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1 CD -
0630-10021-2 - (p) 1995
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| Felix
Mendelssohn (1809-1847) |
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| Symphony No. 4 in A major,
Op. 90 "Italian" |
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28' 56" |
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- Allegro vivace
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10' 39" |
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1
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- Andante con moto
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6' 45" |
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2
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- Con moto moderato
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5' 50" |
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3
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- Saltarello: Presto
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5' 42" |
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4
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| Overture "Die Hebriden",
Op.26 |
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10' 18" |
5
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| Overture "Die schöne
Melusine", Op.32 |
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10' 53" |
6
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| Overture "Ein
Sommernachtstraum", Op. 21 |
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11' 46" |
7
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| Overture "Die erste
Walpurgisnacht", Op. 60 |
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9' 28" |
8
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| Chamber Orchestra
of Europe |
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Nikolaus
Harnoncourt, Dirigent
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Luogo
e data di registrazione
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Teatro
Comunale, Ferrara (Italia) - ottobre
1991 (Symphony No. 4)
Stefaniensaal, Graz (Austria) - giugno
1991 (Overtures Op. 26 e Op. 32)
Stefaniensaal, Graz (austria) - luglio
1992 (Overtures Op. 21 e Op. 60) |
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Registrazione
live / studio
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studio /
live (Overtures Op. 21 e Op.60)
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Producer
/ Engineer
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Wolfgang
Mohr & Renate Kupfer (Op. 21 e Op.
60) / Helmut Mühle / Michael Brammann
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Prima Edizione CD
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Teldec
- 9031-72308-2 - (1 cd) - 69' 05" - (p)
1992 - DDD (Symphony No. 4)
Teldec - 9031-74882-2 - (1 cd) - 77' 55"
- (p) 1993 - DDD (Overtures Op. 21 e Op.
60)
Teldec - 0630-10021-2 - (1 cd) - 71' 50"
- (p) 1995 - DDD (Overtures Op. 26 e Op.
32)
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Prima
Edizione LP
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Poetic idea and musical
form
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“So much is spoken
about music, and so little is said.
I'm convinced that words are
inadequate to describe it, and if
ever I were to find
that they were adequate, I’d give up
writing music altogether. People
normally complain that music is so
ambiguous and that what they are
supposed to think while listening to
it is so unclear, whereas everyone can
understand words." Thus
Felix Mendelssohn unburdened himself
in a letter to Marc-André
Souchay in 1842, gluing vent to ocry
of despair provoked by a development
in the history of
music whereby the centuries' old
understanding of music an a
self-evident language had been
increasingly lost and replaced by a
desire for a type of
expression that could be couched in
concrete terms. As the 19th century
pursued its inevitable course, the
argument over the respective merits of
absolute music and programme
music raged with increasing ferocity.
For Mendelssohn, however,
the problem was precisely the opposite
- "and not only with entire speeches,
but also with individual words, since
these, too, seem to me so ambiguous,
so open to misunderstanding in
comparison to actual music, which
fills one's soul with a thousand
better things than words. The thoughts
expressed by the music that I love are
not too vague to be put
into words, but too specific."
And it was Mendelssohn
- a composer who consciously described
several collections of his piano
pieces as ` Songs without Words" - who
achieved an intimate blend of absolute
musical form and poetical idea so
that, far from the one being
sacrificed to the other; they enhance
and enrich one another. In his twelve
early string sinfonias of 1821-1823,
he had, as it were, retraced the various
stages in the development ol the
symphony, beginning with 18th-century
three-movement models and concluding
with the four-movement
type as it had emerged under
Viennese Classicism. In doing so,
he haul not only acquired a sense of
formal assurance through his delight
in experimentation but,
by limiting himself to a complement of
strings, had
created the basis for the translucent
textures of his later orchestral
works. This phase in his development
was brought to an end with his
Symphony in C minor op. 11 of 1824,
the first of his symphonies deemed
worthy of public performance, after
which he turned to writing overtures.
In 1826, while Carl
Maria von Weber was busy staging Oberon,
the seventeen-year-old Mendelssohn
developed a similar enthusiasm for
Shakespeare's spirit world, a world
that had been opened up to the whole
of the German-speaking public through
the translations of Schlegel and
Tieck. Framed by cadential harmonies
on the woodwind, from which the whole
of the musical argument develops, the
overture to A Midsummer Night's
Dream runs its magical course
within the space of a mere twelve
minutes. Different characters and
different levels of the plot are
evoked in graphic themes without ever
losing sight of the underlying musical
idea, an idea firmly
grounded in clearly recognisable
sonata form. “The mature composer
achieved his first and highest flight
of fancy in a moment of suprerne
felicity,” wrote Robert Schumann,
admirably summing up a work of genius
that survived even Mendelssohn's
acute self-criticism when, sixteen
years later, he took up the piece unaltered
and used it as the overture for his
incidental music to the play.
Whereas the overture to A
Midsummer Night's
Dream was written within the
space of only a month, that of The Hebrides
- originally entitled Die einsame
Insel (The Lonely Island)
- took four years to complete. It
was begun in the course of a tour of
the Scottish Highlands, during which
the composer visited Fingal's Cave on
the island of Staffa. He wrote to his
family: “ln order to make clear what a
strange mood has come over me in the Hebrides,
the following occured to me" - and he
went on to note down a 21-bar
orchestral sketch of the overture.
