Eloq uence
MENDELSSOHN
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Die erste Walpurgisnacht
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Christoph von Dohnányi
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
Ein Sommernachtstraum
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
1
Overture, Op. 21
(Allegro di molto)
2
3
Bühnenmusik (Incidental Music), Op. 61
I
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
II
‘Über Täler und Höh’n’ (Allegro vivace)
4
III
11’30
4’15
1’20
‘Over hill, over dale’
Song with Chorus: ‘Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt’
4’13
‘Ye spotted snakes with double tongues’
5
6
7
8
9
0
!
V
VII
IX
Xa
Xb
XI
Intermezzo
Notturno
Wedding March
Prologue
Funeral March
Dance of the Clowns
Finale ‘Bei des Feuers mattern Flimmern’
‘By this house give glimmering light’
Lynne Dawson, soprano
Dalia Schaechter, mezzo soprano
Frauenchor des Rundfunk, Berlin
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (RSO)
Vladimir Ashkenazy
3’17
7’20
4’59
0’19
1’05
1’31
4’46
Die erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60
THE FIRST WALPURGIS NIGHT
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I
II
III
IV
V, VI
VII, VIII
Overture
‘Es lacht der Mai!’
‘Könnt ihr so verwegen handeln?’
‘Wer Opfer heut’zu bringen scheut’
‘Verteilt euch hier’
‘Diese dumpfen Pfaffenchristen’ – ‘Kommt mit zacken’
‘So weit gebracht’ – ‘Hilf, ach hilf mir’
Margarita Lilowa, mezzo soprano
Horst Laubenthal, tenor
Tom Krause, baritone
Alfred Sramek, bass
Wiener Singverein
Wiener Philharmoniker
Christoph von Dohnányi
Total timing: 78’39
9’00
4’09
2’06
2’01
1’35
6’40
7’57
‘Mendelssohn’s aristocratic horror of selfadvertisement unfitted him for triumph in a
period of revolution; he died, most
inopportunely, when his own powers, like
Handel’s at the same age, were being wasted on
pseudo-classical forms; the new art was not yet
ripe; and in the early Wagner-Liszt reign of terror
his was the first reputation to be assassinated.’
Donald Tovey made these characteristically
mordant observations in the years immediately
preceding World War I, and they illustrate well
how low in public esteem Mendelssohn was
then held; it was a time when he was generally
known, in Britain at least, mainly by some of the
popular and weaker Songs without Words and
a few of the more sanctimonious and
sentimental passages from Elijah. His other
music was largely neglected, and at best his
reputation rested on his being the composer of
a few inexplicably beautiful and original
orchestral pieces.
title to a place among the great composers of
the nineteenth century. Today, Joachim’s
statement that he regarded the continuation of
a true Mendelssohn tradition as identical with
his own efforts to ‘uphold the dignity of art’
would not be received with the skeptical
incredulity that would surely have greeted such
an unfashionable pronouncement in the Britain
of the early twentieth century.
That the reputation of a composer who was
feted and lauded in his lifetime should fall after
his death is not surprising in itself (musical history
is full of such instances – Beethoven may be the
exception to this general rule), but that it should
plummet to the degree that Mendelssohn’s did
is indeed rather surprising. Fortunately a presentday assessment of Mendelssohn would give him
In the same year as Felix’s meeting with
Cherubini, the Mendelssohns moved to a roomy
old-fashioned house in Berlin that had an
excellent music room and, in the adjoining
grounds, a ‘Gartenhaus’ that could seat several
hundred people at the family’s fortnightly private
Sunday concerts. It was in the ‘Gartenhaus’ that
the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In 1825, the composer’s father, Abraham, took
his gifted and already successful young son to
meet the aging Cherubini, whose advice he
sought. Should Felix, be allowed to become a
professional musician? Uncharacteristically, the
crusty and often sarcastic Cherubini was full of
praise for Mendelssohn, but his more usual ill
humor would certainly have prevailed had he
known that confident young Felix afterwards
described him as ‘an extinct volcano, still
throwing out occasional sparks and flashes, but
quite covered with ashes and stones’.
