Elijah excerpt by felix mendelssohn biography
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On Mendelssohn’s Elijah, by R. Larry Todd
Thursday, March 9th, 2017 at 10:00 pm
James Plenty
Few compositions document as compellingly as Elijah the shifting critical reception accorded Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) during the past one hundred and fifty years. At the English premiere, heard at the Birmingham Musical Festival in 1846, Elijah was hailed as an undisputed masterpiece; since then it has remained a staple part of the oratorio repertory, rivaled in English-speaking realms only by Handel’s Messiah. But, like the inevitable swing of a pendulum, Mendelssohn's enshrinement in the canon of “great” composers precipitated a counter-reaction. First, there was Richard Wagner’s notorious anti-Semitic attack in the anonymously published article “On Judaism in Music” (1850). And in the closing decades of the century, there was George Bernard Shaw’s criticism of Mendelssohn's “kid glove gentility.” In 1847, Prince Albert had lionized Mendelssohn as a prophetic artist-priest contending with false artistic idols; now, toward the end of the century, Shaw reversed the metaphor by accusing Mendelssohn (and Victorian society) of displaying a sanctimonious sentimentality.
Based largely on the Old Testament account in I and II Kings, supplemented by texts culle
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THE HISTORY
OF
MENDELSSOHN’S ORATORIO
‘ELIJAH’
BY
F.G. EDWARDS.
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Elijah
Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah, Op. 70 (1846-47)
Mendelssohn as an oratorio composer
Felix Mendelssohn's contributions to sacred vocal and choral music were prefigured by those of his great hero J. S. Bach. Having spearheaded the revival of Bach's music in Germany while he was still in his twenties, Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was sought after to compose music for the new cathedral being built in Berlin in the early 1840s.
Mendelssohn began to conceptualize his setting of Elijah in 1837, on the heels of completing his well-received oratorio St. Paul (Paulus. Lacking a specific occasion for its performance, he set it aside. His return to its composition in 1845 was prompted by an invitation to Birmingham in 1845. Mendelssohn then focused entirely on it, presenting a version adequate for performance in the Town Hall on August 26, 1846, but not sending to press a final version (as Op. 70) until the following year. The revised version was performed in London in April 1847. The composer was more satisfied with the new version, but in contrast to the unrestrained enthusiasm it elicited in Birmingham, the applause was now more modest.
The goal of working with a subject such as Elijah is considered to have appealed to Mendelssohn's wish to score a success with drama