More Syndication, Day 4 – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 4 – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn

If you hear the words “child prodigy” in association with classical music, I bet you would think of one name in particular, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his full name is actually even longer!), and you would certainly be right to do so.  Mozart’s background as a rigorously disciplined, and some would say, exploited child prodigy most assuredly contributed in a major way to the amazingly mature and technically assured composing musician he would become in his adult years.  For a reflection on Mozart’s prodigiousness and sometimes fraught relationship with his father, Leopold, see this post.  But there is another child prodigy in the classical tradition, a composer whom some say was capable of even greater feats even earlier on than Mozart.  The similarities don’t end there; he had a musically gifted sister also, just like Mozart.  And he led a tragically brief but productive life; Mozart lived to only 36, the other prodigy to 38, although much less is made of his untimely death than is made of Mozart’s.  This composer began his childhood a mere two decades after Mozart’s death, and looked to the prior master for inspiration and model work during his childhood and throughout his life.  This lesser-known child prodigy is Felix Mendelssohn. 

As prodigious as Mendelssohn clearly was, his family was careful not to exploit his gifts in the was Mozart’s father, Leopold, is often accused of doing.  So Mendelssohn was raised at home, much more privately, although his friends, family and other community members did have abundant opportunities to hear his early musical works in concerts organized on the grounds of the family estate.  But Mendelssohn was not paraded about Europe, performing for heads of state and traveling to exhaustion as his elder prodigy had been forced to do.  Perhaps the Mendelssohns looked to Wolfgang’s experience and, recognizing the potential for psychological harm, preferred to keep Felix better-grounded, but still provide a first rate classical education, at which he worked most diligently.

But some say Mendelssohn’s early development was even more impressive than Mozart’s, allowing the creation of works that demonstrate great imagination, grace, and technical perfection during his teenage years (indeed, this was, unbeknownst to those close to him, middle age).  While Mozart did not start to generate works that have entered the standard repertoire until his twenties, Mendelssohn composed at least three during his teenage years that have.  This trilogy includes one of his most significant works, one that pioneered his most important contribution to symphonic music, the Midsummernight’s Dream Overture.  Composed at age 17, this monumental orchestral work, which brilliantly captures the fantasy and ethereality of Shakespeare’s play, is still recognized as one of his greatest achievements.  And 16 years later he composed other movements to round out the suite, including the famous Wedding March which runs the serious risk of cliche whenever it is chosen as a recessional (I play a lot of weddings these days; it is selected by brides on occasion), but the overture is quite sufficient without the other movements, and as such is the first example from Mendelssohn’s pen of a concert overture, that is a significant movement for orchestra, usually but not always programmatic, which is a self-contained work and not accompanied by other movements.  Your typical symphony will have 4 movements, all intended to be played together in one performance, and doing so will create a sense of balance and completion that you might find lacking in omitting any of them.  But a concert overture is just one movement, lasting usually between 9 and 15 minutes.  As such, Mendelssohn was pioneering a significant expression of orchestral music which formed the basis for the later symphonic poem, used to such great effect in succeeding generations by Franz Liszt, and later Richard Strauss.  These work in much the same way as the concert overture, but also tend to incorporate newer ideas of thematic development that Mendelssohn had not quite envisioned. 

Over the course of his career Mendelssohn wrote four symphonies that  were more or less conventionally plotted (and one other one with an extended choral cantata at the end – I tend not to include it in the count for that reason) and seven of these concert overtures (and I do include the charming Overture for Wind Instruments in that count).  I have to say that if I was stuck on a desert island and only able to bring either Mendelssohn’s symphonies or his concert overtures, I would take the latter (except for the Hebrides overture; my wife, Heidi, can have that one all to herself), and I’ve felt that way for a while.  There’s just something that I find more satisfying about them than the symphonies.  Maybe it’s the way that Mendelssohn was forced to ingeniously pack his subjects and stories into a briefer, more concentrated form.  Maybe this more concentrated form forces everything in the concert overtures to be more impactful and less wasteful.  But whatever the reason, I tend to gravitate toward that collection over the symphonies.  And if I had to pick one of Mendelssohn’s concert overtures as my favorite, a very tough choice, I think I would probably end up going with Meeresstille und glückliche Fährt, which translates to “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” (that’s a tough choice – I could listen to Ruy Blas for hours, and I like the Trumpet Overture quite a bit; also The Fair Melusine).  I love this piece!  I’ve listened to it many times over the years and it always moves me in a most exuberant way.  Even bringing a better developed sense of harmony and aesthetics to the listening experience in recent years, I feel similarly enthused by it as when I first heard it a decade ago.