was first performed privately, in 1826 when the
composer was still only seventeen. In this
overture Mendelssohn displays the highest
degree of originality, freshness and technical
mastery. The fact that he never actually
surpassed the delightfully inspired aspects of this
work in later pieces perhaps goes some way
towards explaining why Wilhelm Altmann wrote
in 1929 that the British and Germans could until
‘only a short time back … dispose of this
composer with a shrug of compassion and
consign his works to the scrapheap’. However,
exactly one hundred years before Altmann was
to make this remark, the composer was making
his first visit to England where he met with an
enthusiastic reception. On 24 June 1829 the
Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream was
given its first London performance at a concert
in which Mendelssohn was also the soloist in the
first hearing in Britain of Beethoven’s Fifth
Piano Concerto.
Some seventeen years separate the Overture
from the subsequent incidental music to A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61, written in
1843 at the request of the King of Prussia,
Friedrich Wilhelm IV. If any evidence is needed
to refute the charge that Mendelssohn declined
from genius to mediocrity then this incidental
music, not to mention the Violin Concerto of
1844, is surely sufficient. All the numbers are
imbued with characteristic lightness of touch,
and the Scherzo is the most extended of all
Mendelssohn’s many elfin works of this kind. It
has been pointed out by several commentators
that later composers as diverse as Brahms,
Strauss and Mahler show certain influences of
Mendelssohn. Philip Radcliffe cites the lyrical
Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as
being very Mendelssohnian. Perhaps, by the
same token, one could point to the ‘Marcia
funèbre’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and say that for all the restrained comedy and
mock seriousness, there is here a distinct
foretaste of Mahler.
Zelter’s earliest Lieder on poetry by Goethe had
initiated a lasting correspondence and friendly
relationship between poet and musician, and in
1799 Goethe sent Zelter a copy of his ‘dramatic
Ballade’ Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First
Walpurgis Night). Zelter’s attempts at musical
setting of this poem came to nothing, but his
pupil, whom he had introduced to Goethe in
1821, had more success, grasping its cantata
nature, and creating from it a dramatic piece for
soloists, chorus and orchestra.
Mendelssohn began work on the piece in
Vienna, on his way to Italy in the late summer of
1830, having recently visited Goethe; almost a
year later he wrote that he seized the score ‘with
a rage’, and finally competed it in Milan in July
1831. Goethe had described to Zelter the
inspiration for the poem: how the
German heathen priests had retreated from
the establishment of Christianity into the
Harz Mountains and ‘disguised themselves
in devils’ masks, to frighten their
superstitious opponents’.
This playful devilish element inspired
Mendelssohn in the same way as the fairy world
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe’s
later comment to the composer on the
symbolism of the struggle for freedom of
religion inherent in the work similarly brought
out the sonorous manner (and use of
trombones) developed in his religious works
such as Elijah. Die erste Walpurgisnacht
remained unperformed for more than ten years,
during which time Mendelssohn had composed
his grand symphony-cantata Hymn of Praise,
and when he returned to Die erste
Walpurgisnacht at the end of 1842, he used the
same term to describe this work. The death of
his mother in December of that year called him
back to the family home in Berlin, and it was in
the weeks following this that he arrived at the
final version of the piece, which then received its
first performance in Leipzig in February 1843.
DECCA
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Christoph von Dohnanyi
PHOTO: DECCA
/
PHOTO: DECCA
TERRY O’NEILL
/ IAIN MCKELL
Recording producers: Andrew Cornall (Midsummer Night’s Dream); Christopher Raeburn
(Walpurgisnacht)
Recording engineers: Stanley Goodall (Midsummer Night’s Dream); James Lock (Walpurgisnacht)
Recording locations: Sofiensaal, Vienna, Austria, June 1976 (Walpurgisnacht); Schauspielhaus, Berlin,
Germany, September 1992 (Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji
Art direction: Chilu Tong · www.chilu.com
Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt
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