Introducing Jessica's Mendelssohn blog
Post categories: Jessica Duchen
| 16:51 UK time, Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Welcome to Felixcitation - my name for BBC Radio 3's Mendelssohn Anniversary blog!
My name is Jessica Duchen, and I divide my writing time between fiction, journalism, stage works and my own Classical Music Blog http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com. My latest novel, Hungarian Dances, was published in 2008 by Hodder and the next is due out in summer 2009. After studying music at Cambridge I held editorial posts on a succession of music magazines, was the founding editor of the UK's first independent piano magazine and wrote biographies of Korngold and Fauré. I contribute to The Independent and BBC Music Magazine, among others, and I enjoy devising intriguing ways to combine words and music on stage. I live in London with my violinist husband and a cat named Solti.
Composer anniversaries are a bit like London buses, if less bendy. You wait aeons to celebrate some great muso who had strong links with the UK, then four arrive together. Of the big quartet pulling up at our stop in 2009 Felix Mendelssohn is, to my mind, the pick of the bunch.
I'm proud to have been appointed BBC Radio 3's official Mendelssohn blogger for the bicentenary year. Back in 2004 I started my own music blog, fascinated by the way that this amazing medium allows your work to be read in Bolivia or New Zealand a second after you've written it; now I hope that Felixcitations will reach Mendelssohn's admirers the world over.
My first memories of Mendelssohn involve standing on a chair. I was trying to reach my father's turntable - which presumably had been placed on the top shelf expressly to keep me, aged six, well away from it. In one hand I held an LP of a handsome young violinist named Pinchas Zukerman playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto; in the other a cleaning pad that would have removed the dust from the grooves, had this much-played treasure had time to accumulate any. The haunting opening, the enchanting melody of the slow movement and the quicksilver finale were already well and truly under my skin.
My father, who adored Mendelssohn, also had a beautiful old volume of the Songs without Words, from which I later tried to learn some at the piano. Each piece had been assigned a spurious title. Some of the monikers seemed distinctly more poetic than 'Opus Y Number Z' - among my favourites were 'The Wanderer', 'Duet' and, er, 'The Morning Star' - but the notes were another matter. Pianos in Mendelssohn's era possessed keys lighter and faster than those of the modern grand; today his pianistic effects, delicate and colourful as any humming-bird, are what we could term 'challenging'. My student days brought equally unnerving encounters with his Second Piano Concerto (ouch) and chamber music. "Let's bash through the Mendelssohn D minor!" enthused a piano-trio partner at university. Yeah, right...
Away from the notes, this extraordinary man's life and work was worthy of a novel by Charles Dickens or George Eliot. He sprang as if fully-formed into the very heart of German Romanticism. He was one of the most extraordinary child prodigy composers ever to tread the planet. He was gifted in painting and writing as well as music, travelled widely and had five children. In career terms, he was the Leonard Bernstein of his day, hugely active as a conductor and educator as well as a composer (and, presumably, a heck of a good pianist). When he wasn't writing, he was founding the Leipzig Conservatory, wielding his baton over the Gewandhaus Orchestra, reviving Bach's St Matthew Passion and premiering, long after the composer's death, Schubert's Ninth Symphony. Yet there is dark material, too, in Mendelssohn's life - darker than we might have imagined... But more of that anon.
As Mendelssohn was a favourite of Queen Victoria and spent a requisite amount of time in Britain, it's easy to embrace him as an honorary Brit. BBC Radio 3's festival Mendelssohn in Britain, over the weekend of 8-10 May, features an invitation to choirs up and down the country to join in a simultaneous singing of 'O for the Wings of a Dove'; R3 has commissioned six young composers to write brand new Songs without Words; the celebrations include Elijah itself, plus a live 'In Tune' from Birmingham Town Hall, where the work was premiered. They'll also be broadcasting all Mendelssohn's symphonies in early February to mark his birthday. While I'll feature these festivities in this column in a big way, I won't neglect the sides of his life and work that haven't made it into the schedule.
Mendelssohn was nothing if not passionate and he deserves a passionate response - so please interact! Write in with your views and your news. For instance, do you know of, or are you doing, a Mendelssohn concert? What are your favourite recordings, your favourite memories, any juicy Mendelssohn anecdotes? The more we talk, the more we'll learn; and the more we listen, the more wonderful Mendelssohn's music will start to seem.
I'll be writing regularly throughout 2009 and will moderate your comments constantly along the way. Looking forward to hearing from you soon!
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~56~RS~)
Comments
My favorites are --in addition to the wonderful E minor violin concerto-- the Octet for Strings, and a wonderful symphonic overture for wind ensemble. I think I managed to narrow down which one this was, and send out for a recording through Amazon, but I seem to have lost it. I hope you can identify the one to which I'm referring; perhaps there will be a podcast sometime next year, in which case I would love to hear this overture again.
Arch.
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Good morning, Jessica! This is kleines c. I rather like 'Elijah'. By the way, all the best for your blog in 2009. As a member of the BBC Radio 3 messageboard community, I should perhaps add that interacting online can, on occasion, be quite challenging. Season's greetings! c.
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Here's hoping Radio 3 in Mendelssohn year givess an ear to Milos Milosojevic.
His Mendelssohn interpretation on accordion was the highlight of the Derek Butler Prize at the Wigmore Hall.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/derek-butler-prize-wigmore-hall-london-801136.html
He won the competition hands down, nem con. He has something original to say.
Yup. He's an accordionist.
But if the likes of Lawrence Cummings and Piers Lane , who were on the jury, think he's a musician of real substance...he deserves to be heard.
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Hello, Jessica. I hope your Mendelssohn blog goes well. May I take this opportunity to ask what ".. will moderate your comments constantly along the way." means? Does that mean you'll be tinkering with them from time-to-time or just that you'll be removing inappropriate and off-topic ones, perhaps including this one.
