Sechs Orgelsonaten op. 65 (Mendelssohn)
Felix Mendelssohn's six Organ Sonatas, Op. 65, were published in 1845. Mendelssohn's biographer Eric Werner has written of them, 'next to Bach's works, Mendelssohn's Organ Sonatas belong to the required repertory of all organists'.[1]
Background
Mendelssohn was a skilled organist and during his visits to Britain gave a number of well-received organ recitals. These often included the improvisations for which he was famous (e.g. at his recitals during his 1842 tour in London and Oxford).[2] In an article in the magazine Musical World of 1838, the English organist Henry John Gauntlett noted:
His execution of Bach's music is transcendently great [...] His extempore playing is very diversified - the soft movements full of tenderness and expression, exquisitely beautiful and impassioned [...] In his loud preludes there are an endless variety of new ideas [....] and the pedal passages so novel and independent [...] as to take his auditor quite by surprise[3]
These qualities are evident in the organ sonatas, which were commissioned as a 'set of voluntaries' by the English publishers Coventry and Hollier in 1844, (who also commissioned at the same time an edition by him of the organ chorales of J. S. Bach), [4] and were published in 1845. The publishers' original announcement referred to them as 'Mendelssohn's School of Organ Playing', but this title was rescinded at the composer's request.[5]
There were approximately 180 subscribers to the publication.[6]
The music
In response to the commission, Mendelssohn at first drafted seven individual voluntaries, but then determined to extend and regroup them into a set of six sonatas, meaning by this not pieces in classical sonata form, but using the word as it had been used by Bach, for a collection or suite of varying pieces.[7] The sonatas include references to a number of Bach chorales, and No. 3 (in A major) incorporates a processional piece which Mendelssohn had written for the wedding of his sister Fanny. No 4 was the last to be written.[8]
The six sonatas are:
- No. 1 in F minor (Allegro - Adagio-Andante recitativo:Allegro assai vivace)
- No. 2 in C minor (Grave:Adagio - Allegro maestoso e vivace - Fuge:Allegro moderato)
- No. 3 in A major (based on the Bach chorale from Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 38) (Con moto maestoso - Andante tranquillo)
- No. 4 in BVorlage:Music major (Allegro con brio - Andante religioso - Allegretto - Allegro maestoso)
- No. 5 in D major (Andante - Andante con moto - Allegro)
- No. 6 in D minor (based on the Bach chorale Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 416) (Chorale and variations:Andante sostenuto - Allegro molto - Fuga - Finale:Andante)
Reception
The sonatas demand good standards of pitch and touch from the organ and also a satisfactory pedalboard. Few English instruments were adequately equipped in these respects at the time, which probably explains the slow growth in interest in the pieces in Britain. The first public performance in Britain of any of the sonatas was probably given by Edmund Chipp, who also performed all six from memory in 1848.[9] Although British critics rated the music highly, often drawing attention to its echoes of the composer's improvisatory style, Mendelssohn himself never performed any of the sonatas in public (either in England or elsewhere).[10]
However, the sonatas were well received abroad (as they had been simultaneously published by Maurice Schlesinger in Paris, Ricordi in Milan and Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig). Robert Schumann wrote to Mendelssohn in 1845 that he had played them over on the piano.[11] They are likely to have prompted Schumann's Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, and, later in the century, the sonatas of Josef Rheinberger.[12]
The American Guild of Organists requires for its admissions examination that the examinee play at least one movement from one of the Mendelssohn sonatas.[13]
External link
- Sonata no. 4, 4th movement on YouTube, played by Andreas Feyrer
Sources
- Brown, Clive, A Portrait of Mendelssohn, New Haven and London (2003) ISBN 9780300095395
- Edwards, F. G., Mendelssohn's Organ Sonatas in Proceedings of the Musical Association 21st Session (1894-5), pp. 1-16. London, 1895.
- Scholes, Percy F., The Mirror of Music, 1844-1944, London and Oxford (1947) (2 vols.)
- Stanley, Glenn, The music for the keyboard, in The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. Peter Mercer-Tayolr, Cambridge (2004)
- Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn, A Life in Music, Oxford (2003), ISBN 0195110439
- Werner, Eric, tr. D. Newlin, Mendelssohn:A New Image of the Composer and his Age, London, 1963