Mendelssohn

Im Zentrum der Studie steht die Verwendung des Chorals protestantischer Provenienz als kompositorisches Idiom in der Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Finalgestaltung. Anhand der "Reformationssymphonie" von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und der Religions- und Kulturpolitik in Preussen in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts werden einige Eigentümlichkeiten in der noch ungeschriebenen Geschichte des symphonischen Chorals beleuchtet. Jene schlichten Melodien, unisono oder im Kantionalsatz, erhalten als musikalisches Erbe der Reformation im 19. Jahrhundert eine fundamentale Bedeutung für die Musik auch außerhalb des Kirchenraums. Vor dem Hintergrund der gleichzeitigen ästhetischen Erhöhung der Instrumentalmusik am Ende des Jahrhunderts markieren die strukturellen Eigenheiten in der Faktur des Chorals als distinktes kompositorisches Idiom somit auch den Übergang vom Liturgischen und Geistlichen hin zum Charakteristischen und Programmatischen.

The study focuses on the use of the chorale of Protestant provenance as a compositional idiom in 19th century symphonic music, with special attention to the design of finale. With reference to the "Reformation Symphony" by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the religious and cultural politics in Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, some peculiarities in the still unwritten history of the symphonic chorale are illuminated. Those simple melodies, in unison or four-part setting, are given fundamental importance for music outside the church as well, as a musical legacy of the Reformation in the 19th century. Against the background of the simultaneous aesthetic elevation of instrumental music at the end of the century, the  peculiarities in the structure of the chorale as a distinct compositional style thus also mark the transition from the liturgical and sacred to the characteristic and programmatic idiom.

Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith, composing about one hundred years apart, integrated visual elements, including drawings and illustrated notations, into musical manuscripts they designed as gifts for women they admired. The two documents, illustrating Mendelssohn’s Schilflied (1842) and Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis (1942), are strong declarations of compositional and artistic ideology. This article examines the scores as reflecting, respectively, aspects of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conceptions of musical composition and form, and their relation to visual media.

NB: Translated by Farshad Moshfeghi for Iran's Music Report Magazine (2012)

Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony is something of a problem-piece – biographically for the composer, historiographically in terms of its later reception, and above all aesthetically for our attempts at situating it within the traditional categories of musical criticism. To compound the issue, Mendelssohn’s actual composition is by no means an inconsiderable achievement; to put it bluntly, a very fine work seems to be hiding here within the melange of confused aesthetic criteria and reception history that surrounds it. Most fundamentally, the problem boils down to the symphony’s relationship with an aesthetic dispute concerning the relative status of absolute and programmatic music. This debate is not merely an ‘extramusical’ discourse but is in fact exemplified by the very musical materials used by Mendelssohn, specifically the use of pre-existent or cyclic themes within this symphony and its expressive succession of movements. The present study builds upon research concerning Mendelssohn’s relation to programmatic aesthetics and one of their most significant proponents, A.B. Marx, to explore this work at a deeper analytical level, suggesting finally the complex equipoise this symphony holds between rival aesthetic camps and the implications for our understanding of the music.

The Quartet in A minor (1827) is one of Mendelssohn's most remarkable works and a historically groundbreaking example of the use of cyclic form. In this work the continual return and transformation of earlier themes creates a complex mode of temporality with far-reaching expressive implications for the articulation of musical time and memory. Drawing on a close analytical reading of the quartet, this article develops a novel hermeneutic interpretation of its cyclic qualities. Mendelssohn's cyclic design, it is argued, introduces a new, fundamentally modern conception of time and narrative journey. Notions of musical memory and multiple time arise from this structure, which crucially require new approaches in order to understand their full potential. In particular, this quartet's manipulation of time has major implications for the phenomenology of musical form and memory. For this, I draw on the theories of Marcel Proust to interpret the cyclic procedures of this quartet, arguing that qualities often associated with later Romantic music are in fact present far earlier in Mendelssohn's music of the 1820s.

