Felix Mendelssohn Takes to the Woods and Celebrates Autumn

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Image provided via Wikimedia Commons–oil portrait by Edward Magnus, Berlin State Library

We don’t typically think of Felix Mendelssohn as a great outdoorsman nor as a composer of intimate songs. He’s associated most commonly with big orchestral works, notably his symphonies and concerti. His second area of expertise is in the area of big choral works, either his own (Elijah) or those of J. S. Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn was pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting Bach’s great music back into the public sphere, starting with his direction in 1829 of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in Berlin. Mendelssohn was only 20 at the time, and for the rest of his short life he was profoundly influenced by Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, his final large-scale masterwork achievement completed before his death, was written very much in the style of the Passion. (If you’re curious about how and why this young man was so taken with a Baroque composer whose works had completely fallen out of favor, you can’t do better than to read this article that lays out the whole chain of transmission. Key sentence: “Only the advent of an extraordinary individual could redirect an entire society’s attention towards a forgotten composer.”)

But enough of that. What about these outdoorsy songs? Well, I honestly don’t know why the rather frail young man who suffered from chronic ill health all his life liked being out in nature; I would have thought that he’d stick close to home and its comforts. But he wrote a whole set of lieder that were subtitled “To be sung outdoors” (“Im Freien zu singen”) and actively sought out lyrics to be used. In one letter he asked for his friend the poet Karl Klingemann to “send me a song or a pair, to be sung in autumn, or better yet in summer, or in spring, on the water or in a meadow or on a bridge, or in a forest or garden. …” And we do have one description in a letter to his mother of a time when Mendelssohn indeed got to fulfill his dream of an open-air concert:

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In Taberna/In the Tavern

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“In the Tavern” by David Teniers the Younger, 1610-1690, from The National Gallery of Art, public domain

One of the most popular concert choral works of the 20th century is Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. I’ve written a book about it, and I’d encourage you to take a look if your own group is involved in a performance. Below is a version of a chapter about one selection, “In Taberna,” which we’re including in an upcoming concert called “Harmony and Hops,” all about the joys of Germany and drinking, in whatever combination we can come up with.

This particular piece is part of a larger section of Carmina that is also titled “In Taberna.” In that section Orff includes some texts about the joys of drinking, gambling, and lust. It’s fair to say that it’s this section that has given Carmina as a whole its scandalous reputation of being sacrilegious, but in reality none of these pieces are directly about church institutions at all. That whole connection stems from the fact that the set of original medieval manuscripts from which the texts were taken happened to be found in a monastery. But even the piece “Ego sum Abbas/I Am the Abbot” isn’t about a real abbot at all but about an “abbot of the drinkers” who presides over a parodical “Drinkers’ Mass.” So don’t take any of this too seriously!

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Why Is Mendelssohn’s Name Sometimes Listed as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy?

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(Image accessed via Library of Congress website)

Note to my readers: This post is a chapter from the book I wrote about Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, which I was privileged to perform with my own choir a number of years ago. This coming October the Cherry Creek Chorale will be performing one of Mendelssohn’s songs in a lovely, varied program titled “Harmony and Hops.” I’ll be writing specific posts about our selections, but in the meantime here’s this material on one of our composers:

I remember seeing this version of Mendelssohn’s name on a piano piece I was (very unsuccessfully) working on, and thinking, Is this another Mendelssohn? You’ll see both version of Felix’s last name used. So what gives? It’s a very complicated, and fascinating, story that concerns itself with Jewish culture in Europe and the role of anti-Semitism.

To begin with, Felix’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, came to Berlin from a small town in Germany in 1743 at the age of 14, even though that city’s society was very hostile to Jews. He managed to become quite prominent in the philosophical and literary world, beating Immanuel Kant in an essay contest sponsored by the Berlin Academy. Frederick the Great even granted him the title of “Protected Jew,” which guaranteed his right to live peacefully in Berlin. (But of course this distinction only makes the lowly status of most Jews even more obvious by contrast.) Moses is a worthwhile historical figure in his own right and was hailed as the “German Socrates.” He devoted much of his later life to writings that eloquently supported the idea of religious freedom, saying that the state should not seek to control the religion of its citizens.

