Lost Mendelssohn works airing before 200th b-day

[January 23, 2009]  NEW YORK (AP) -- The world is getting a musical present for Felix Mendelssohn's 200th birthday -- the first performances of 13 long-lost works of the German composer.

The compositions were among 270 Mendelssohn pieces hidden in libraries or in private collections around the world, according to Stephen Somary, a conductor and musical sleuth who spent more than a decade hunting the composer's forgotten works.

The 13 compositions -- for voice, string quartet, piano and violin -- are being performed at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage on Wednesday, six days before Mendelssohn's birthday on Feb. 3.

"This concert to me is an extraordinary event at putting together works that really cross his entire lifetime," Somary said. "It's unprecedented."

The performance comes seven years after Somary's Mendelssohn Project premiered the composer's revised version of the beloved "Italian" symphony. It's about eight minutes longer than the well-known one given to the publisher by Mendelssohn's wife after his death.

"There are so many examples like that, where incorrect versions were published or only half-finished," Somary said.

Not everybody thinks these newly found works deserve much attention.

Leon Botstein, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and president of Bard College, said Mendelssohn was among the most self-critical of composers.

"I would be very, very skeptical," Botstein said. "If the composer leaves it unfinished or kept it out from publication, you have to respect the composer's wishes. What needs to be honored in Mendelssohn is the music that has been known for (more than) 100 years, much of it published shortly after his death, that isn't played."

The composer was the grandson of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. When Felix was a child, his parents converted the family to Christianity and adopted the last name Bartholdy.

Some of his greatest works -- the string Octet and incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- were written before he turned 18. His string quartets, last three symphonies, E Major violin concerto, oratorio "Elijah" and what became the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald Angel Sings" are also among his masterpieces.

Somary, a New Yorker who worked in Germany in the 1990s, had such a love for Mendelssohn that he set out to record the composer's entire catalog -- then believed to number 350 to 400 works.

"I had no idea what I was walking into when I started this," said Somary, a former aide to Leonard Bernstein.

Because of the composer's Jewish background, his works were banned in Germany by the Nazis. During the Hitler era, hundreds of compositions, manuscripts, letters and even artworks Mendelssohn painted were smuggled to Warsaw and Krakow, then dispersed around the world after Germany occupied Poland.

Consulting with musicologists and poring through 9,000 unpublished letters, Somary was able to track down the lost pieces.

Wednesday's program -- to be performed by the Shanghai Quartet and others -- includes works recovered in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Russia, France and England.

"Once I first went to the Prussian State Library in the former East Berlin and started reading some of the letters that had never been published and started seeing references to four or five different operas that no one had ever heard about," Somary said. "Another symphony, a children's symphony, chamber music lieder, artworks. An entire world opened up for me. ... It was so stunning."

Mendelssohn died at 38 in 1847, just before nationalist revolutions swept Europe. Among the German nationalists was the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner, who wrote the screed "Judaism in Music" in 1850, condemning works by Jews.

"What issues from the Jews' attempts at making art must necessarily therefore bear attributes of coldness and indifference, even to triviality and absurdity," Wagner wrote.

Somary said that within six years of that publication, Mendelssohn's music went from by far the most performed in Central Europe to not performed at all.

Wagner and his sympathizers plotted "to posthumously assassinate" Mendelssohn, Somary said.

He hopes the concert and the project will elevate Mendelssohn's stature.

"There was something incomplete about him, something incomplete about the public's perception," Somary said. "His music was so extraordinary but yet it was never given the same attention as others of the same quality."

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On the Net:

http://www.themendelssohnproject.org/

http://www.mjhnyc.org/

[Associated Press; By MARTIN STEINBERG]

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