The historical past played perhaps a more important role in Mendelssohn’s music than in that of any other composer. This article approaches the work traditionally seen as his first major compositional achievement, the Octet in E flat Major for Strings, op. 20 (1825), from the perspective of the composer’s strong historical sense and takes up ideas of musical memory, history, and circular narrative journey as embodied in the cyclical structure of the piece. The Octet enacts a coming to self-consciousness of its own musical history, a process with close parallels in the writings of Goethe and Hegel, both of whom Mendelssohn knew personally. In its cyclical manipulations of musical time, Mendelssohn’s Octet sets up a new formal and expressive paradigm for a musical work that would be of major significance for the instrumental music of the later nineteenth century.

Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides or Fingal’s Cave is regularly considered the musical landscape (or seascape) painting par excellence. Scarcely another work has such an unerring capacity to suggest the wide horizons, delicate nuances of changing color and light, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean breakers and freedom of the sea. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of this idea of musical landscape since
the early nineteenth century, it is far from clear analytically or phenomenologically how the predominantly aural and temporal experience of music might convey a sense of visual space that would appear central to the perception of landscape. This article explores Mendelssohn’s archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that
encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Traveling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn’s overture, uncovering his music’s implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn’s work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime.

Keywords: Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, musical landscape, embodied subject, musical ecology,

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. ENNO POPPE – INTERZONE : LEADER UND BILDER – LIVE PERFORMANCE,CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS, DECEMBER 3, 2009
2. JOHANN STRAUSS – DIE FLEDERMAUS
3. JAN WILLEM DE VRIEND – EVA BUCHMANN – HANDEL – AGRIPPINA
4. ILDEBRANDO PIZZETTI – ASSASSINIO NELLA CATTEDRALE
5. PAUL MCCREESH – GABRIELI CONSORT – JEPHTE – JUDICIUM SALOMONIS – JONAS
6. SERGEY EISENSTEIN – SERGEY PROKOFIEV – IVAN THE TERRIBLE
7. JANACEK – BOULEZ – CHEREAU – FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
8. HANDEL – NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT – JEPHTHA
9. HANDEL - JEPHTHA
10. HANDEL – ISAREL IN EGYPT
11. DELLER CONSORT – PURCELL – KING ARTHUR
12. ALBAN BERG – LULU – PIERRE BOULEZ
13. JEAN-CLAUDE MALGOIRE – PHIIPPE JAROUSSKY – FRIEDRICH HANDEL – AGRIPPINA
14. GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – NICHOLAS MCGEGAN – JUDAS MACCABAEUS
15. VIVALDI – JUDITHA TRIUMPHANS
16. MOZART  LA FINTA GIARDINIERA
17. MOZART - MITHRIDATE
18. MENDELSSOHN – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
19. MOZART – ASCANIO IN ALBA
20. MOZART – LA FINTA SEMPLICE
21. PIZZETTI – KARAJAN – MORD IN DER CATHEDRALE – 1998
22. CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – L’INCORONARIONE DI POPPEA – GABRIEL GARRIDO
23. HERVÉ NIQUET – HENRY PURCELLE – KING ARTHUR
24. GABRIEL GARRIDO – MONTEVERDI – LA FAVOLA D’ORFEO
25. GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – ARNOLD OSTMAN – AGRIPPINA
26. RICHARD STRAUSS – DER ROSENKAVALIER – PHILIPPE JORDAN – ANNE SCHWANEWLIMS
27. RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME – SIR GEORG SOLTI
28. GIUSEPPE VERDI – RIGOLETTO STORY
29. RACHMANINOV – ALEKO
30. SHOSTAKOVICH – THE NOSE
31. CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA – GABRIEL GARRIDO – ENSEMBLE ELYMA
32. PHILIPPE JORDAN – DAVID MCVICAR – RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME
33. VERDI – OTELLO – PLACIDO DOMINGO
34. JOHN BLOW – VENUS AND ADONIS
35. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER
36. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER GRIMES
37. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLY BUDD

With animated geometrical models of the solutions to Bach’s puzzle canons.

