Great Composers: Felix Mendelssohn

[@retiredmusiceducator3612]

I just love your stuff!!!!!!!!!!! and it helps me with my 7/8 classes and now, I will be putting this stuff to good use in a HS class. yay! thanks!!!

[@davidEdwardsTalk]

This man was incredible..thank you.

[@monicacall7532]

Mendelssohn carried on from Beethoven in showcasing the expressive abilities of my instrument the cello. His brother Paul was an excellent amateur cellist for whom he wrote his first cello sonata in F Major. Unless Paul was playing at a very advanced level Felix must’ve written the second sonata for another cellist. His other works for cello also show his great

[@rsv-code7004]

Mendelssohn is second only to Bach in my book. I'm continually amazed by him. Thanks for making this, I really enjoyed it.

[@lilian1514]

awesome videos, incredibly helpful and interesting! thank you :)

[@AntonioFormaro]

My favotite composer ever

[@classicalmusic3334]

From another source I read that Berlioz didn't like the fact that Wagner had very little admiration for Mendelssohn's music, so I wonder if Berlioz really disliked Mendelssohn's music as much as you mentioned in this video.

[@Tolstoy111]

Wagner liked M’s music.

[@monicacall7532]

Oops, accidentally hit the wrong key! His cello works show a great understanding of the instrument and it’s expressive qualities. Wagner and Tchaikovsky never consulted a cellist and their orchestral and solo parts don’t lay well in the hands and are awkward and sometimes downright infuriatingly difficult to navigate in the beginning. Brahms and Schumann, like Mendelssohn, took the time to run their works by professional cellist friends who made suggestions as to how to keep the expressive qualities while making the music lay well in the hands. Give me their solo, orchestral and chamber music parts to play any day! Mendelssohn wrote a cello concerto for Lisa Cristiani (correct name?) along with the gorgeous “Song Without Words” for cello. She only received the SWW, so she wrote Mendelssohn. He’d just died. Mrs. M wrote LC to reassure her that her husband had mailed the solo part and score to her. By the time that the letter reached Rome Cristiani had died in an epidemic of some kind. The concerto got lost in the mail and we are the poorer for its loss. How truly sad. I’ve played a lot of Mendelssohns music and find it to be some of the most beautiful of the romantic era. And, of course, I bless him for renewing the interest in Bach. No less than Schumann wrote accompaniments to the Solo Cello Suites! They’re dreadful but always good for a few laughs.

[@SpaghettiToaster]

Well, I think the debate over who was the greater prodigy should not disregard the question of who actually wrote the better music... which to me would be for the most part Mozart, as much as I love Mendelssohn's music as well.

[@ClassicalNerd]

I've always sort of viewed the idea of prodigy as being "which one was the most prolific at a young age" versus "who was the better composer," making prodigiousness a more objective calculation. There are great prodigies who amounted to very little or nothing at all, and great musicians who weren't prodigies in the slightest.

[@SpaghettiToaster]

Classical Nerd Well, taken to the extreme, this would mean whatever kid started humming nursery rhymes the earliest would be the greatest prodigy... I understand your point of view though. Still, I can understand people who consider Mozart the quintessential example of a child prodigy because of how quickly he came to produce excellent music of so many forms, as well as his skills as a performer. Personally, I like most of the very early Mozart pieces better than the very early Mendelssohn ones.

[@magentuspriest]

@@ClassicalNerd _comment of the year_

[@ClassicalNerd]

I don't know if it's showing up for anyone else, but certain parts of KZbin is claiming that this video's only 3:45. It's playing normally for me, but if it's messing up playback for anyone else, please let me know.

[@KuroiPK]

For me it's 17:20

[@ClassicalNerd]

It's showing up as that for me now as well, but I'll keep an eye on this for the time being in case it crops up again.

[@ChicanoViolin]

YAAAAAAA

[@ProudBerliozian]

Watch it there, dude! I understand that in the context of Mendelssohn, Berlioz was an "atheistic blowhard," but as far as weirdness, it is very naive to think him simply as "one of the weirdest figures in all of Romanticism" with no other adjective describing one of the greatest composers in history, a sentiment borne from a very narrow knowledge of his large musical and literary output. Berlioz was actually more a Classicist that most of his peers, retreating back to the purity of ideal in Gluck's doctrine for opera, the development of symphonic forms by Beethoven, the simplicity in melodic invention of Weber (and by simplicity I mean the organic evolution of the melody's creation, not that his melodies are trite or simplistic), and Spontini's sense of grandeur on the opera stage based on the realization of Gluck's ideals (Wagner would later refine those in his own vision, by creating the complete dramatic work.) While the more well known compositions of Berlioz--such as the Symphonie Fantastique, Harold in Italy, Damnation of Faust, Roman Carnival Overture and a couple of others--are strange to many ears even today, his instinct was not so crazy as it was different. He really was different, and novel things really, honestly emanated from him. But the way you put it (again, I understand that in the context of Mendelssohn, Berlioz is seen almost only as an oddball,) it appears the guy was simply crazy. It is still vital to remember that his tremendous contributions to the posterity of music--both in the public sphere as well as in the way composers, some of the greatest, turned to him in their development--in his wide variety of works ranging from the bizarre to the exquisite, he marked his place in this world as a pure genius. Perhaps it is time for a Berlioz video... I truly love these videos, and though I just discovered your channel, I'm devouring it for the rest of the night. Kudos.