Calm Sea and Prosperous voyage was composed when Mendelssohn was 19 years old.  One fruit of his very well-rounded humanistic education was a love for poetry, most especially his older compatriot Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  The feeling was mutual – when Goethe experienced Mendelssohn’s musicianship at the tender age of 7, Goethe compared him to Mozart, but much more favorably.  And Mendelssohn wasn’t the only one inspired by the elder poet; many Germanic musicians of the nineteenth century incorporated texts by Goethe into their works.  In 1815, when Mendelssohn was just 6, Beethoven had composed a cantata for choir and orchestra using the texts of two poems by Goethe: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.  I find the cantata nice, the first half emanating the German choral “glow” and the second with a rousing Beethoven finish, but not particularly memorable.  Mendelssohn, on the other hand,  is a man after my heart:

 Can’t you feel the excitement at the end as the ship approaches harbor and the crew and spectators on the pier celebrate?  I find the fast section constantly topping itself with one deeply fulfilling and celebratory gesture after another, always clothed in Mendelssohn’s utterly natural and brilliantly clear orchestration.  Once the trumpet fanfares start to layer on top of each other you will know the end of the work is near, and its final progression is a great plagal cadence, like a contented “a-men” as the ship moors.  

How did you find the first half of the work, the evocation of the calm sea?  Very peaceful, isn’t it?  But listen again, and listen deeper, for there is an edge, a base level of anxiety.  Why would this be?  A calm, glassy sea is such a tranquil image, isn’t it?  Well, it’s important to remember that during the era of sailing ships, a calm sea worked against productivity, providing no fuel for the sails.  It was only on choppy, or even rough seas, that sailing ships could progress along their course and ultimately deliver their cargo.  Listening in light of this, we can hear the initial active gestures of wind and wave to be beacons of hope cutting through the calm; the second half, Prosperous Voyage, is simply manic in the joy of its relief to finally be pushed along toward harbor.  19 he may have been, but Mendelssohn clearly had a very adult understanding of the commercial seaways, and was mature beyond his years is his ability to capture its psychology in perfect orchestration and flawless musical pacing.  

Mendelssohn may have gained an early lead on Mozart’s development, creating enduring works of maturity a good half decade in his life before the elder prodigy, but critics also point out that Mozart’s development, once it began, was continuous and culminated in works of astounding depth toward the end of his life.  This was less so with Mendelssohn; some would say his development plateaued and could have gone further.  This is, of course, a complex thing to analyze, and can easily become mired in armchair speculation, as all alternate histories are wont to do, but I understand the criticism.  Still, I am happy that Mendelssohn’s rapid early development yielded fantastic works such as Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which continue to inspire listeners with their breadth and perfection.  That he was so young at the time of writing them is a bonus.

 

 

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All That Glitters, Day 5 – “Spring Celebration” from The First Day of Spring by Felix Mendelssohn

This week’s theme is…All That Glitters!  Gold has been attractive to humankind and symbolic of opulent wealth through all of recorded history.  It has shaped human civilization and provided an evocative poetic metaphor.  This week we explore music that was influenced by gold as it altered the course of history and provided poetic inspiration.

All That Glitters, Day 5 – “Spring Celebration” from The First Day of Spring by Felix Mendelssohn

