LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Mendelssohn: Mendelssohn Family
built 790 days ago
Mendelssohn was one of the most precocious prodigies in all of classical music. As a child he began performing his compositions in his family's legendary Sunday morning salon concerts. This is the young man who wrote the most compelling and effervescent string octet in the repertoire at the age of sixteen. When it came to chamber music, Mendelssohn was a natural.
Source:
Came from a famous, wealthy and cultured Jewish family, Mendelssohn was a well-mannered boy. Yet his family loved music so much and he was no doubt musically talented. As a child, he knew all nine Beethoven symphonies by heart and even played them on the piano. His memory was therefore exceptional. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn could hear a piece of music once and never forget it.
Source:
(Hamburg, 1809-47, Leipzig), a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, grew up in an affluent culture-loving Jewish family which on its conversion to the Lutheran faith added Bartholdy to the family name. He was a child prodigy as a pianist and became a pupil of Goethe's friend Zelter; by the time of his death, aged 38, he was recognized as one of Germany's foremost composers. He matured early, writing his octet at 16 and the Midsummer Night's Dream overture at 17. Later instrumental works include 5 symphonies, 3 concertos, organ sonatas, piano pieces (Lieder ohne Worte), chamber and church music, and incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Racine's Athalie and the Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles to commissions from Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. His first oratorio, St. Paul (1836), proved successful in England, and Elijah (1846) received its premiere at the Birmingham Festival with the composer conducting. He paid ten visits to Britain: the ‘Hebrides’ overture Fingal's Cave was inspired by his Scottish tour during the first in 1829.
Source:
Born into a wealthy, intellectual, artistic family, Mendelssohn began studying piano with his mother at an early age. He made his public debut as a pianist at age nine and composed his first piece at age eleven. Thereafter, he produced numerous sonatas, concertos, symphonies for strings, piano quartets, and Singspiels. At age sixteen he composed the Octet for Strings, and at seventeen he wrote the overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Source:
Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau, a city in the state of Anhalt-Dessau in Germany, on September 6, 1729. As a child, he suffered from a disease that left him with a curvature of the spine. He was the son of a Torah scribe and his family was poor but learned. He began a traditional Jewish education under David Fraenkel, the rabbi of Dessau. When Fraenkel became rabbi of Berlin, the 14-year-old Mendelssohn followed him and studied in Fraenkel’s yeshiva in Berlin. He soon became a promising scholar of Talmud and Rabbinics.
Source:
In his two great oratorios, Mendelssohn was inspired by the works of Handel which he heard during his trips to England and which he had studied intensively and conducted in Dusseldorf. He composed Saint Paul between early 1834 and the spring of 1836. Mendelssohn viewed the story of Saint Paul's conversion as an allegory of his family's history and conversion to Lutheranism, and he matched the dramatic tension in the story with the inclusion of large-scale choruses, symbolic both of the blind rage of followers of the old idolatries and ... to the victorious followers of the new faith. In the structure of the work, Mendelssohn greatly emulated Handelian models. The overture is based of the chorale melody Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, and the same theme later becomes a powerful choral movement that dominates the central part of the oratorio. In appropriate places, Mendelssohn inserted simple chorale settings in the same manner of the Bach Cantatas and Passions.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Mendelssohn Family