Zwei Miszellen zur Mendelssohn-Rezeption

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-151
Author(s):  
Erich Reimer
Keyword(s):  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn

Die Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys Oratorium "Paulus" (Nr. 16) entnommene Bläserfanfare, die alljährlich während des Libori-Festes in Paderborn als Libori-Tusch erklingt, ist wahrscheinlich 1836, acht Wochen nach der Uraufführung des "Paulus" in Düsseldorf, zum tausendjährigen Libori-Jubiläum in Paderborn eingeführt worden. Als Vermittler kommt der Louis-Spohr-Schüler Otto Julius Gehrke (1807-1878) in Frage. Bei der Bläserfanfare am Ende des vierten Satzes der "Rheinischen Symphonie" von Robert Schumann handelt es sich mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit um eine Anspielung auf die Bläserzwischenspiele im Wachet-auf-Choral (Nr. 16) des "Paulus" von Mendelssohn. Diese Anspielung dürfte in einem assoziativen Zusammenhang mit Schumanns Interesse am Kölner Dom gestanden haben.

Über die verschollenen geglaubte Schauspielmusik zu Shakespeare "Othello" von August Wilhelm Ambros

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Stefan Wolkenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Robert Schumann ◽  
National Library ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Incidental Music ◽  
The Common ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn

Der Musikwissenschaftler August Wilhelm Ambros (1816-1876) spielte als Feuilletonist und Komponist im Prager Musikleben der 1840er Jahre eine wichtige Rolle. Seine 1848 komponierte Schauspielmusik zu William Shakespeares "Othello" (die in Prag zahlreiche Aufführungen erlebte) wurde nie publiziert und galt als verschollen. Diese Ansicht muss revidiert werden. Das Autograph der Komposition befindet sich seit 1939 unbeachtet im Besitz der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Die erste Sichtung ergab folgenden Befund: Ambros hat sich an dem für eine Schauspielmusik üblichen Modell orientiert. Neben Ouvertüre und Finale besteht die Komposition aus mehreren Zwischenaktmusiken, die durch die Handlung des Dramas miteinander verknüpft sind. Stilistisch orientiert sich die Komposition an den Werken Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys und Robert Schumanns, die für den Prager Davidsbündler Ambros als wichtige Vorbilder fungierten. Durch die Entdeckung der Schauspielmusik zu "Othello" lässt sich diese immer wieder betonte Nähe nun an einem größeren Werk untersuchen.    The musicologist August Wilhelm Ambros (1816-1876) played an important role as feature writer and composer in the musical life of Prague during the 1840s. In 1848 he composed an incidental music for William Shakespeare's drama "Othello" which was performed in Prague for several times, but never was published. It has been considered to be lost, what has to be revised. The autograph of the composition is owned by the Austrian National Library since 1939, but has met with no response so far. The results of a first investigation are: the music to the drama "Othello" does not diverge from the common patterns of this genre. It consists an overture, a finale and some intermission music. Its style is affected, like most of Ambros' other compositions, by Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The recovering of this composition now allows to research this influence on a larger opus. 

A Crash Course in Chopinology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jonathan Kregor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Franz Liszt ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Western World ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Hector Berlioz ◽  
The World ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn

As the Western world celebrated the dawn of its third millennium, devotees of nineteenth-century art music started to prepare for a spate of bicentennials. By 2013, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner had been honoured with symposia, concerts, exhibitions and premieres the world over. These events offered opportunities for participants to take stock of who these composers once were, who they are now, and how they might endure to the next milestone anniversary.

