On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll have works by two composers who were definitely BFF.
Though for some reason I always peg Robert Schumann as significantly younger, he and Felix Mendelssohn were in fact born only a year apart (Mendelsson in 1809 and Schumann in 1810).
Schumann’s ideas were more progressive, for one, at least on the surface. Mendelssohn, more of a classicist, achieved superstardom early as one of music’s great child prodigies. The two met in 1835. Schumann was a struggling artist with ambitions to become a piano virtuoso – ambitions frustrated by a hand injury he sustained a few years earlier. He was in the process of composing a string of piano masterworks that would help cement his lasting fame.
Mendelssohn was from a well-to-do family, the grandson of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and currently Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He had given his first concert at the age of nine and composed two of his most astonishing masterpieces while yet in his teens (the Octet for Strings in 1825, at the age of 16, and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1826). What the two men shared in common, aside from a passion for music, were an intellectual curiosity and a love of literature.
Needless to say, they became fast friends. Mendelssohn conducted Schumann’s orchestral works, they entertained themselves by playing chamber music, and they engaged in engrossing discussions about the nature and direction of their art in the wake of Beethoven. It was a friendship that would last for the remainder of their lives.
Mendelssohn died in 1847 at the age of 38; Schumann, who struggled with mental illness since at least 1833, began to exhibit psychotic behavior and asked to be placed in an institution in 1854. He died there two years later at the age of 46.
Schumann’s “Andante and Variations” was composed in 1843, in the wake of two chamber music masterworks, the Piano Quintet and the Piano Quartet, both in the key of E flat major. For the composer, sadly, three times was not to be a charm. Part of the problem was the unusual instrumentation, which calls for two pianos, two cellos, and horn. Early performances in the Schumann home were so loud, it may have contributed to his disgust with the piece. At Mendelssohn’s suggestion, he arranged it for two pianos alone. It was only in 1868 that Johannes Brahms, another of Schumann’s friends, recognized the worth of the original version and gave its first public performance with the composer’s widow, Clara, in 1868.
We’ll hear it today, performed at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1985 by husband-and-wife pianists Claude Frank and Lilian Kallir, cellists Melissa Meell and Peter Stumpf, and hornist Julie Landsman.
We’ll also have Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, written in 1827, a few months after Beethoven’s death. Mendelssohn was 18 years-old at the time and clearly intoxicated by Beethoven’s late quartets, which had only recently been published. Though certainly influenced by the deceased master, Mendelssohn’s own essay in the form is quite at odds with the introspection of Beethoven’s Op. 135. In contrast, he infuses the quartet’s Classical structure with a passionate Romanticism. He also explores the possibilities of cyclic form more exhaustively than any other composer, possibly, before César Franck. We’ll hear it performed at the 1995 Marlboro Music Festival by violinists Lisa-Beth Lambert and Hiroko Yajima, violist Annemarie Moorcroft, and cellist Sophie Shao.
I hope you’ll join me for works by Schumann and Mendelssohn, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
Robert Schumann (left) and his “brother from another mother”
