Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

FELIX MENDELSSOHN : Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844)

Born: February 3, 1809, in Hamburg

Died: November 4, 1847, in Leipzig

First performance: March 13, 1845, in Leipzig; Ferdinand David, violin; Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Niels Gade conducting

Orchestra: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was a composer, pianist, organist and conductor whose prodigious musical talents rivaled those of Mozart, and who, like Mozart, did not live to see his 40th birthday. But young Felix came from a well-to-do German family and was raised in an intellectually stimulating and stable environment, protected from the childhood exploitation that Mozart endured. At sixteen, Mendelssohn produced his first masterwork, the Octet for Strings, Op. 20, and the following year saw the completion of his brilliant opus 21, A Midsummer Night’s Dream concert overture. In terms of achieving his musical "maturity," Mendelssohn surpassed even Mozart.

Through the course of his career Mendelssohn became something of a superstar performer and composer, especially in Great Britain. In contrast to many of his flamboyant contemporaries, however, Mendelssohn neither overcame abject poverty, had a string of adulterous affairs, nor suffered syphilitic insanity—consequently, his reputation as a “Romantic” suffered. Following Mendelssohn's death from a series of strokes in 1847, Richard Wagner became a particularly vociferous critic, lumping him with the likes of Brahms for their unimpassioned, backward-looking drivel in contrast to his own more worthy creations of genius. In addition to tooting his own tuba, Wagner had ulterior motives which had nothing to do with Mendelssohn's music. For one, Maestro Mendelssohn apparently had rejected (and possibly lost) the score to Wagner’s early Symphony. For another, Wagner was virulently anti-Semitic, and although Mendelssohn was by all accounts a devout Lutheran, his grandfather Moses was a well-known Jewish philosopher.

Sadly, Wagner’s propaganda did have a negative effect among many critics even through most of the 20th Century, but Mendelssohn’s music has never fallen out of favor with concertgoers. Or bride's: the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummernight’s Dream (Op. 61, 1843) has long been regarded as the quintessential recessional for weddings. Ironically, this March is frequently paired with the bridal processional (“Here Comes the Bride…”) from Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin—it seems that posterity finds Mendelssohn’s music the perfect complement to Wagner’s, so it seems the two composers have been forever married, like it or not.

Mendelssohn’s flawless Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, remains among the most-frequently performed and recorded concertos ever written, and it is one of the most influential. He began sketching the first movement as early as 1838, but his many other commitments kept him from finishing it until 1844.

In the two short years following the Concerto's 1845 premiere, Mendelssohn achieved another lasting triumph with Elijah (184), a sacred oratorio second in popularity only to Handel's Messiah. But the Violin Concerto proved to be Mendelssohn's last orchestral masterpiece, and, more than any other, the work that fulfilled the promise of a sixteen-year-old Wunderkind.