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About the Music

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Instrumentation: Scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, timpani, and strings
Composed: 1842
Duration: 12 minutes

For many of the Romantics, Shakespearian tragedy seemed a perfect musical fit. Consequently, not a few composers sought to capture the toil and trouble of the Bard’s dark dramas in notes. Tchaikovsky alone set music to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Others looked to Othello, Falstaff, King Lear, and Macbeth—in short, Shakespeare’s work served as a bottomless pit of inspiration for composers of the 19th century (and continues still). But crafting music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream required a deft hand, one that could conjure up a magical forest replete with animals and fairies. Enter Felix Mendelssohn.

Like a number of his Romantic-era contemporaries, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky among them, Mendelssohn’s love of Shakespeare dates to his childhood. Growing up in one of Berlin’s most cultural and well-to-do families, Mendelssohn not only had German translations of Shakespeare literally at his fingertips from childhood, but he and his siblings put on plays of their own. Mendelssohn was all of seventeen when he had his first go at A Midsummer Night’s Dream in overture form, a work that encyclopedist George Grove called “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music.”

The Wedding March needs no introduction, though some listeners may be unaware that the music, which celebrated the fictitious wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen Hippolyta in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sprang from one of Mendelssohn’s most brilliant scores. Sixteen years after his youthful overture, Mendelssohn, now among Europe’s leading musical lights, received a group of commissions from King Frederick William IV of Prussia, for incidental music to plays he enjoyed. Though Mendelssohn responded with several scores based on Greek tragedy, it was the music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Wedding March, in particular, that has best stood the test of time.

Pēteris Vasks (b. 1946): Musica Dolorosa
Instrumentation: Scored for string orchestra
Composed: 1983
Duration: 14 minutes

Later this season we will hear the music of Giya Kancheli, whose music and world view were strongly impacted by life behind the Iron Curtain. Among Kancheli’s noted contemporaries is Pēteris Vasks, whose Musica Dolorosa is no less than a musical depiction of the pain he experienced in the world they shared.

Born in Latvia to a Baptist pastor, Pēteris Vasks’ began studying double bass but because of the repressive attitude toward Baptists, Vasks eventually made his way to Vilnius, where he was free to pursue his love of musical composition. While his early style owed much to Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki, among the dominant composers on the contemporary scene as Vasks was coming of age musically, Vasks eventually found his voice—an accessible style that melded elements of aleatoric music (chance or improvisatory style) with a lyrical language—and set it all within a spiritual framework. Though his sound ranges from plaintive to muscular, it is highly communicative and frequently delivers a strong sense of the torment he experienced as a citizen of the USSR, which he described as “a dark and tragic time when it seemed that even the greatest idealists and optimists were beginning to lose hope for our survival.”

Musica Dolorosa, from 1983, sprang from the desire to try to put into sound what Vasks was experiencing personally and musically at home. The work is cast in three broad sections, during which three musical ideas thread their way: a barely changing, driving ostinato depicting an imperishable foundation; the lament, as illustrated by the descending glissandos; and a lyrical, ascending motif that represents heaven and freedom. At the work’s midpoint, the music culminates in an explosive passage of maximum, aleatoric tension before vanishing, now replaced by a lonely solo cello monologue. The recapitulation returns to us Vasks’ visceral pain of his experience— “It all hurt and I wanted those who hear [the composition] to hurt as well.” There is no attempt to “wrap things up” at the close. Rather, the “ending” represents a never-healing wound, reflecting Vasks’ belief that “everything in this world comes from love, even pain.”

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E Minor, Op. 64
Instrumentation: Scored for violin solo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, horn, timpani, and strings
Composed:1844
Duration: 26 minutes

Unlike Mozart, with whom he was often compared as a child prodigy, Mendelssohn did not compose either of his violin concertos for himself, despite playing both the violin and viola with proficiency. His first attempt came at the age of thirteen, a work he composed for a teacher and family friend, though like many of his youthful works, it was soon all but forgotten. It would be another fifteen years before Mendelssohn returned to the genre. This time, with years of formidable compositional experience under his belt, Mendelssohn would craft one of the greatest violin concertos ever written.

What would prove to be Felix Mendelssohn’s final concerto was conceived in the year 1838, three years after he took the helm of one of Europe’s most prestigious musical institutions, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Indeed, almost immediately upon accepting the Leipzig position in 1835, he appointed violinist Ferdinand David, a longtime friend, and colleague, as his concertmaster (in a striking bit of coincidence, David was born into the same Hamburg house where Mendelssohn had been born a year earlier; both families subsequently resettled in Berlin). Though the pair had entertained the idea of a new concerto as early as 1838, it would be another six years before Mendelssohn had completed the work. All the while, Mendelssohn worked closely with David, who offered the brilliant composer numerous technical suggestions. It speaks to Mendelssohn’s character that although he played and understood the instrument perfectly, he still desired the input of a highly valued colleague.

Mendelssohn, of course, had a host of impressive works to serve as models, Beethoven above all, but also the works of Ludwig Spohr (who knew Beethoven and mentored the young Mendelssohn) and the contributions of violin virtuoso Giovanni Battista Viotti, who arguably exerted the greatest influence on violin playing during the first quarter of the 19th century. Mendelssohn, however, had other ideas in mind, and by the time the concerto received its premiere, he had crafted a work whose design differed radically from everything that came before.

By nature, Mendelssohn was no revolutionary. While he imbued his scores with the uniquely personal gifts of inspired melody, stirring harmonies, and an unsurpassed sense of orchestration, he was largely pouring new wine into bottles produced during the Classical era. With his concerto, Mendelssohn offered up brand-new formal outlines. Among the most unusual gambits occurs at the very beginning, where instead of the expected orchestral introduction, the violinist jumps in immediately. And rather than relying on the soloist to craft or even improvise a cadenza (soloist alone), Mendelssohn wrote out his cadenza in full (featuring extended ricochet string crossings). Furthermore, all three movements are played without pause, with the bassoon serving to connect the first and second movements.

Innovations aside, because of its expressive qualities, excitement, and exquisite craftsmanship, Mendelssohn’s concerto has remained a favorite of violinists and audiences alike almost since the day of its successful premiere. A year before his death, the celebrated 19th-century violinist Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his concerto years later, summed up what Mendelssohn’s concerto meant to his instrument’s repertoire. Having acknowledged that the greatest of all was Beethoven’s, the seriousness of Brahms’ and Bruch’s being the most seductive, the violinist’s violinist admitted that “the most inward, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.”

© Marc Moskovitz
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