Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream

The stories, legends, and myths about the trials and travails of
composers lives are legion, like Beethoven’s battles against
fate, Mozart and Schubert’s struggles with finances, Brahms’
failures with women, Mahler’s troubles with just about everyone,
and Shostakovich’s near fatal interactions with the government.
 These stories tend to add to the general understanding of
these composers, and in fact they tend to enhance their
reputations.  We see their struggles in their music, and it
makes us admire them more for overcoming them.   With
Mendelssohn, and to some extent Haydn as well, we have the
opposite case.  Mendelssohn grew up in a happy, wealthy
German family, and it was only late in his life when he underwent
any major struggles at all.  Whether this happy upbringing
contributed to the character of his music is anyone’s guess, but
Mendelssohn seems to always get the short end of the stick when
it comes to reputation, and I think that his generally cheerful
music has a lot to do with this fact.  But Mendelssohn is no
second-rate composer.  As I mentioned in April with my show
about Mendelssohn’s Octet, he was certainly THE greatest composer
under 18 that we know of(and yes I’m including Mozart in that),
and his best music ranks up there with the best composers in
history.  And today, our focus on both the overture to
Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the incidental music that
Mendelssohn wrote 17 years later, allows us to enjoy the full
breadth of Mendelssohn’s staggering talent.  This is not
only clever and cheerful music. It is also fantastically
orchestrated, perfectly structured, and in the case of the
overture, it is full of invention and character that is simply
mind-blowing from a composer who was just 17 years old at the
time.  So today we’ll talk all about this, from the beauty
and perfection of the overture to the incidental music that
followed, meant to be performed alongside Shakespeare’s play.
We’ll also talk about the role Shakespeare played in Germany at
the time, and how Mendelssohn’s upbringing did indeed have a lot
to do with the music he chose to write. Join us!