Finally to become known as The Hebrides,
it was still descrrhed in the first
edition of the full score as Fingal's
Cave. “With its basalt
columns reminiscent of organ pipes and
remarkable echo effect, this
cave has two attractions for
tourists," notes Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
"It is by
no means out of the question that
Mendelssohn undertook
the strenuous sea voyage precisely
because of this acoustic phenomenon, a
phenomenon that we can at least ausume
left its mark on the
striking play with the overture’s
dotted woodwind theme".
The sketches accompanied the composer
to Italy and thence to
Paris, from where he wrote to his
sister Fanny: "I can't give The
Hebrides here, since I
don't yet regard it as finished; the
middle section in a loud D major is very
silly." Further revisions followed and
in this form the work was performed in
London in 1832, but
a third version conducted by the
composer himself in Berlin in 1833
- was necessary before Mendelssohn was
satisfied with the result. As before,
the piece is cast in
sonata form, but, unlike the wealth of
images in the overture to A
Midsummer Night's Dream, the
potential for musical conflict derives
on this occasion from the opposition
between a seemingly unassailable
main theme that retains im basic
outline on in countless different
appearances, and melodic forms which,
deriving from it, keep on assuming new
guises
Mendelssohn’s setting of Goethe’s
ballad about the Blocksberg,
Die erste Walpurgisnacht, dates
from 1832. The
overture, which was the final piece to
be written, opens with a description
of winter's passing storms and the
approach of smiling spring
(represented by the clarinet over a
gentle string accompaniment) and looks
forward to the grotesque and comical
action of the ballad itself, which
tells of an ancient
pagan fertility festival. As
before, Mendelssohn was satisfied with
the work only after he had revised it,
and it was not until 1843
that it was heard for the first time
in Leipzig. In the composer's own
words, it appeared “in a somewhat
different guise from before", no
longer "over-dressed with trombones".
Mendelssohn's overture
to The Fair Melusine
dates from 1833
and proved, in its composer`s words,
to be his "best or, at all events,
most inward" overture. He was inspired
to write it by a performance of
Conradin Kreutzer's
opera Melusine that he heard
in Berlin in the spring of 1833: "The
overture was encored, though I
disliked it quite particularly [...].
I was seized by a
desire to write an overture that
people wouldn't encore but that they
would receive more inwardly."
For Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who
is particularly fond of this work, The
Fair Melusine is
an example of "programme music at its
most explicit. With
its five-part strtrcture - Melusine's
theme, the knight's theme, passion,
irreconcilability,
separation - it provides both air
accurate reflection and a wonderful
interpretation of the fairytale". In
this particular version of the tale,
by the Austrian dramatist Franz
Grillparzer, the mermaid Melusine
falls in love with a knight. For his
sake, she enters the world of men,
wins his love and leads a life of
happiness at his side on condition
that he never asks her about her
origins. But the knight's curiosity
finally gets he better of him;
secretly he observes her on the one
day of the week when he is forbidden
to visit her, and it is
then that he sees her fish's
tail and recognises
her for what she is.
Melusine has to return to her watery
realm.
The desire on the part
of a creature such as a nixie, nymph
or undine to be loved
by a human being was a popular
theme among 19th-century artists,
expressing, as it did, the typically
Romantic longing for a horne in the
world and, at the same time, the unbridgeable
gulf between the elemental world and
that of human beings. Fairy-tales of
all ages have served to tell of
existential truths that could not
otherwise be put into words, but this
particular myth of the irreparable
breach in the world is
without any doubt one of the most
moving. In Mendelssohn's
sympathetic setting, even the "Once
upon a time” of the tentative opening
bars expresses man's sense of grief at
the lost unity of humankind and
nature. When these bars are repeated
at the end of the piece, they appear
in a diderent light as a result of all
that has been heard in the meantime.
Once again, Mendelssohn
uses contrastive themes, but on this
occasion the theme symbolising
the ideal harmony that exists among
natural creatures and the brash motif
associated with the world of chivalry
are opposed by a third theme,
entrusted to the oboe, which leaves
its traces in both these worlds,
seeking to effect a rapprochement,
only to abandon them in the end more
lonely than ever before. Whereas
Mendelssoln's concert overtures are
rightly regarded as highly original
works that served as a model for many
later character-pieces and for the
sort of programme music
written by composers ranging from
Berlioz, Schumann and Wagner to Liszt,
Smetana and Tchaikovsky, the merger
between sonata form, overture and
poetic tone-painting that Mendelssohn
first essayed in this
work was to prove of the first
importance for his symphonic writing
in general.
Virtually coeval with the Melusine
overture is the composer's Italian
Symphony, a work which, thanks not
least to the letters that he wrote
from Italy, has
always run the risk of being
misconstrued as a musical Baedeker.
But Mendelssohn was no more concerned
here than he had been in his concert
overtures to indulge in mere
scenepainting, even if in the final
movement, which is headed “Saltarello”
and which recalls the overture to A
Midsummer Night's
Dream, he was inspired
by Neapolitan folk music. Far from
being intimidated by the shade of
Beethoven, he succeeded in clothing
his new ideas in compelling symphonic
garb, ideas whose novelty was by no
means lost on contemporary audiences.
The English conductor Julius
Benedict, who had studied with Carl
Maria von Weber, was one of the first
to point out, in a review
of the piece, that it represented a
radical new departure and that it was
“far ahead of its time".
Ronny
Dietrich
The author is
principal dramaturge at the
Zurich Opera. Both here and
in her previous appointments
at the Alte Oper in
Frankfurt and the Vienna
Konzerthaus, she has an
opportunity to follow
Nikolaus Harnoncourt's
work closely over a period
of many years.
Translation: Stewart
Spencer
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Nikolaus
Harnoncourt (1929-2016)
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