Over the course of the eighteenth century a rather significant shift in priorities was taking place among the musicians of European art music.  If you examine the primary output of Baroque composers and compare it to that of the Romantic composers you will notice a difference, and it happened gradually over the course of the Classical era.  The difference to which I refer is that vocal and choral music was given much greater significance in the eighteenth century, while instrumental music achieved an equal level of prominence in the nineteenth.  Bach and Handel held as their primary professional aims to create vocal and choral works for most of their careers.  It’s not that they didn’t create instrumental music; they both left many notable and highly-regarded examples from many genres, including keyboard music, chamber music like solo and trio sonatas, and orchestral suites and concertos.  And Bach, in typical Northern German fashion, left copious amounts of virtuoso organ music.  But, had you asked either of them what they considered to be their primary job, they probably would have both referenced a vocal or choral genre like church cantata, opera, and oratorio, depending on when you asked.  Even their contemporary Vivaldi, whom we remember primarily for his mind-bogglingly prolific production of instrumental concertos, produced considerable amounts of vocal music with 80 operas (more than Handel), and vast amounts of sacred choral music for the Catholic Church.  This focus on vocal and choral music makes sense: the Baroque style period accompanied the birth and early development of opera, and the religious choral music was inherited from the noble polyphonic choral practice of the Renaissance which informed subsequent choral composers of music for both Catholic and Protestant worship.

The Classical Composers, especially Mozart and Haydn, being Catholic, continued the tradition of composing choral masses.  They were also both prolific composers of opera, with Mozart especially providing notable classics in both Italian and German that are still considered some of the best in history.  But over the course of their careers a shift was taking place.  Like all such shifts it is certainly due to a complex set of influences working in tandem, incorporating transformations in the socio-economic systems that supported musicians, and also technological developments in the production of musical instruments which imbued them with greater power, range of color, versatility, and operational reliability.  At the same time small instrumental forms that had begun to rise to prominence in the Baroque era, especially the opera overture and instrumental concerto so dear to Vivaldi, were broadening, deepening, and taking on new dimensions of scale, harmonic complexity and orchestral color.  The sum total of all of this was that genres like the symphony, solo keyboard sonata, string quartet, and concerto, had begun to rival opera and sacred choral music as the primary vehicles of European musical expression.  By the time of Beethoven, and perhaps because of him, the shift was complete, and the true test of a composer was in his symphonies, not his operas or cantatas.

These vocal forms certainly did not disappear, nor will they ever.  From its inception in 1600 opera was here to stay, and certain composers, like Rossini (see this post) and Wagner (see this post), chose to make their careers more or less exclusively by this medium.  Many composers wrote operas less exclusively as well.  But the majority of composers were making their careers primarily through instrumental music.  Beethoven set the pace for this.  He is best-known for his nine symphonies, thirty two piano sonatas, seven concertos and fifteen string quartets.  Compare this to his one opera and two choral masses; the balance is much different than it was in previous generations.

German composers followed in Beethoven’s footsteps, and we primarily know his successors, Weber and Wagner excluded, for their instrumental music.  But, there was also a certain vocal form that emerged for the German Romantics which had not really existed in previous style periods, the lied, or “song”.  The plural is lieder.  You can see this post for more about lieder from two great German masters.  The lied was most commonly found for solo singer and transparent piano accompaniment, but German composers also developed settings for choir, sometimes accompanied and sometimes a capella.  One particularly delightful cycle by Felix Mendelssohn, one of Beethoven’s artistic heirs of the early nineteenth century, is the a capella Opus 48 of 1839, The First Day of Spring, which includes six short songs for mixed voices, all in celebration of springtime, a common and inspiring image for the early Romantics.

Mendelssohn, the most classical of all the Romantics, created a formidable output that is sorely misrepresented today.  Most listeners have heard a couple of his symphonies, some of his concert overtures (for more on his concert overtures see this post), his violin concerto, perhaps some of his chamber music, and possibly some of his Handelian oratorio Elijah.  But Mendelssohn’s output was actually mostly vocal, owing to his prolific production of German lieder and sacred choral music.  His production of the latter makes sense in that he spent so much time in Great Britain, whose royalty and citizenry adored him and his ability to compose within the English choral tradition.  But there are numerous German songs, including some for chorus, like those of Opus 48.