From Part 2: On the concept of transformation principles in music

We are about to embark on a conceptual journey through Johann Sebastian Bach’s creative mind. The Musical Offering, and the even greater Art of the Fugue, were consciously written as musical pedagogical workshops, to educate Bach’s students, and generations of
future musicians, in the art of polyphonic (many-voiced) contrapuntal composition.

In the Musical Offering, Bach uses King Frederick’s “Royal theme,” to create a series of ten canons. But the fun part is that they are puzzle canons -- he does not write out all of the voices. You have to solve the musical puzzles before you can perform them!

Bach challenges you to discover one or more principles of musical change, with the aid of hints in the titles, and musical symbols. When you apply these principles of change to the canonical voice(s) provided, you are able to create one or more new canonical voices. The solution to the musical enigma is found when you add the newly created voice(s) to the given voice(s).

It is not the theme itself, but what you can do with it, how you are able to transform it, which becomes the subject of musical thought. In order to solve Bach’s musical puzzles, the student is forced to concentrate on discovering the transformation principles Bach intended to be used, and can not get lost in just performing the notes. These discovered principles are the same ones that Bach, and other great composers, used to compose their fugues, and other musical forms using polyphonic counterpoint....

Musical Geometry
In the musical workshop that follows, you are encouraged to physically perform these same single, or multiple transformations with geometric figures, to better visualize the different types of musical change, and how they can be combined to create complex musical development....

As a special feature, 3D animations of these geometrical movements are provided, which will help you to explore the “harmony of the spheres” – transformation in a “spherical” musical universe....

Part 1 -- Prologue: Bach presents a Musical Offering
Part 2 -- On the concept of transformation principles in music
Part 3 -- Bach’s Puzzle Canon Workshop. (Animations in avi format. Use a file viewer if necessary.)
Part 4 -- Conclusion
Part 5 -- Epilogue: The case of Felix Mendelssohn’s entry in Hans Christian Andersen’s Album

See: www.schillerinstitut.dk/moweb/musical_offering.htm

In this essay I argue that Kant holds one of the following two theses: a promise to do something that violates the moral law (i) is impossible or (ii) can be conscientiously broken. On this issue I put Kant in dialogue with Moses Mendelssohn in order to show, against recent suggestions, that Kant’s account is distinctly Mendelssohnian.

How did Moses Mendelssohn reconcile a naturalistic theory of language, advocating the contingent development of all tongues, with the belief that Hebrew did not change ever since its inception? The seeming contradiction was resolved by employing the contemporary notion of the language of action – a primordial human means of communication, where gesture and melody were as significant as words. Mendelssohn’s view of Hebrew as the language closest to this idiom was accompanied by his suggestion that the Jewish ceremonial law is a living script which can be properly understood only through oral instruction. He employed both ideas to counter the notions that the Hebrew vowel points were a late invention and that some loci in the Hebrew Bible had been subject to textual corruption. For Mendelssohn, the allegedly supernatural aspects of spoken Hebrew could be naturalised through constant and lively human conversation across the ages. The appropriation of contemporary critiques of the arbitrariness of language allowed Mendelssohn to forge an original synthesis that could simultaneously accommodate naturalism and providentialism.

