MENDELSSOHN: THE COMPLETE SOLO PIANO MUSIC, Howard Shelley, VOL. 6 Like New CD.
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From the Insert:
ONE OF THE VERY GREAT PIANISTS of the nine- teenth century, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) achieved legendary status for his performances and improvisations alike, though his piano compositions generally have not withstood comparison with the very best keyboard music of the century.
The one piano sonata he published was deemed not to have broken new ground after Beethoven's path-breaking thirty-two; he created no large-scale cyclic works comparable to Robert Schumann's hybrid literary/musical fantasies for the instrument; his meticulously crafted Lieder ohne Worte exuded for many a refined romanticism not as soul- searching as the miniatures of Chopin or Brahms; and nowhere did his technical demands on the pianist challenge the Promethean exertions of Liszt.
But such views of Mendelssohn's piano music largely mirrored the conventional wisdom about the composer's stature engrained over much of the twentieth century. A complex of factors, including a reaction against Victorianism (a frequent visitor to England, Mendelssohn had enjoyed audiences with the Queen, had been embraced as a Victorian gentleman, and was an easy mark for later critiques of the period) and the banning of his music by the Nazis (though a baptized Lutheran, Mendelssohn was the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), combined to undermine his reputation.
And so he was remembered as a purveyor of comfortable (gemütlich) salon music; his affinity for complex Bachian counterpoint led him to rely too much on historical models; and his music betrayed a cloying sentimentality utterly at odds with modernist tastes.
Writing in The Musical Times on the sesquicentenary of the composer's birth in 1959, Stanley Bayliss conceded that Mendelssohn's music offered "magic, charm, clarity, brilliance, verve, lilt, [and] polish'-but all these qualities were not enough to offset this terse verdict of post-War culture: 'Mendelssohn does not go very deep.
These attitudes contrasted dramatically with the composer's meteoric rise to fame during the 1830s and 1840s, and his rapid canonization.
An extraordinary child prodigy, he was compared by Goethe and Heine to a second Mozart, and described by Robert Schumann as the Mozart of the nineteenth century.
As a composer, he made significant contributions to every important genre of the time, with the exception of opera (though not for want of trying-he reviewed scores of potential libretti, only to settle late in life on Die Lorelei, left unfinished at his death).
As a conductor, he turned the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig into one of the premier musical institutions of his time.
As a tireless editor and performer of Bach and Handel, he argued for continuities in the European classical tradition, in which he found again and again the wellspring of his own inspiration.
And as a pianist, his elegant style of playing found favour with many critics, including his early biographer W A Lampadius. 'Mendelssohn's skill as a virtuoso was no mere leger- demain', Lampadius wrote in 1865, 'no enormous finger facility, that only aims to dazzle by trills, chromatic runs, and octave passages; it was that true, manly virtus from which the word virtuoso is derived; that steadfast energy which overcomes all mechanical hindrances, not to produce musical noise, but music, and not satisfied with anything short of exhibiting the very spirit of productions written in every age of musical art.
The characteristic features of his playing were a very elastic touch, a wonderful trill, elegance, roundness, firmness, perfect articulation, strength, and tenderness, each in its needed place. His chief excellence lay, as Goethe said, in his giving every piece, from the Bach epoch down, its own distinctive character."
Today, in the midst of a full-scale Mendelssohn revival, Howard Shelley's survey of the complete solo piano music in six volumes offers a welcome opportunity to revisit and reassess this repertoire. As we now know, Mendelssohn composed or began nearly two hundred works for piano.
Nevertheless, he saw only about seventy through the press released in seventeen opera from the Capriccio, Op (1825), to the sixth volume of the Lieder obne Worte Op 67 (1845). Some twenty-five additional pieces appeared posthumously in eleven additional opera. The remainder. whether fully drafted or fragmentary were left to his musical estate or have disappeared.
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