I confess I'm more drawn to the Radio 3 message boards where, for good or ill, moderation is fairly minimal. I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion of Mendelssohn there as well. In any case, good luck with your venture.
By the way, am I correct in thinking that you have posted on the Radio 3 message boards yourself in the past?
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I should perhaps confess that I have, on occasion, posted on the BBC message boards in the past, tony. I wonder whether you have ever come across any of my messages?
;)
As for Jessica, I do not recall her presence on the BBC Radio 3 messageboards, although as you know, tony, it can be quite difficult to work out what lies behind the members' nicknames, so to speak.
In terms of moderation, tony, I would suggest that temperance is a cardinal virtue, so do not drink too much over the Christmas holidays. Cheers! Santa c & the gang.
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Hello, kleines. I don't know what Jessica's nickname is but I do occasionally read her excellent blog: http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-not-to-write-book.html
I hope that you, Jessica and all bloggers have a very merry Christmas.
Sorry to hog your blog and bombard it with trivia, Jessica. Yes, I love Mendelssohn's music, especially the violin concerto, the quartets, quintets, octet and piano trios, which I think can compare with any, and I hope to discover more during 2009.
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I refuse to apologise for hogging the 'gang of four' bloggers, tony, and bombarding them all with trivia before Christmas. You are all best advised to ignore trivia, particularly when generated by kleines c.
I notice that you have a preference for instrumental music above, tony, whereas I rather like the human voice. Do you like any of Mendelssohn's choral compositions (songs etc.)?
Did Queen Victoria have good musical taste, Jessica?
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You have a very interesting blog, by the way, Jessica:
http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/
Happy New Year and enjoy your break!
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As tony will no doubt be reading Jessica's blog as he sips his cocoa in his armchair this New Year's Eve, may I suggest that he puts on some Mendelssohn? I would recommend his Magnificat. All the best for 2009, c.
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Don't tell me that you were watching Elton John on ITV1 instead, tony. By the way, can you skate?
;)
Anyway, perhaps I ought to write something of more substance for Jessica about Felix Mendelssohn to help her with this particular blog later in 2009. I just did a search on Google, and this particular website could prove useful:
http://www.mendelssohn-2009.org
The calendar of events is particularly impressive. There is even something today in Berlin. More later ...
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
I should add, if only for the moderators, that the BBC House Rules are inappropriate for classical music, and in particular, Mendelssohn.
Felix Mendelssohn was quite obviously a German composer, and a lot of the material associated with his anniversary year will inevitably only be available in German.
I would strongly suggest that the moderators reconsider their interpretation of BBC House Rules with respect to BBC Radio 3. If any doubt, please contact one of the station administrators directly.
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Great start, Jessica!
Can I ask that you and the BBC also cover some of the music of the other composers who influenced Mendelssohn or were influenced by him? It is hard to get a good sense of just how superb his music was without also hearing the music of his contemporaries and students, especially the lesser and lesser-known ones. I mean people like Juan Arriaga, Neils Gade, Johannes Verhulst and William Sterndale Bennett. Sadly, their music is usually relegated to the early hours of the morning on Radio 3, if it gets played at all.
Also, as you say, Felix Mendelssohn was a gifted painter and draftsman, and his music, perhaps more than any other composer until Morton Feldman, was influenced by the visual artists of his time, such as Caspar David Friedrich and the Nazarenes (one of whom, Philipp Veit, was his cousin). Is is rare, it seems, for musicologists and musicians to know much about the visual arts, which means they may miss what is most distinctive in Mendelssohn's music (eg, the use of an observer, or Ruckenfigur, in a scene portrayed).
Indeed, a side-by-side comparison of Mendelssohn and Feldman would also be very informative. We are now used to seeing art works from different historical periods or countries placed next to each other in galleries, in order to provoke us to think about the works anew. Why not do the same for music?
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I guess that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach must have influenced Felix Mendelssohn a fair bit, makhabane?
:)
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Hello
very interesting idea; will be sure to read your blog.
One question, as I am half German and my 'Mendelssohn-conditioning' happened there: in Germany, he is nearly always referred to as 'Mendelssohn-Bartholdy' (his father took on the second name after the family's conversion); I have hardly ever seen his full name in UK listings. While I don't have a particular preference, I was just wondering why this is the case.
Was in Leipzig in early January, and was delighted to see that the Mendelssohn monument, destroyed by the Nazis in 1934, has been restored and is now outside the Thomaskirche in time to oversee the 2009 festivities.
Best wishes
Dr Kara McKechnie, Leeds
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I doubt that the British are so keen on double-barrelled names, Kara, although there are, of course, exceptions? I hope that Jessica has more to add.
;)
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Great to see a Mendelssohn weekend.
No complaint but I bought a Freeview box last month in the hope of one of R3's 'complete works' events for FM-B's bicentenary!
I'd love to hear the original of 'Hark, the Herald' [ how different might it be in the correct harmony and words: 'Gutenburg, der Deutche Mann'?!]
I was one of the few at the prom of 'Antigone' a few years ago. I'd love to hear [and see] that again.
Who knows what other gems may be hidden in his 'minor 'works [his concertstucke for wind band, for example]?
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Happy 200th Birthday, Felix!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00h9xdv
It is time to party, Jessica!
:)
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Jessica,
I read your recent article in 'The Independent' about Handel. Although I agree with many of your points, I think that Handel's music speaks for itself, and can certainly hold its own in comparison with Bach and Beethoven, for example.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/handel-loved-britain--ndash-but-that-doesnt-mean-we-have-to-love-him-back-1632256.html
Perhaps your fellow blogger, Suzanne, would like to comment further? All the best, c.
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