There is a distinctive color to German choral music of the Romantic era.  It started, as far as I can tell, during Beethoven’s lifetime, in his works and those of his contemporaries.  It has a stillness, a glow about it that I have always found most enchanting.  It is a thoroughly Romantic trademark; I have never heard it in Mozart or Haydn with their busy textures and accompaniment patterns.  Only the German composers who lived during the nineteenth century exhibit this feature, and I have noted the quality in choral music by Beethoven, Spohr, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss (although he did leave any choral music: I still note a similar quality in some of his songs and operas – see this post).  I’m not sure how to describe it, nor do I know exactly how it is created.  The same voices can sing Palestrina, Bach, and Mozart, and you would not hear it.  It’s just German Romantic magic 🙂  See if you can pick up on that warm glow in the third song of Mendelssohn’s Opus 48, “Sweet, golden spring day”…

 

German	English
Süsser, gold’ner Frühlingstag! Inniges Entzücken! Wenn mir je ein Lied gelang, sollt’ es heut’ nicht glücken? Doch warum in dieser Zeit an die Arbeit treten? Frühling ist ein hohes Fest: lasst mich ruh’n und beten.	Sweet  gold’ner spring day ! Intimate delight ! If I ever managed a song , shall ‘ there today ‘ does not succeed ? But why take the job at this time? Spring is a great feast : Let me find rest and pray .

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Music about Transportation, Day 3 – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn

This week’s theme is…Music about Transportation!  When we hear the word “transportation” in the twenty-first century, we imagine many modes of moving people and things from place to place, over sea, land and air.  This is largely a modern set of images, although people and things have moved from place to place throughout all of history.  Because of this, the theme of transportation is present in music to varying degrees through its history.

Music about Transportation, Day 3 – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn

If you hear the words “child prodigy” in association with classical music, I bet you would think of one name in particular, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his full name is actually even longer!), and you would certainly be right to do so.  Mozart’s background as a rigorously disciplined, and some would say, exploited child prodigy most assuredly contributed in a major way to the amazingly mature and technically assured composing musician he would become in his adult years.  For a reflection on Mozart’s prodigiousness and sometimes fraught relationship with his father, Leopold, see this post.  But there is another child prodigy in the classical tradition, a composer whom some say was capable of even greater feats even earlier on than Mozart.  The similarities don’t end there; he had a musically gifted sister also, just like Mozart.  And he led a tragically brief but productive life; Mozart lived to only 36, the other prodigy to 38, although much less is made of his untimely death than is made of Mozart’s.  This composer began his childhood a mere two decades after Mozart’s death, and looked to the prior master for inspiration and model work during his childhood and throughout his life.  This lesser-known child prodigy is Felix Mendelssohn. 

As prodigious as Mendelssohn clearly was, his family was careful not to exploit his gifts in the was Mozart’s father, Leopold, is often accused of doing.  So Mendelssohn was raised at home, much more privately, although his friends, family and other community members did have abundant opportunities to hear his early musical works in concerts organized on the grounds of the family estate.  But Mendelssohn was not paraded about Europe, performing for heads of state and traveling to exhaustion as his elder prodigy had been forced to do.  Perhaps the Mendelssohns looked to Wolfgang’s experience and, recognizing the potential for psychological harm, preferred to keep Felix better-grounded, but still provide a first rate classical education, at which he worked most diligently.

But some say Mendelssohn’s early development was even more impressive than Mozart’s, allowing the creation of works that demonstrate great imagination, grace, and technical perfection during his teenage years (indeed, this was, unbeknownst to those close to him, middle age).  While Mozart did not start to generate works that have entered the standard repertoire until his twenties, Mendelssohn composed at least three during his teenage years that have.  This trilogy includes one of his most significant works, one that pioneered his most important contribution to symphonic music, the Midsummernight’s Dream Overture.  Composed at age 17, this monumental orchestral work, which brilliantly captures the fantasy and ethereality of Shakespeare’s play, is still recognized as one of his greatest achievements.  And 16 years later he composed other movements to round out the suite, including the famous Wedding March which runs the serious risk of cliche whenever it is chosen as a recessional (I play a lot of weddings these days; it is selected by brides on occasion), but the overture is quite sufficient without the other movements, and as such is the first example from Mendelssohn’s pen of a concert overture, that is a significant movement for orchestra, usually but not always programmatic, which is a self-contained work and not accompanied by other movements.  Your typical symphony will have 4 movements, all intended to be played together in one performance, and doing so will create a sense of balance and completion that you might find lacking in omitting any of them.  But a concert overture is just one movement, lasting usually between 9 and 15 minutes.  As such, Mendelssohn was pioneering a significant expression of orchestral music which formed the basis for the later symphonic poem, used to such great effect in succeeding generations by Franz Liszt, and later Richard Strauss.  These work in much the same way as the concert overture, but also tend to incorporate newer ideas of thematic development that Mendelssohn had not quite envisioned. 