[@ClassicalNerd]

I love Berlioz's music more than Mendelssohn's, but let's be honest-the guy, by his own admission, hatched a plan to kill his cheating girlfriend while he dressed in a French maid outfit. The fact that a character such as that could be friends with the infinitely more pious and reserved Mendelssohn downright astonished me, _especially_ considering that they each had disdain for the other's music. Berlioz's sheer influence in the history of Romanticism and even the orchestra itself is profound and not one many acknowledge even today. One of the biggest challenges towards putting together a Berlioz video-which has been in the work, script-wise, for a while-is that he was such an enigmatic character, capable of brilliant work even though even his friends thought him rather nuts.

[@ProudBerliozian]

LOL. From the Classical Music for Dummies perspective, that is indeed a strange man--but it would seem, from the way they made a huge to-do about that relatively insignificant story (it's historically significant only because it was right after that, in Nice, that he penned three of his concert overtures), that Berlioz was a raging lunatic. that was all that there was in l'episode de la vie d'un artiste. Fact is, he was no more eccentric than his colleagues, peers and brethren in the Romantic era of the Arts, such as Alkan, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Dreyschock, Wordsworth, Shelley, Elliot, Delacroix, Cezanne...and the list goes on, as you can see. So, biographically he may have had some interesting episodes that set him apart for juicy details, but musically and philosophically, he was quite the puritan of old ideas, hearkening to Rameau, Gluck, Beethoven and Spontini (certainly an old fashioned composer by the standards of his time.) However, his unique, often strange, harmonic language and disdain for rigid adherence to forms and rules--let alone his singular genius and trendsetting influence in the use of sound, whether orchestral, vocal, instrumental and even noise--made him stand out as any of the voices of what we (lazily and ignorantly*) call "greats" today. Even Donald Francis Tovey, an avowed detractor of Berlioz, recognized how "Boiling oil awaits [him] for [his] irreverent treatment of Berlioz in the fourth volume of [his] Essays. Nevertheless, [he] claim[s] to see a great deal more than his out-and-out admirers see in Berlioz, for they give [him] no sufficient evidence that they see enough in the art of music to measure anything so important as Berlioz’s actual musical achievement." I'll be honest: I don't find him all that enigmatic in context of the period, and while many people did find him strange, he was no nut. He was truly shrewd and resourceful, embittered and tempered by experience. His biggest concern in life was writing music that he thought was possible (which Parisians thought impossible and others, like the Germans, English and Russians found fantastic, though not fully comprehensible), getting it performed and being accepted for it. The fact that those dreams intersected with his detested career as a critic (where he was equally brilliant, but so resentful of it) created more enemies and detractors than he deserved (as is evinced in the story of the premiere of L'enfance du Christ, where he withheld his name from the program as the composer as a test to the biases of the newspaper critics, and his detractors fell in his trap, extolling the work--one even foaming that Berlioz could never write such exquisite music...) and so he suffered petulantly, publicly, to the ridicule of his enemies. But still, through it all, I find quite a sober, human, hustling composer whose one fault and greatness, simultaneously, is his adamant decision never to allow conventions and rules to hinder him from letting his fancy fly. *I refer here to the general trend of music purveyance, scholarship and appreciation heretofore of the typical musician, music director, musicologist, critic, etc, and not you. What I discovered yesterday, perusing your young channel was how diverse, erudite and curious you are, and you do something that I've long, long, long ago been fighting for with all the meager voice I have--to re-explore, rediscover and revere the music of composer long forgotten and ignored. This work is sacred and long overdue, and I think that technology, being as tremendously useful as it is, both in this medium, and in the fact that we can stream the millions of tracks of obscure music on, say Naxos, is so promising and encouraging to this end.

[@ClassicalNerd]

Well, I'm not holding Berlioz's life or work to any different standard than the other artists you mentioned, and that's part of his appeal-that a "conservative" could be a "revolutionary" figure, to put it in the simplest terms. Yet most every time Berlioz pops up in the biography of another musician, there's some oddball story about him, thus my assessment of him as "weird"-as in "enigmatic"-in this particular video. (At the very least, even if the Berlioz anecdotes are embellished, he's almost the exact opposite of Mendelssohn, who was very much bound by the rules. How they managed a friendship remains baffling.)

[@swymaj02]

is Fanny's work out in the public sphere?

[@proman84]

It is. You can find a lot of it on KZbin.

[@KuroiPK]

Are you working on a rebranding of your channel? The new font is more suitable for thumbnails, because it's easier to read wenn small. What could also work quite well if you search for a hand lettering font style, or do it yourself but I don't know if you know how. (design is a interesting fun thing to do)

[@ClassicalNerd]

I wouldn't consider it a rebranding as much as little tweaks here and there to improve production quality. As much as I loved the old font, there was little I could do for thumbnail visibility despite my best efforts. If I find a handwritten-looking font that's visible, I'll definitely switch to that.

[@KuroiPK]

If you use adobe cc you could look at the available Typekit fonts. Quite high quality and easy to use. I use them quite a bit, but for other reasons. It seems that they also have a free plan for typekit too.

[@telephilia]

Mendelssohn composed some pretty damn great music but also a lot of bourgeois mediocrity. More accomplished and polished than Schumann but on the whole not as great a composer.because what is lacking is a certain passion.

[@teddythemlgcorgi7309]

Which specific pieces by Mendelssohn do you think is mediocre? Just curious

[@dinosaurcj]

I am curious too, could you name some?

[@ONeirda]

Would you please be so kind to train yourself to be able to say "Gööööthe" instead of "Guttey"? You will manage. Just give it a try. By the way, there is something called International Phonetical Alphabet (IPA). In IPA, "Goethe" is spoken "ˈgœ-tə". Please get yourself familiar with IPA. It will help you with languages other than American English. (Perhaps you need to be informed that there exist other languages than only American English.) I am sure you will be able to get that right. With just a little effort. A tiny little effort. Thank you so much.

[@ClassicalNerd]

This is an ancient video, before I knew German. :)