Mendelssohn's Welt Die drei Violinsonaten Andreas Reiner & Desar Sulejmani

• Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847): Sonata for violin and piano in F Major (1820)
• 1I. Allegro05:46
• 2II. Andante07:15
• 3III. Presto04:07
• Sonata for violin and piano in F Minor, op. 4
• 4I. Adagio - Allegro moderato09:34
• 5II. Poco Adagio06:47
• 6III. Allegro agitato04:49
• Sonata for violin and piano in F Major (1838), Version Menuhin
• 7I. Allegro vivace11:17
• 8II. Adagio07:03
• 9III. Assai vivace05:14
• Total Runtime01:01:52

Info for Mendelssohn's Welt Die drei Violinsonaten

Mendelssohn’s Sonata in F Minor op. 4 is a work he composed at the same time as the wildly successful Octet and, it almost seems, as an antidote to the youthful exuberance of that piece. From the opening recitative of the sonata, we are invited into a realm unexplored by the Octet, as if the one work had been born of the composer’s public persona and the other of his private, inner voice. The chronological proximity of the two works suggests an ability to let joy and sorrow coexist in a manner far beyond his seventeen years and charac- teristic of his great musical and emotional genius.

Mendelssohn’s second family name itself, Bartholdy, tells the story of a family compelled to make incompat- ible elements conform. Mendelssohn’s father attached the name of an inherited property to his children after their baptism so that the name Mendelssohn would not come into connection with converted Christians. The society the Mendelssohns kept was one in which anyone with any ambitions had already converted to Christianity like Rahel Varnhagen or Ludwig Börne; as Heinrich Hei- ne, another pragmatic convert, put it so cynically, con- version was “the entrance ticket to European culture.”

Young Felix was in the spotlight from a very early age; at twelve Goethe invited him to Weimar, where he played for the poet for two hours every day and told him how glad he was to be “a German and alive now.” His is an unparalleled success story, distinctly different from the Romantic German ideal of the suffering artist who dies in poverty. Mendelssohn was celebrated so ubiquitously during his lifetime that he was sometimes unable to keep up with all the demands made of him as a composer and conductor.

For all his success: how did it come to pass that the German-speaking public would someday dismiss much of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre as pleasant yet superficial? The roots of this change go back a long way, possibly even to Mendelssohn’s day. In the Romantic period, dark and complex sentiments and structures were considered superior to the lighter classical forms and subjects, and Heinrich Heine, for one, was criticized for the clarity and plasticity of his language.

Mendelssohn, too, became the target of a far more vicious attack against which he could no longer defend himself due to the fact that he was dead. Wagner’s Das Judentum in der Musik is widely known, but it is worth pointing out that certain current prejudices about the nature of Mendelssohn’s music may have their origins in this essay, such as in the following statement: “The washiness and whimsicality of our present musical style has been...pushed to its utmost pitch by Mendelssohn‘s endeavour to speak out a vague, an almost nugatory content as interestingly and spiritedly as possible.” …

Andreas Reiner, violin
Desar Sulejmani, piano

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