Mendelssohn’s bicentenary began with a birthday present for future audiences: first performances of 13 recently discovered vocal and chamber works. The January concert at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage was called "Mendelssohn: Lost Treasures and the Wagner Suppression". These unpublished pieces are among 270—plus drawings and copious letters— recently unearthed in library basements and private collections. Since 1996, Stephen Somary has established foundations in New York and Stuttgart for research, part of "The Mendelssohn Project", which he directs. After evaluating other sources, the reference to Wagner’s suppression looks like an incomplete assessment: Wagner didn’t have the power to suppress anything. He did write an anti-Jewish pamphlet—not causing but reflecting a rise in German anti-Semitism that was to culminate in Nazism. (Mendelssohn’s baptism and family conversion to Christianity cut no ice with non-Jews of that later period.) The trend reduced performances of Mendelssohn’s works, and many—published and not—languished in library boxes. (The haunting Hebrides Overture, the deeply developed Elijah, and the effervescent Violin Concerto— none of which lacked performances this year—remained in the repertory.) As anti-Semitism grew in the 20th Century, manuscripts were spirited from Germany to adjacent countries, and, as Germany invaded those countries, they were smuggled out to Berlin, Budapest, London, Paris, and St Petersburg. One piece was found in Australia, and another is now in the New York Public Library. Mendelssohn’s trademark melodic grace, formal control, and moments of rich color attest to authenticity; but the "lost treasures" were not necessarily suppressed pieces but sometimes ones he chose not to publish. Introducing the concert, Somary alluded to Mendelssohn’s wealthy, cultivated family: he had no need to publish. In addition, composers often withdrew works, planning later revisions; for Mendelssohn, who died of a stroke in his 30s, there was no "later". Part of the program, performed by the Shanghai Quartet with guest singers and pianists, was juvenilia, and, while Felix was a prodigy on a fast developmental track, his compositions at age 11 or 12 are eons away, musically, from the brilliant Octet or the magical Midsummer Night’s Dream of his later teens. Most striking on the program were 12 fugal studies from 1821 played by the Shanghai Quartet. Collected in Bern (and also Berlin after being returned from Cracow and Katowice), they are competent, with harmonic touches and chromatic surprises. The tenth fugue riffs on Bach’s chorale from Cantata 140, foreshadowing the 20-year-old Mendelssohn’s resurrection of the St Matthew Passion, which restored Bach to his rightful stature. A Somary find from this period, still to be heard, is Grand Festival Music for a Durer Festival, a cantata in praise of the artist Albrecht Durer, whom the composer (who himself drew and painted) would have admired. An 1820 Piano Sonata in F minor (performed by Orion Weiss, the stronger of the guest pianists) was a tad monotonous, but who cares? Its fugal section, repeated chords, and minor key revealed how much Beethoven the 11-year-old had absorbed. Several one- and two-part middle-period songs, ably sung by mezzo-soprano Abigail Nims and bass-baritone Kevin Deas, showed that Mendelssohn knew his way around song moods. One was fiery, one galloped, one was a lullaby, and all had the fluid essential piano part that Schubert was so good at. Manuscript for Songs Without Words The Songs Without Words came relatively late, and a D-major one from 1843 was in that idiom, with a complex melody suggesting the composer’s continuing maturation. (The museum could use a finer instrument—perhaps a Steinway, come to think of it.) But Somary, who says he has recovered most of the missing one-third of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre, agrees that the extent works were suppressed is less relevant than their rediscovery and revival. This project is not comparable to what Mendelssohn did for Bach: Mendelssohn is already established, and Somary considers the discoveries "nice" with "a handful that are worthwhile, but they won’t change history". Nonetheless, hundreds of new Mendelssohn works? Bring them on.
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