A dream situation for Mendelssohn

Synopsis

Not many 19th century composers chose their parents as wisely as Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. Papa Mendelssohn was a wealthy banker in Berlin, and his musically gifted children grew up in a mansion where Sunday afternoon chamber music concerts were regular events. Felix and Fanny would perform their own pieces at the piano, and if young Felix had composed a little symphony for strings, why, it was a simple matter for Papa to hire the necessary musicians and have it performed.

It was an idyllic situation for any young composer, and certainly young Felix put his good fortune to good use. In July of 1826, when he was 17, Felix wrote to a friend: “I have grown accustomed to composing in our garden. Today or tomorrow I am going to dream there ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”

Mendelssohn had been reading a German translation of Shakespeare’s comedy, and on today’s date in 1826, completed a concert overture to that play. Felix and Fanny gave the first performance in a two-piano version at one of the family soirees, and a private orchestral reading at the mansion followed a few months later.

Mendelssohn intended his piece to represent the whole of the drama in miniature: “At the end,” he wrote, “after everything has been satisfactorily settled and the principal players have joyously left the stage, the elves and fairies bless the house, and disappear with the dawn. So the play ends, and my overture, too.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Felix Mendelssohn (1809 - 1847) A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec 46323

On This Day

Deaths

• 1904 - Austrian music critic and university professor Eduard Hanslick, champion of Brahms and enemy of Wagner, dies in Vienna, aged 78

• 1970 - German-born American composer Ingolf Dahl, age 68, in Frutigen, Switzerland;

Premieres

• 1946 - American premiere of Britten: opera "Peter Grimes," at Berkshire Music Center (Tangelwood), with Leonard Bernstein conducting;

• 1947 - Villa-Lobos: "Bachianas Brasileiras" No. 8, in Rome, conducted by the composer;

• 1947 - Von Einem: opera "Dantons Tod" (The Death of Danton) at the Salzburg, Festival in Austria,with Ferenc Fricsay conducting;

• 1966 - Henze: "Die Bassariden" (after Euripides' play "The Bacchae") at the Salzburg Festival in Austria;

• 1967 - Piston: Clarinet Concerto, during the Fifth Congregation of the Arts at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire;

• 1988 - Ned Rorem: “Bright Music” for flute, two violins, cello and piano, at Presbyterian Church, Bridgehampton (New York), by the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Associates;

• 2000 - Joan Tower: "Big Sky" for piano trio, in LaJolla, Calif., at a SummerFest concert featuring Chee-Yun (violin), David Finckel (cello) and Wu Han (piano);

Others

• 1826 - At his parent's mansion outside Berlin, the 17-year-old German composer Felix Mendelssohn completes his overture to Shakespeare's comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream" after reading the play the previous month; The first private performance (in a two-piano version) was given at the family mansion by Felix and his sister Fanny on November 19, 1826; The first public performance (in its orchestral version) was given in Stettlin on February 20, 1827, conducted by Carl Loewe; Mendelssohn returned to the play nearly two decades later after he had become court composer to the King of Prussia, creating a whole score of incidental music besides the overture, and himself conducted the concert premiere of the expanded incidental music in Berlin on November 14, 1842 in Berlin; The complete incidental music integrated into a staging of Shakespeare's play was performed at the Neue Palais at Potsdam on October 14, 1843.