But even such a respected and beloved figure as Moses Mendelssohn couldn’t wipe out the widespread anti-Semitism in European culture. So Abraham, Moses’ son and Felix’s father, took several steps to distance himself and his family from their Jewish heritage. One of those actions was to adopt the surname “Bartholdy,” an action suggested by Abraham’s brother-in-law, Jakob Salomon, who took the name from a property he had acquired. Abraham urged Felix to drop the Mendelssohn name and just use Bartholdy, but even though Felix was baptized as a Protestant and married a minister’s daughter, he refused to drop his use of Mendelssohn. It’s never possible to know exactly what was going on in the mind and heart of someone from the past (or even someone in the present), but it seems to me that Felix wanted to honor both aspects of his background. Most of the time, his public knew him as Mendelssohn without the Bartholdy, but sometimes both names were listed. And that inconsistency has carried over until today.

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Was there a real girl from Ipanema? And just where IS Ipanema, anyway?

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Brazilian Beach Image by jorge luiz ribas from Pixabay

I think I’ve always associated “Ipanema” with “Ipana,” as in the toothpaste brand. (Sort of dates me, I know. Apparently it was brought back to market in 2011 as a “retro brand.”) Hey, I’m sure the girl has a great smile, although we’re not specifically told that in the song.

But it won’t surprise you to find out that there is nothing about dental hygiene here. Ipanema is a beach in Rio de Janeiro, and there was a bar about a block from there where the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and the poet Vinicius de Moraes liked to sit and drink beer. They noticed a lovely 18-year-old girl often walking by on the sidewalk, either down to the beach or home from school (although it’s not clear how they knew where she was going). Her name was Hélo, short for Heloisa Eneida Menezes Pais Pinto. So inspired were they by her loveliness and her way of walking (“sheer poetry,” according to de Moraes) that they wrote the song on the spot, using the traditional manuscript material of bar napkins.

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Mahler Rises to the Occasion with His Resurrection Symphony (No. 2)

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

You may think of this blog post as a smorgasbord of information about Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from which you can pick and choose what seems most relevant to you. Use the table of contents box above or just scroll through and see what catches your eye. The notes for each movement include a link to a corresponding podcast episode from a delightful series called “Embrace Everything.” These episodes are only about 40 minutes long and are packed with goodies. You’ll enjoy them and profit at the same time.

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The Richer, Fuller Story behind “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” by George Matheson

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George Matheson image in public domain accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m always a little suspicious of what I call “just-so stories,” ones that seem too neat and tidy in drawing straight lines to explain human actions. The “just-so” on the lyrics of “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” says that George Matheson, a Scotsman living in the mid-1800s, was going blind. He had been at university and engaged to be married, but when he told his fiancé the news of his impending blindness she refused to marry him. So his sister became his housekeeper, assistant, and companion. She helped him with his scholarship as he became a prominent theologian and preacher, even learning Greek and Hebrew so that she could read those texts to him. 20 years later, though, she married. Matheson was heartbroken as he contemplated being alone again, perhaps reliving the rejection he had felt when his fiancé had ended their relationship. Out of his grief he penned the famous four-stanza poem that is the subject of this post.

It could certainly have happened that way, but real life is always messy. For one thing, we have no definitive source about this supposedly unfaithful fiancé, just a few allusions that say he “might have” been involved with a young woman who broke his heart. Here’s what one old hymnbook has to say: “There is a story of how years before, he had been engaged until his fiancé learned that he was going blind, and there was nothing the doctors could do, and she told him that she could not go through life with a blind man.” Not a lot of corroborating detail here, it must be said. And Matheson didn’t suddenly realize that he was going blind; in reality, his vision was never very good and steadily deteriorated over time. While at school he was able to make out texts by the use of a strong magnifying glass and always sat near the front of the classroom in order to see the board. He could see faint outlines and shadows throughout his life, but his poor vision made him almost totally dependent on others for the practicalities of daily life. Although the system of Braille writing for the blind had been invented in 1824, I don’t see any references to his use of it. In spite of these limitations, however, his list of accomplishments would be truly remarkable even for a sighted person. He published books, produced sermons, gave lectures, and even preached before Queen Victoria, all without being able to read or write without the aid of a secretary. His sister, Jane Gray Matheson, filled that role at least until she married, and he gave her credit for her help in his own works.

