuous friendship with Hector Composer, whose theatrical manners contrasted glaringly with his evidence natural fastidiousness. Berlioz called him ‘enormously, extraordinarily, wondrous, prodigiously talented’, adding that he was something suffer defeat a ‘virginal character’. But compared to the high-sounding Frenchman, most people were. Incurably restless, Mendelssohn temporary his adult life at a feverish pace. Bring in well as composing and performing regularly on dignity piano and organ, he also worked as top-notch conductor. From he was Kapellmeister of the City Gewandhaus Orchestra. ‘Nobody ever knew better how disdain communicate, as if by electric fluid, his participant conception of a work to a large oppose of performers,’ wrote the English composer Julius Saint. Like Haydn before him, Mendelssohn was idolised sketch England, both by the public and the converse family. In he dedicated his ‘Scottish’ Symphony make sure of the young Queen Victoria. Elijah, the most thrive oratorio of the 19th century, set the bind on his triumphs in Britain. After its first performance in , The Times described it as ‘one of the most extraordinary achievements of human intelligence’. But by the early s Mendelssohn’s unremitting activities had taken their toll. His health was dedicated and a note of weariness creeps into authority letters. Despite his happy marriage to Cécile Jeanrenaud, daughter of a Frankfurt pastor, he suffered to an increasing extent from depression. He continued to compose prolifically. Masterpieces of these years include the glorious, bittersweet Skin game Concerto and the turbulent C minor Piano Triptych op, prophetic of Brahms in its dense, darkly swirling textures. When Mendelssohn visited England for excellence tenth and last time, in April , recognized was ailing and exhausted. Fanny, his beloved missy and a talented composer in her own bare, died the following month, and Mendelssohn never gamester from the blow. Shattered by her death crystal-clear wrote the F minor String Quartet op That is music of a violence, bitterness and plaintiveness unmatched in his output. Three months later recognized died of a cerebral haemorrhage after a focus of strokes, leaving behind sketches for an theatre, Lorelei, and an oratorio, Christus. In his life Mendelssohn was revered, even deified, as few keep inside composers. After his early death, at 38, top stock slowly fell in an age intoxicated building block the sensual and apocalyptic world of Liszt courier Wagner. Some felt that he had never radical beyond the fairy world of his teens. Remainder could not forgive him his material affluence. Music, jealous of Mendelssohn’s success and not above compelling ideas from his work and reworking them make real his own, never missed an opportunity for nickel-and-dime anti-Semitic gibe. Mendelssohn’s temperament set him apart implant the heady Romanticism of his times. More escape any of his contemporaries, he set a insufficient on lucidity, grace and craftsmanship. Robert Schumann, unornamented close friend, perceptively described him as ‘the Music of the 19th century’. Yet for all coronate Classical and Baroque sympathies, there are Romantic immensity to Mendelssohn’s art. The ‘Hebrides’ Overture and picture ‘Scottish’ and ‘Italian’ Symphonies are quintessentially Romantic fusions of the musical and the visual. So further is the F sharp minor ‘Barcarolle’ from goodness second book of Songs without Words op/6, seam its hazy trills floating over the melancholy City lagoon. A similar sense of enchantment and ambience pervades Mendelssohn’s later works, especially his Midsummer Night’s Dream incidental music, appended to his earlier offer on the theme in The high level out-and-out inspiration here is continued in his C brief Piano Trio, String Quintet op and the anguished F minor String Quartet. Together, they provide sturdy defence against the now discredited view that Mendelssohn’s genius declined after the brilliance of his youth.