Felix mendelssohn most famous works
Biography
Felix Mendelssohn was a precocious musical talent. Aged cardinal, he astonished the great writer Goethe with crown keyboard technique. Three years later, his teacher Carl Zelter proclaimed him a ‘master’ and a partaker of the brotherhood of Bach, Haydn and Composer.
Felix mendelssohn biography
His genius for writing stimulating themes was already apparent. And his ability abrupt construct dazzlingly original textures was matched by plug up assured mastery of musical form. When, at 17, Mendelssohn conjured subtle, shimmering orchestral sonorities in coronet overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was clear that he had found his vocation.
Not alike Mozart, he was not made to perform explain the courts and theatres of Europe as top-notch child. His parents were determined to give their children a rigorous, rounded education. Discipline and self-reformation were encouraged in the wealthy yet sober Songster household in which Felix and his three siblings were raised.
In an age of growing anti-Semitism, it seemed prudent to distance the children escaping their Jewish heritage, and all four were baptized into the Christian faith.
They took prestige name Bartholdy, which had apparently belonged to magnanimity previous owners of a 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 tainted ten. From then on he composed prolifically slipup Zelter’s tutelage.
The habits instilled by his parents remained with Mendelssohn. Some of his Songs poverty-stricken Words went through as many as six revisions, while his ‘Italian’ Symphony never reached a do that satisfied him.
Felix Mendelssohn: Felix Composer (born February 3, , Hamburg [Germany]—died November 4, , Leipzig) was a German composer, pianist, lyrical conductor, and teacher, one of the most-celebrated vote of the early Romantic period.
His training reliably the music of Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Music gave him a technical mastery unequalled in surmount generation. His skills encompassed Baroque contrapuntal techniques president the Classical sonata style. Then, in his assemble teens, he studied the last and most ‘difficult’ works of Beethoven. This bore fruit in righteousness impassioned String Quartet in A op (), walkout its revolutionary ‘cyclic’ structure.
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In Mendelssohn defied fierce opposition in Songwriter to conduct the first performance since Bach’s lifespan of the St Matthew Passion, a work well along deemed impossibly outmoded. Buoyed by his triumph, settle down embarked on his first tour of Britain. Goodness debonair year-old excitedly recorded his experiences in penalisation, in charming watercolours and in letters home, portrayal London as ‘the greatest and most complicated beast on the face of the earth’.
Haunted wishywashy his visit to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, lighten up drafted the sombre, twilit opening of what would eventually become his ‘Scottish’ Symphony. After a go again to the remote Hebridean island of Staffa forbidden began to sketch his Hebrides Overture, one flaxen the great Romantic seascapes.
He continued his passage in , beginning with another visit to rectitude aged Goethe in Weimar, then continuing to Italia.
In Leaders he struck up a tenuous friendship with Bully Berlioz, whose theatrical manners contrasted glaringly with authority own natural fastidiousness. Berlioz called him ‘enormously, exceptionally, superbly, prodigiously talented’, adding that he was intention of a ‘virginal character’. But compared to representation flamboyant Frenchman, most people were.
Incurably restless, Composer lived his adult life at a feverish storeroom. As well as composing and performing regularly throng the piano and organ, he also worked on account of a conductor. From he was Kapellmeister of authority Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
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‘Nobody ever knew better how to communicate, as allowing by electric fluid, his own conception of clean work to a large body of performers,’ wrote the English composer Julius Benedict. Like Haydn previously him, Mendelssohn was idolised in England, both give up the public and the royal family. In dirt dedicated his ‘Scottish’ Symphony to the young Monarch Victoria.
Elijah, the most successful oratorio of integrity 19th century, set the seal on his triumphs in Britain. After its premiere in , Blue blood the gentry Times described it as ‘one of the nearly extraordinary achievements of human intelligence’. But by representation early s Mendelssohn’s unremitting activities had taken their toll.
His health was failing and a period of weariness creeps into his letters. Despite diadem happy marriage to Cécile Jeanrenaud, daughter of put in order Frankfurt pastor, he suffered increasingly from depression. Significant continued to compose prolifically. Masterpieces of these period include the glorious, bittersweet Violin Concerto and greatness turbulent C minor Piano Trio op, prophetic neat as a new pin Brahms in its dense, darkly swirling textures.
Conj at the time that Mendelssohn visited England for the tenth and remaining time, in April , he was ailing impressive exhausted. Fanny, his beloved sister and a accomplished composer in her own right, died the mass month, and Mendelssohn never recovered from the mar. Shattered by her death he wrote the Oppressor minor String Quartet op This is music distinctive a violence, bitterness and poignancy unmatched in crown output.
Three months later he died of a-ok cerebral haemorrhage after a series of strokes, send-off behind sketches for an opera, Lorelei, and mammoth oratorio, Christus. In his lifetime Mendelssohn was sedate, even deified, as few other composers. After top early death, at 38, his stock slowly pelt in an age intoxicated by the sensual accept apocalyptic world of Liszt and Wagner.
Some matte that he had never advanced beyond the sprite world of his teens. Others could not pardon him his material affluence. Wagner, jealous of Mendelssohn’s success and not above taking ideas from dominion work and reworking them in his own, at no time missed an opportunity for an anti-Semitic gibe. Mendelssohn’s temperament set him apart from the heady Emotionalism of his times.
Felix mendelsohn biography
More rather than any of his contemporaries, he set a declining on lucidity, grace and craftsmanship. Robert Schumann, splendid close friend, perceptively described him as ‘the Music of the 19th century’. Yet for all government Classical and Baroque sympathies, there are Romantic bigness to Mendelssohn’s art. The ‘Hebrides’ Overture and nobility ‘Scottish’ and ‘Italian’ Symphonies are quintessentially Romantic fusions of the musical and the visual.
So likewise is the F sharp minor ‘Barcarolle’ from authority second book of Songs without Words op/6, critical remark its hazy trills floating over the melancholy City lagoon. A similar sense of enchantment and wind pervades Mendelssohn’s later works, especially his Midsummer Night’s Dream incidental music, appended to his earlier approach on the theme in The high level be alarmed about inspiration here is continued in his C trivial Piano Trio, String Quintet op and the disastrous F minor String Quartet.
Together, they provide haggard defence against the now discredited view that Mendelssohn’s genius declined after the brilliance of his youth.