Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy - Songs Without Words - For the Piano

Book Size: 8 1/2 x 11" * * * * * * From the introductory: AN APPRECIATION FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY (1809-1847) is usually regarded as belonging to that Romantic School or period in musical history in which the names of Schumann and Chopin are of similar prominence. This customary classification of Mendelssohn, however, is not altogether just, inasmuch as it applies to one side only in the wide compass of his musical personality, and not even to its strongest side, for it emphasizes unduly that romanticism which was only an incidental feature in his many-sided genius. The classification is somewhat unjust to Mendelssohn's other and far more pronounced characteristics; especially to those which so markedly differentiate him from his great contemporaries and which entitle him to be regarded as a "Classic-Romantic'* -- in fact, the Classic- Romantic. While he could not -- and evidently had no desire to -- keep altogether aloof from the strong wave of romanticism that swept over Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he came within its range only occasionally: when the text of a song called for it or the drama which he either introduced or enlivened with his music. Thus we find him almost transcendentally romantic in some of his Overtures (Fingal's Cave, Hebrides), also in his '*Walpurgis Night," and above all in his music to Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," the elf-like texture and fairy-tale mood of which frequently -- but also plainly -- recur in some of his piano compositions (Scherzo a capriccio, Rondo capriccioso, and others). And yet, when we enquire into the tendencies which were predominantly sympathetic to him and which he championed with all the strength of his personality, position and influence, we find them linked with the names of Bach and Beethoven. These were the masters for whose works he acted as an enthusiastic and energetic propagandist; it was their purity of form, their clarity of thought which impressed him far more strongly than the mysticism and fancy of the Romantics. With the farseeing' eye of a divinely appointed prophet he perceived that these masters had spoken not for their time only but for all times, that their fundamentality would outlast every transient fashion; and it was in their path rather than with the Romantics that his genius compelled him to pursue his way. That his works had lately to suffer somewhat from neglect is undoubtedly due to his so-called "followers," who -- as usual with Epigones -- had caught only the external qualities of his work (form, manner of workmanship, etc.), without its delightful and refined spirit; who imitated rather than followed him and who, by aping his style and by diluting his fine spirituality into a platitudinous conventionality, have wearied the music-lover. In the same degree, however, as these imitators fall more and more into oblivion (Sterndale Bennett is now completely forgotten), the true genius of their great model breaks forth anew in unimpeded light and reasserts it's great, masterly qualities....