Krankheit 14-1 Moses Mendelssohn und die Krankheit der Gelehrten : psy-chologisch-biographische Studie / Hans-Joachim Schwarz ; Renate Schwarz.-1. Aufl.-Hannover : Wehrhahn, 2014.-410 S. : Ill., graph. Darst. ; 23 cm.-ISBN 978-3-86525-355-2 : EUR 34.00 [#3507]

I explain how the growth of knowledge depends upon World 3 even though it involves creative discovery. I show the falsity of the oft-repeated claim that the conclusion of a valid argument is contained in its premises and I explain how that claim is a consequence of early modern conceptions of logical analysis, the structure of propositions and concepts, and the nature of necessary truth. I argue that inference, and also logical analysis, is a matter of guessing and testing, that is, a matter of discovery that depends upon World 3. I explain in what sense it is true that, as Karl Popper says, ‘we never know what we are talking about.’

Nachleben 19-4 Moses Mendelssohn und seine Nachwelt : eine Kulturge-schichte der jüdischen Erinnerung / Martina Steer.-Göttingen : Wallstein-Verlag, 2019.-440 S. : Ill. ; 23 cm.-Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Habil-Schr.-ISBN 978-3-8353-3529-5 : EUR 39.00 [#6680] Nach den intensiven Forschungen zu Mendelssohn und der jüdischen Auf-klärung in den letzten Jahren 1 liegt es nahe, auch die Rezeptionsgeschichte noch stärker in den Blick zu nehmen. Dazu ist in den letzten Jahren eben-falls viel geforscht und theoretisch erkundet worden, indem Gedächtnis-, Gedenk-und Erinnerungspraktiken als Formen des kulturellen Gedächtnis-ses vielseitig diskutiert wurden. Auch sogenannte Erinnerungsorte spielen dabei eine Rolle, und es ist vor dem Hintergrund solcher Konzeptionen, 2 die hier nicht nochmals referiert werden müssen, daß die vorliegende Arbeit, eine Wiener Habilitationsschrift in überarbeiteter Fassung, die lange Wir-kungsgeschichte Mendelssohns innerhalb des Judentums bis zum Jahr 1929 bzw. 1936 verfolgt. 3 Die vorliegende Arbeit 4 orientiert sich dabei schwerpunktmäßig an den Jubi-läen, zu denen Moses Mendelssohns gedacht wurde. Ausgehend vom Ster-bejahr 1786 und den unmittelbaren Reaktionen auf das Ableben des Philo-1 Siehe nur exemplarisch Mendelssohns diskrete Religion / Björn Pecina.-Tü-bingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2016.-XII, 394 S. ; 24 cm.-(Beiträge zur historischen Theologie ; 181).-Zugl.: Halle-Wittenberg, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2014.-ISBN 978-3-16-153352-5 : EUR 99.00 [#4882].-Rez.: IFB 18-1 http://informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=8848 2 Die Einleitung S. 1-34 bietet einen entsprechenden genretypischen For-schungsbericht zu den verschiedenen Aspekten der kulturellen Erinnerung, was hier nicht weiter erwähnt werden muß. Ich kommentiere hier auch nicht weiter die metaphorisierende Praxis, Mendelssohn als deutschen Erinnerungsort anzusehen (S. 62).

Immer wieder wird in der Geschichte der Symphonie die Grenze zwischen Instrumental- und Vokalmusik durchbrochen. Auffallend häufig begegnen gerade in der Finalgestaltung vokalmusikalische Melodien, imaginäre Choräle oder ganze Chortableaus. Welche kompositorischen Strukturen und Ideen liegen ihnen zugrunde, welche kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung kommt ihnen zu? Im Zentrum der Studie stehen exemplarische Untersuchungen, die sich einzelnen ‚vokalmusikalischen Modellen‘ widmen und dabei versuchen, ihre Bedingungen, Wirkungen und Geschichten ausführlicher zu würdigen.

The border between instrumental and vocal music is broken again and again in the history of symphony. Especially in the design of finale, vocal-musical melodies, imaginary chorales or entire choral tableaus are conspicuously frequent. What compositional structures and ideas underlie them, what cultural-historical significance do they have? At the centre of the survey are exemplary studies devoted to individual 'vocal-musical models', which attempt to appreciate their conditions, effects and stories in greater detail.