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Felix Mendelssohn: Music
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Born in Hamburg, Germany 3 February 1809, Felix Mendelssohn was part of a privileged family. With an art-loving father, a mother who read Plato, a grandfather known as a philosopher and a sister who composed music, the household was a meeting place for wit and culture allowing Felix to develop his talent. Encouraged by those around him, his first public performance as a pianist at the age of 9 and first masterpiece, an overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 17, were just the beginning.
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The radiance of Felix Mendelssohn's apparent joy for life was infused into his music. His works are remembered for their masterful and beautiful melodies. He is perhaps most famous for his oratorio "The Elijah" and the "Wedding March" from "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
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Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March was first played at the wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter to the Crown Prince of Prussia on this date in 1858. Since then, the piece has become the traditional music played during the wedding recessional.
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Felix Mendelssohn's score for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the most famous incidental music ever written. Mendelssohn composed the miraculous overture as a 17-year-old, and the incidental music dates from 1843, near the end of his life, which was cut short by a pair of strokes four years later.
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Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg in 1809 and died in Leipzig in 1847 at the age of 38. During his lifetime he became one ofthe most famous and best-loved musicians in the Western world. A child prodigy, between the ages of 11 and 14he produced well over 100 compositions astonishing in variety and quality as well as in quantity. Early creations such as his Octet and Incidental Music for a Midsummer Night’s Dream made him wildly famous as a teenager. His lieder, string quartets, concerti, symphonies, and sacred music were celebrated throughout Europe; his oratorio Elijah, composed a few years before his death, rivaled Handel’s Messiah in popularity.
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Felix Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy Hamburg family, studied the piano with his mother at an early age, and later took formal instruction on the piano from Carl Zelter in Berlin. When still only a child, he began to compose chamber works - his family often held chamber soirées in their home, and young Felix had ample opportunity to hone his craft on these impromptu ensembles. Soon he was composing trios, quartets and operettas, and was making his mark as a pianist; his public debut on the keyboard came at the age of nine. By the time Mendelssohn was seventeen, his fame as a musical prodigy was spreading; that year, his first great composition - the overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - was produced.
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