Buried Treasures: Felix Mendelssohn: Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings in D Minor (1822)

by Georg Predota 

Felix Mendelssohn

When Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) died at the incredibly young age of thirty-eight, he simply had not yet made arrangements for literally hundreds of unpublished musical manuscripts and artworks, alongside thousands of personal letters to and from the composer. During his lifetime, and for a short period thereafter — with a large number of music published during a period of two years following his death — Mendelssohn was almost universally lauded musical genius. What is more, Mendelssohn was also the artistic director and chief conductor of The Gewandhaus (Garment House) in Leipzig, a venue that has long been recognized as one of the most important performing centers in Europe. Under his tutelage and leadership, the Gewandhaus Orchestra became a cultural institution. Mendelssohn not only initiated the revival of music by Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart, he also assured that his brand of musical historicism was disseminated throughout Europe and beyond. With the help of Richard Wagner who declared “Judaism the evil conscience of our modern civilization” in his 1850 treatise Judaism in Music, Mendelssohn and his music were quickly subjected to deliberate and systematic forms of historical revisions. And when Wagner declared Mendelssohn’s music “an icon of degenerate decadence,” publishers far and wide declined to make his manuscripts and letters public.

Of course, Wagner was not able to completely erase or dismiss Mendelssohn’s influence on Germanic arts, nor was he able to excise him from music-historical memory. This, of course, led to serious irritation within the propaganda machinery of Nazi Germany, and his name was promptly added to various lists of forbidden artists. At that time, according to Stephen Somary, founder and artistic director of the Mendelssohn Project, “a majority of Mendelssohn manuscripts — both published and unpublished — were housed in the basement of the Berlin State Library. They were smuggled to Warsaw and Krakow during the winter of 1936/37, and when the city fell under Nazi control in 1939, they were hurriedly smuggled out again and disbursed to locations wide and far between.” Following WWII, the majority of manuscripts remained buried behind the Iron Curtain. Haltingly, various unknown versions and unknown compositions were discovered and made available in one form or another.

The Gewandhaus

Initially, these efforts focused on works Mendelssohn composed before his 14th birthday, pieces that had originally been presented at private concerts at the Mendelssohn home. Among them various sonatas for viola and for violin, religious choral music, numerous piano compositions and even a fourth opera. But it also included a succession of concertos, among them a concerto for piano and string orchestra in A minor (1822) and two concertos for two pianos and full orchestra in E and A-flat, originating from 1823 and 1824, respectively.

The concerto for violin, piano and string orchestra in D minor was composed for an initial private performance with his best friend and violin teacher Eduard Rietz. On 3 July 1822, Mendelssohn revised the scoring, adding timpani and winds and the premiere of this version was apparently performed on the same day. For reasons detailed above, it remained unpublished until 1960, when the Astoria Verlag in Berlin issued a miniature score, edited and arranged by Clemens Schmalstich. In 1966, Theodora Schuster-Lott and Frieder Zschoch prepared a scholarly edition for the Deutsche Verlag für Music as part of the new Mendelssohn complete edition, “which was engraved, but never published except in a reduction by Walter-Heinz Bernstein for violin and two pianos.” Finally, in 1999 the 1960 miniature score was reissued in a scholarly edition with the wind and timpani parts added. And just in case you are wondering, the A-minor Piano Concerto of 1822 had until recently been unavailable in any edition, and the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra in E major, composed as a birthday gift for his sister Fanny, had to wait until 2003 before audiences could get a listen to the original version.

The Modern Patron: Benny Goodman

by Maureen Buja, Interlude  

Benny Goodman, 1942

After having made his name in jazz, clarinetist Benny Goodman set out to make his name in classical music, feeling that he was likely to leave a longer impression in classical music than in jazz. To fill that need, he started commissioning works, with the net result being a body of modern music for clarinet that is unmatched.

Szigeti, Bartók and Goodman in rehearsal

His first commission was undertaken to help a music who was having financial problems. In 1938, at the instigation of the violinist Jozsef Szigeti, Benny Goodman commissioned Béla Bartók for a double concerto for clarinet and violin. Bartók, Szigeti, and Goodman made their premiere at Carnegie Hall in January 1939 with a work entitled Rhapsodies for Clarinet and Violin: Verbunkos and Sebes. The trio recorded the work in 1940 after Bartók had written a new middle movement. It had a new title: Contrasts, based on Bartók’s feeling that the trio did not employ instruments that had sonorities that would easily blend. Through the work, the violin and clarinet trade fragments of melodies, with one instrument supplying a rhapsodic accompaniment to the other.

Aaron Copland conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
with Benny Goodman (by David Weiss)

With that start, Goodman continued to meet composers and commission works. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t: his commission of a clarinet concerto from Benjamin Britten in 1942. Only the first movement was completed and it was filled out and orchestrated much later by Colin Matthews, being published under the title of Movements for a Clarinet Concerto only in 2008. The composer Ingolf Dahl started a double concerto for Goodman and seems to have nearly completed it, but the work has vanished. A concerto was commissioned from William Walton but nothing is known about it.

Lost works aside, the works that do survive include clarinet concertos by Milhaud (1941), Hindemith (1947), Copland (1947-48), and Malcolm Arnold (1974), a sonata for clarinet and piano by Francis Poulenc (1962), and titled works including Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra by Alex North (1946) and Derivations by Morton Gould (1955). 

Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs by Leonard Bernstein (1949) had been written for the band leader Woody Herman but he was between bands at the time and Goodman played the premiere, gradually being identified with the work. 

Bernstein and Goodman in rehearsal, 1951

Composers were faced with a quandary in their writing – do they do something that’s purely classical or do they consider including anything from Goodman’s jazz side in their writing? For Morton Gould in Derivations for Clarinet and Band, the jazz side pulled strongly, resulting in a final movement that, as the composer says, is ‘…meant to go like a shot. Its accumulating barrage of jazz-oriented ostinatos and motifs attempts to give the drive and feel of jazz improvisation.’ 

Paul Hindemith and Benny Goodman, ca. 1947

The fact that he commissioned a work did not guarantee that he would play it. He pushed Darius Milhaud for a clarinet concerto and exclusive performing rights for 3 years, but in the end never performed or recorded the work. It was given its first performance in 1946 by clarinetist Richard Joiner with the Marine Band at the Marine barracks in Washington, D.C.

Hindemith and Goodman started meeting in 1941 but because of the war, Goodman suspended all activities, including commissioning German composers until much later. It wasn’t until 1947 that the commission discussions were renewed. The first performance didn’t go well and Goodman didn’t play the work again until 1955, where critics said they would have liked the work better if Goodman had been free to improvise that than tie himself to the work. In the end, however, perception of the work has changed to recognize its value. 

Of all the work that Goodman commissioned, three works stand out: Bartók’s Contrasts, Copland’s Concerto, and Hindemith’s Concerto. All are significant contributions to the clarinet literature and to the music of the 20th century.