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Mendelssohn Violin Concerto
April 5 & 6, 2008
Click on the  to hear the musical examples.
Felix Mendelssohn
1809-1847
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Violin Concerto e minor, Op. 64
Felix Mendelssohn
If ever there was a composer born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it was Felix Mendelssohn. He was raised in affluence and comfort, his precocious musical talent recognized and nurtured by his culturally sophisticated and highly supportive family. His home was a Mecca for the artistic and intellectual elite of Germany who also encouraged the prodigy and his talented sister Fanny. One of his admirers was the formidable grand old man of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fortunately for the development of Felix’s rare abilities, his carefully selected teachers, however impressed they may have been with him, were demanding. His strict training, especially in fugue composition, familiarized him with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, who at the time was dismissed as a mere pedagogue. In 1829, Mendelssohn was central to a Bach revival with an historic performance of the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin, virtually rescuing the great composer’s music from the counterpoint classroom.
As a mature artist, Mendelssohn was acclaimed throughout Europe as a composer and conductor, especially in his native Germany and in England, where he had a private audience with the young Queen Victoria, who sang for him after he had played for her. He untimely death from unknown causes created a profound shock, and Mendelssohn societies promoting his music and ideas quickly sprang up all over middle and northern Europe.
Unlike Mozart, Mendelssohn was extremely self-critical, constantly requesting feedback and carefully perfecting his compositions. The Concerto in e minor had a long gestation period. Mendelssohn started it in 1838 but did not finish it until six years later. He wrote it for his friend, the famed violinist Ferdinand David (1810-1873), concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig where Mendelssohn served as conductor from 1835 to 1843. The composer sought – and took – David’s advice on technical aspects throughout its composition. David finally premiered it in Leipzig in 1845, but Mendelssohn was ill and unable to attend. Now one of the staples of violin repertory, the Concerto was considered daring and innovative at the time of its composition.
From the first bar, the Allegro molto appassionato opening broke new ground. Instead of the usual orchestral exposition of the main themes, the violin enters at once to present the principal theme on which the movement is built.  Mendelssohn gives the second part of the theme to the orchestra. For the second theme, the roles are reversed, with the winds introducing the theme. The cadenza, largely the creation of David, is placed unconventionally before the recapitulation. Relocating the cadenza away from its traditional place at the end of the movement stresses the continuity with the second movement, which follows without pause.
The Andante emerges out of a single quiet bassoon tone, emanating from the last chord of the opening movement. It is joined by other instruments for a short transitional passage, after which the solo violin introduces the simple, almost religious theme. The middle section in the minor mode turns slightly darker.
Another transition, based on the opening theme of the Concerto, leads into the Allegro molto vivace. Mendelssohn saved the demonstration of the virtuoso possibilities of the violin for this sparkling Finale. After an orchestral fanfare for the winds, containing a rhythmic motive that the composer reuses for throughout the movement as part of other themes, the soloist enters with a flourish followed by a delicate, dancing theme that dominates the movement and recalls the atmosphere of the teenaged composer’s first great hit, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The orchestra answers with a development of the opening fanfare. The soloist then plays a new, more lyrical melody – also based on the fanfare – in counterpoint with the first theme, now in the orchestra, Later, their roles are reversed.
Anton Bruckner
1824-1896
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Symphony No. 9 in d minor
Anton Bruckner
Great talent does not insure great self-confidence, but Bruckner’s insecurity took the form of a full-fledged inferiority complex. While during rehearsals, or even after a premiere, many composers followed the advice of their colleagues and revised their scores, Bruckner spent untold hours repeatedly altering his scores at the suggestion or demand of conductors, publishers, musicians and music critics. Most of his symphonies exist in many versions and it is left to the conductor to decide which version to perform and to musicologists to determine a definitive score.
The Ninth is the exception, for the simple reason that Bruckner died before finishing, much less revising, it. In 1903 his student Ferdinand Löwe published and conducted a falsified version without disclosing that he himself had changed the score significantly. Until 1932, Löwe’s version became the performing standard. In that year, Siegmund von Hausegger conducted both versions – Löwe’s side by side with the original – at a single concert in Munich as if calling on the audience, critics and performers to judge between the two. Since then the original version is the one invariably performed.