On Musical Journeys: William Sterndale Bennett’s Diaries, 1836–1842

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-232
Author(s):  
Bettina S. Mühlenbeck
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Travel Diaries ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
The City ◽  
Productive Time

The present article explores the travel diaries William Sterndale Bennett kept on his three extended journeys from London to Leipzig between 1836 and 1842. In the autumn of 1836 the young pianist and composer embarked on the first and longest of ultimately three residencies in Leipzig. Invited by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, he came to the burgeoning centre for instrumental music in order to spend productive time in the artistic circle surrounding Mendelssohn. Bennett began keeping a diary, in which he recorded his experiences – from mundane to musical – and which de facto evolved into a silent travel companion. He repeated this process on his subsequent two travels. The diaries offer valuable first-hand accounts of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts under Mendelssohn’s leadership (who served as its Kapellmeister from 1835 to 1847) as well as the semi-private soirées in the prestigious salons of the city. In the privacy of the personal journal, Bennett did not shy away from making bold statements concerning compositions, performance practices, the quality of musical instruments or socio-cultural idiosyncrasies. Especially intriguing is the congenial connection he made with Robert Schumann. The two artists shared an ad hoc, allusive affinity and community of solidarity that has been overlooked in the past. All of this is the more revealing in light of his otherwise soft-spoken and reserved personality, particularly since Bennett’s journaling also offers a view into his own compositional and creative process during this important phase of his career. Apart from tracing musical opinions expressed, aesthetic positions maintained and cultural differences observed, this article follows the artistic bond between William Sterndale and Robert Schumann.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN AND ROBERT SCHUMANN

2014 ◽  
pp. 1007-1053
Author(s):  
Emil Naumann ◽  
Ferdinand Christian Wilhelm Praeger
Keyword(s):  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn

Bach's Legacy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Stinson
Keyword(s):  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Negative Thoughts ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Organ Works ◽  
Vocal Works ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Edward Elgar

This book examines how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Edward Elgar—engaged with the legacy of the music of J. S. Bach. It investigates the various ways in which these individuals responded to Bach’s oeuvre, not as composers per se, but as performers, conductors, scholars, critics, and all-around ambassadors. In its detailed analyses of both musical and epistolary sources, the book sheds light on how Bach’s works were received within the musical circles of these composers. The book’s narrative also helps humanize these individuals as it reconstructs, with touching immediacy, and often by recounting colorful anecdotes, the intimate social circumstances in which Bach’s music was performed and discussed. Special emphasis is given to Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s reception of Bach’s organ works, Schumann’s encounter with the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Wagner’s musings on the Well-Tempered Clavier, and Elgar’s (resoundingly negative) thoughts on Bach’s vocal works.

Clara Schumann's Interiorities and the Cutting Edge of Popular Pianism

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 697-765
Author(s):  
Alexander Stefaniak
Keyword(s):  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Variation Sets ◽  
Music Market ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Variations On A Theme

In her contemporaries’ imaginations Clara Schumann transcended aesthetic pitfalls endemic to virtuosity. Scholars have stressed her performance of canonic repertory as a practice through which she established this image. In this study I argue that her concerts of the 1830s and 1840s also staged an elevated form of virtuosity through showpieces that inhabited the flagship genres of popular pianism and that, for contemporary critics, possessed qualities of interiority that allowed them to transcend merely physical or “mechanical” engagement with virtuosity. They include Henselt's études and variation sets, Chopin's “Là ci darem” Variations, op. 2, and Clara's own Romance variée, op. 3, Piano Concerto, op. 7, and Pirate Variations, op. 8. Her 1830s and early 1840s programming offers a window onto a rich intertwining of critical discourse, her own and her peers’ compositions, and her strategies as a pianist-composer. This context reveals that aspirations about elevating virtuosity shaped a broader, more varied field of repertory, compositional strategies, and critical responses than we have recognized. It was a capacious, flexible ideology and category whose discourses pervaded the sheet music market, the stage, and the drawing room and embraced not only a venerated, canonic tradition but also the latest popularly styled virtuosic vehicles. In the final stages of the article I propose that Clara Schumann's 1853 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20, alludes to her work of the 1830s and 1840s, evoking the range of guises this pianist-composer gave to her virtuosity in what was already a wide-ranging career.

The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Crawford ◽  
Hildegard Fritsch
Keyword(s):  
Robert Schumann
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