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Two Hagenberg Hits

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Image by 12019 from Pixabay

My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has performed quite of few of Elaine Hagenberg’s choral compositions, and we were privileged to be part of the original commissioning consortium for her first extended work, Illuminare. She burst on the classical choral world in 2013 with “I Will Be a Child of Peace,” an arrangement of a Shaker hymn, and hasn’t looked back since. We are now heading towards yet another Hagenberg premiere, her new major work Aeterna Via. We are performing the Colorado premiere on May 8 & 9, and its worldwide introduction will be in Paris this June. If you live in the Denver metro area and would like to attend this very special concert, you can get your tickets here. Below is a two-part post about some other Hagenberg works we’ve performed in the past. “You Do Not Walk Alone” will be a part of this upcoming program in May.

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An Illuminating New Work–Elaine Hagenberg’s “Illuminare”

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A Composer Composes

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Elaine Hagenberg’s Illuminare burst on the classical choral scene in 2022 with initial performances by member choirs of a commissioning consortium. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, was privileged to be a part of this group and to perform the work in March 2022. We had the additional privilege of having Ms. Hagenberg on board for our final rehearsal. The composer was a full collaborator that evening, listening and critiquing gently but firmly. She clearly knew exactly how she wanted the piece to sound, and we benefited greatly from her input.  I’m reminded of something that the director of my choir, Brian Patrick Leatherman, said when we started working on the piece: “This is going to be big.” He also said that when he’d been contacted about our participation in the consortium he’d “JUMPED AT!” it. I’d say that his enthusiasm has been fully justified. Illuminare was made available for sale in August 2022 and is now being performed widely all over the world. A gala performance in Paris is scheduled to take place on June 24, 2026; this concert will also include the performance of a new major Hagenberg work. I hope to write about the texts of that composition at some point.

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Paul Simon Borrows from Bach (and Others), Producing Two Masterpieces

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My Own Take on Originality

Interesting question: is anything actually original? John Lennon summed up the answer nicely when he said that 99% of popular music was reminiscent of something which had come before. But it isn’t just popular music—it’s everything. It’s all been done before, or, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “there is nothing new under the sun.” (Which had probably been said before.) So how do we determine the quality of art, if it all builds on the past? Well, it’s complicated, and so much of it is subjective. For instance (don’t judge me here), I have never been all that impressed with the Beatles. Or Bob Dylan. Or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. I just don’t get it, or them. One man’s horrible daub is another man’s inspiration for life. (Did I hear anyone say “Thomas Kinkade”?)

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Aaron Copland Does More than Required for his Old American Songs

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Copland, the Commission, and the Composition

Once again I’m on the hunt for the origins of a famous piece of music. Aaron Copland’s suite of early American tunes was commissioned by none other than Benjamin Britten and was presented at that composer’s newly-launched Aldeburgh Festival in 1950. Britten had developed a keen interest in performing American folk music, at least partly because of his long visit to the US from 1939-1942. While there he and his partner Peter Pears had spent a lot of time with Copland; he said later that Copland was “by far the best American composer.” Perhaps because of Pears’ abilities as a singer, he and Britten regretted the dearth of songs in the Copland catalog. So they decided to do something about that, and in 1950 commissioned a set of American folk songs to be performed at the Festival. Well! Copland dove into this commission head first, only coming up for air after he’d ransacked the sheet-music archives at Brown University for material. He did an enormous amount of work for what turned out to be a set of pieces that together total less than 13 minutes’ worth of performance time. But this wouldn’t be the first time Copland got completely caught up in writing music that he didn’t think would result in much return on his investment; he said about  the ballet music for Appalachian Spring, “It took me about a year to finish and I remember thinking how crazy it was to spend all that time because I knew how short‑lived most ballet scores are, but [it] took on a life of its own.”1

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