Cutting Room Floor: Unauthorized Mendelssohn

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

Composers who die young, like Mozart and Mendelssohn, almost always leave behind some unpublished work which trickles into the public realm over the years and decades following their passing. But in Mendelssohn's case, the amount of largely unknown material that he composed is truly staggering: musicologists estimate that as many as 270 pieces of music attributable to Felix remain unpublished. (And that number doesn't even take into account the works originally attributed to him that turned out to have been written by his sister Fanny.)

This year being the bicentenary of Mendelssohn's birth, there is understandably greater attention being focused on him than usual, and in New York this week, conductor Stephen Somary is presenting a concert featuring thirteen pieces of chamber music that Somary claims have never been heard in public before.

The reasons behind there being so much missing Mendelssohn are many. Some claim that Mendelssohn's international reputation was damaged when his music (along with that of all other Jewish composers) was banned by the Third Reich, removing him entirely from the repertoire in the heart of classical music's active European centers for years. Then there's the fact that Mendelssohn just wrote a huge amount of music - more than 700 works altogether - and it's only natural that some of it would never have gone to press.

But then there's the issue of what the composer himself wanted published, and that's what makes the reviving of long-lost manuscripts a controversial matter. It's very likely that at least some of Mendelssohn's unpublished music was stuff that he never wanted to see the light of day. The AP article about Somary's concert quotes conductor Leon Botstein as saying that, "If the composer leaves it unfinished or kept it out from publication, you have to respect the composer's wishes." Mendelssohn was known to be hugely critical of his own work, often revising and re-revising works for years after they had been premiered, so Botstein may have a point.

Still, the argument against Botstein's philosophy is that, if we were to go solely with a composer's recorded wishes in all matters, concert music would sound a lot different than it does in many cases. Beethoven's metronome markings, for instance, are notoriously erratic, and the vast majority of orchestras and conductors use them as a vague guide rather than as definitive tempo markings. Mahler famously removed the Blumine movement from his first symphony, but many orchestras today re-insert it. Sibelius wrote several different versions of his 5th symphony, all of which have been performed and recorded in recent years. And Mendelssohn himself was hugely unhappy with the Italian Symphony that we're featuring on next week's ItC concerts (despite nearly universal consensus that it was a masterpiece,) and tried for years to revise it. We make use of none of his revisions today, that I know of.

My own view tends to be that composers do not have an eternal say over the music they wrote. If a manuscript is available and hasn't been played yet, why not play it? It might turn out to be of little interest, in which case it can safely go back in the drawer. But on next week's concerts, we'll be featuring a song by Fanny Mendelssohn so seldom performed that our library had to order the music for it from some random person we found on the internet. It's stunningly beautiful, and I'd hate to think that it might have stayed buried because someone was worried about whether or not Fanny meant for us to hear it.