Bruckner was the stereotype of the country bumpkin: awkward, graceless, with a thick provincial accent. He was given to bouts of severe depression and was in awe of and deferential to intellectual and professional authority. His worship of Wagner made him automatically anathema to Vienna’s influential music critic Eduard Hanslick. In part through his naïveté he became caught up in the musical maelstrom of the great battle between Wagner and his followers, on the one hand, and Brahms and Vienna’s musical establishment, symbolized by Hanslick, on the other.
In spite of Bruckner’s conservatism and lack of sophistication he was quite an innovator. He greatly broadened the scope of the symphony by enlarging the orchestra. The Ninth is scored for 3 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, 8 horns – 4 doubling on Wagner tubas in the Adagio – 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, contrabass tuba, timpani and the usual strings. His large symphonies have been compared to massive granite structures, monuments to his intense and unquestioning belief in God.
Among the features to expect in this Symphony are long passages of tonal instability – particularly chromatic sequences or fanfares – leading to clear-cut thematic statements. The effect is sometimes one of seemingly endless anticipation – often for several minutes – waiting for a harmonic resolution. Fanfare motives in particular play an important role in the first movement, forming whole or parts of themes, countermelodies, or announcements preparatory to important musical events. Bruckner achieves the massive dimensions of the Symphony with prolonged buildups to restatements of the principal themes, each fading before the next one begins.
The symphony opens with a long introduction marked, Feierlich, misterioso (fiery, mysterious), a tremolo on the strings, followed by a funereal fanfare, an antiphonal dialogue between trumpets and lower brass that resolves into a Wagnerian-sounding heroic theme. The introduction ramps up the tension, finally settling on the first theme of the exposition. The beginning, a descending octave in the brass, suggests another fanfare, but turns instead into something of a musical snarl before resolving. Because the movement is in an expanded sonata form, the composer dutifully supplies a contrasting lyrical melody for the strings. The fanfare plays an important role in this movement, insinuating itself even into the most gentle passages, as in this gentle oboe solo and the marching brass passages.
The term Scherzo for the second movement is something of a misnomer. It is a brutally dissonant, foot-stomping danse macabre, a style the composer had used in his previous symphonies. Perhaps the composer’s idea of playfulness resided in the sharply contrasting sonorities between the sections of heavy brass and the delicate winds and upper strings; the theme appears first mysteriously in the woodwinds then returns in the full orchestra like thunder, heavy with brass and timpani. Also contrasting with the heaviness in the brass is a little waltz that emerges as an oboe solo to begin the second strain of the scherzo. The trio begins as a wispy flute solo with an ostinato rhythm in the lower strings that mimics the pounding of the Scherzo, only much faster. Like the Scherzo, it contains a second melody in the violas and cellos that ramps up the tension for a return of the Scherzo.
The solemn Adagio has a majestically deliberate pace combined with a religious intensity. It opens with an almost agonized cry in the strings, which begins of a long preamble about six minutes in length, containing an unresolved four-note motive on the English horn that recurs throughout the long movement and upon which the movement is largely based. The preamble eventually resolves in a true lyrical melody for the violas and cellos built on the English horn motive. He later incorporates the motive into another lyrical theme. About a third of the way through, the opening intervals of the movement are presented in inversion (upside down) as a funereal trumpet motive, which Bruckner expands on in his customary extended way. Although the movement vacillates between the somber and the ethereal, Bruckner offers a gentle, soothing conclusion. These sharp contrasts in harmonic language and sheer volume suggest the composer’s spiritual struggle with his own mortality and his faith. In the coda, as a kind of retrospective, Bruckner quotes from his own Seventh and Eighth symphonies and the Gloria from his Mass in d minor.
Bruckner spent two years, desperately ill, failing physically and mentally, trying to compose the fourth movement. There are 186 fragments representing six versions of the Finale, all of which he appears to have rejected. In desperation he suggested that his Te Deum be played instead, but its mood and its major key made this an unsatisfactory solution. The liturgical hymn of thanksgiving, however, does represent his enduring faith, even in the face of his own decline and death. Conductors, however, seldom take the suggestion, leaving the Symphony unfinished.
Bruckner was a devout Catholic with a simple faith in his God. The score bears the dedication “An den lieben Gott.” He considered the Symphony, especially the Adagio, as his personal musical testament. Perhaps his composer’s block on the Finale resulted from the fact that there is very little for a dying man of true faith to say after the mystical ending of this Adagio.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008
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