LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Mendelssohn: Felix Mendelssohn
built 805 days ago
The long-awaited, definitive biography of the composer MendelssohnAn extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as ""The Wedding March"" and ""Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.""Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant, based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, saccharine works (termed by one critic ""moonlight with sugar water""), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works. Here are engaging analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the zestful Octet, puckish Midsummer Night's Dream , haunting Hebrides Overtures, and elegiac Violin Concerto in E minor. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in subtle, coloristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. He ... explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness of his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and prolific composer, his avocation as a painter and draughtsman, and his remarkable, polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time.Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis.
Source:
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was one of the greatest of all the early Romantics. Already composing in early childhood, he created two of his greatest masterpieces at the age of sixteen: the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and the Octet for strings. A descendant of the great Jewish Enlightenment philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, Felix, along with his sister Fanny, grew up in a wealthy and cultured household, where his musical and other artistic gifts were nurtured. Mendelssohn was ... an avid promoter of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and conducted, in 1829, the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s time. In honour of Felix Mendelssohn’s great contribution to Western music, in collaboration with the Atlantis Ensemble, Musica Omnia has initiated a project to record all of Mendelssohn’s chamber music with fortepiano. This series will be completed by 2009 in honour of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of this towering genius of the nineteenth century.
Source:
In his formative years, Mendelssohn's wealthy great-aunt Sarah Itzig Levy had exposed Felix to much of Bach's music. Sarah Itzig Levy had been a harpsichord pupil of W.F. Bach, and at her salon she performed J.S. Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and others. She commissioned works from C.P.E. Bach and performed them as well.
Source:
Shortly after his twentieth birthday, Felix Mendelssohn accepted an invitation from diplomat Klingemann to travel to London. Introduction into the salons and social life there paved the way for Mendelssohn to appear in four large scale concerts, including his first Symphony, Op. 11. After the concert season, he traveled to Edinburgh where his impressions formed the basis of the Scottish Symphony. On the way to the Scottish highlands, Mendelssohn visited Sir Walter Scott in Abbottsford and made a stormy crossing to the island of Staffa. There, 'Fingal's Cave' was the inspiration for his overture Die Hebriden (originally called Die einsame Insel, The Lonely Island). In 1830, Mendelssohn, then just 21, was offered the chair of music at the University of Berlin, but declined, recommending a friend instead.
Source:
Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany, Felix Mendelssohn began, like Mozart, as a child prodigy. His father, Abraham, was a successful banker; his influential mother, Leah Solomon, was an amateur musician. Young Felix studied both the violin and piano and gave his first public recital at age nine. Encouraged by his family and teachers, the precocious Felix began writing music when he was 10 years old. At the age of 17, he astonished the world with a true masterpiece, his Overture to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. By this time he had already written his twelve symphonies for string orchestra.
Source:
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born into a remarkably gifted and intellectual German family. But did you know that his family was Jewish, although they adopted Christian doctrine and the children were baptized in a Lutheran church? Did you know that his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was one of the foremost scholars of his day? These are the lesser-known facts about the well known musician.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Felix Mendelssohn