Over the course of his career Mendelssohn wrote four symphonies that  were more or less conventionally plotted (and one other one with an extended choral cantata at the end – I tend not to include it in the count for that reason) and seven of these concert overtures (and I do include the charming Overture for Wind Instruments in that count).  I have to say that if I was stuck on a desert island and only able to bring either Mendelssohn’s symphonies or his concert overtures, I would take the latter (except for the Hebrides overture; my wife, Heidi, can have that one all to herself), and I’ve felt that way for a while.  There’s just something that I find more satisfying about them than the symphonies.  Maybe it’s the way that Mendelssohn was forced to ingeniously pack his subjects and stories into a briefer, more concentrated form.  Maybe this more concentrated form forces everything in the concert overtures to be more impactful and less wasteful.  But whatever the reason, I tend to gravitate toward that collection over the symphonies.  And if I had to pick one of Mendelssohn’s concert overtures as my favorite, a very tough choice, I think I would probably end up going with Meeresstille und glückliche Fährt, which translates to “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” (that’s a tough choice – I could listen to Ruy Blas for hours, and I like the Trumpet Overture quite a bit; also The Fair Melusine).  I love this piece!  I’ve listened to it many times over the years and it always moves me in a most exuberant way.  Even bringing a better developed sense of harmony and aesthetics to the listening experience in recent years, I feel similarly enthused by it as when I first heard it a decade ago.

Calm Sea and Prosperous voyage was composed when Mendelssohn was 19 years old.  One fruit of his very well-rounded humanistic education was a love for poetry, most especially his older compatriot Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  The feeling was mutual – when Goethe experienced Mendelssohn’s musicianship at the tender age of 7, Goethe compared him to Mozart, but much more favorably.  And Mendelssohn wasn’t the only one inspired by the elder poet; many Germanic musicians of the nineteenth century incorporated texts by Goethe into their works.  In 1815, when Mendelssohn was just 6, Beethoven had composed a cantata for choir and orchestra using the texts of two poems by Goethe: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.  I find the cantata nice, the first half emanating the German choral “glow” and the second with a rousing Beethoven finish, but not particularly memorable.  Mendelssohn, on the other hand,  is a man after my heart:

 Can’t you feel the excitement at the end as the ship approaches harbor and the crew and spectators on the pier celebrate?  I find the fast section constantly topping itself with one deeply fulfilling and celebratory gesture after another, always clothed in Mendelssohn’s utterly natural and brilliantly clear orchestration.  Once the trumpet fanfares start to layer on top of each other you will know the end of the work is near, and its final progression is a great plagal cadence, like a contented “a-men” as the ship moors.  

How did you find the first half of the work, the evocation of the calm sea?  Very peaceful, isn’t it?  But listen again, and listen deeper, for there is an edge, a base level of anxiety.  Why would this be?  A calm, glassy sea is such a tranquil image, isn’t it?  Well, it’s important to remember that during the era of sailing ships, a calm sea worked against productivity, providing no fuel for the sails.  It was only on choppy, or even rough seas, that sailing ships could progress along their course and ultimately deliver their cargo.  Listening in light of this, we can hear the initial active gestures of wind and wave to be beacons of hope cutting through the calm; the second half, Prosperous Voyage, is simply manic in the joy of its relief to finally be pushed along toward harbor.  19 he may have been, but Mendelssohn clearly had a very adult understanding of the commercial seaways, and was mature beyond his years is his ability to capture its psychology in perfect orchestration and flawless musical pacing.  

Mendelssohn may have gained an early lead on Mozart’s development, creating enduring works of maturity a good half decade in his life before the elder prodigy, but critics also point out that Mozart’s development, once it began, was continuous and culminated in works of astounding depth toward the end of his life.  This was less so with Mendelssohn; some would say his development plateaued and could have gone further.  This is, of course, a complex thing to analyze, and can easily become mired in armchair speculation, as all alternate histories are wont to do, but I understand the criticism.  Still, I am happy that Mendelssohn’s rapid early development yielded fantastic works such as Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which continue to inspire listeners with their breadth and perfection.  That he was so young at the time of writing them is a bonus.

—

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