Mendelssohn: Songs Without Words, Vol. 2

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Cat No: 8550453

Release Date: 12 January 2000

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 4891030504530

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: MENDELSSOHN

Description
FelixMendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809 -1847) Songs without WordsTo contemporaries of Mendelssohn the notion of songs without wordsseemed paradoxical. If there were no words, in fact, there could be no song.Yet what Mendelssohn achieved was exactly what his title suggested, music inits purest and simplest form, expressing its own musical meaning, imbued withfeeling, but without verbal connotation. At the same time short piano pieces ofthis kind would always find a ready amateur market and would be welcomed bypublishers, although this may have been irrelevant to the composer's purpose.Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the great Jewishthinker of the Enlightenment, was born in Hamburg in 1809, the son of aprosperous banker. His family was influential in cultural circles, and he andhis sister were educated in an environment that encouraged both musical andgeneral cultural interests. At the same time the extensive acquaintance of theMendelssohns among artists and men of letters brought an unusual breadth ofmind, a stimulus to natural curiosity.Much of Mendelssohn's childhood was passed in Berlin, where his parentsmoved when he was three, to escape Napoleonic invasion. There he took lessonsfrom Goethe's much admired Zelter, who introduced him to the old poet inWeimar. The choice of a career in music was eventually decided on the advice ofCherubini, consulted by Abraham Mendelssohn in Paris, where he was director ofthe Conservatoire. There followed a period of further education, a Grand Tourof Europe that took him south to ltaly and north to Scotland. His professionalcareer began in earnest with his appointment as general director of music inD??sseldorf in 1833.Mendelssohn's subsequent career was intense and brief. He settled inLeipzig as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts, and was instrumental inestablishing the Conservatory there. Briefly lured to Berlin by the King ofPrussia and by the importunity of his family, he spent an unsatisfactory yearor so as director of the music section of the Academy of Arts, providing musicfor a revival of classical drama under royal encouragement. This appointment hewas glad to relinquish in 1844, later returning to his old position in Leipzig,where he died in 1847.As a composer Mendelssohn possessed a perfect technical command of theresources available to him and was always able to write music that isfelicitous, apt and often remarkably economical in the way it achieves itseffects. Mendelssohn had, like the rest of his family, accepted Christianbaptism, a ceremony Heine once described as a ticket of admission into Europeanculture. Nevertheless he encountered anti-Semitic prejudice, as others were to,and false ideas put about in his own life-time have left some trace in modernrepetitions of accusations of superficiality for which there is no realjustification.The series of Songs without Wordsthat Mendelssohn wrote and published from 1830 onwards serve as a very personalmusical diary in which the composer exp
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