"Chorale Transformation and Triumph in Mendelssohn's _Sinfonia VI _ and Hensel's Das Jahr" (original) (raw)
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The role of the chorale in the oratorios and symphonies of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
2005
The Lutheran chorale fascinated Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1947) to the extent that it became a signature element in some of his major works. The purpose of this study is to examine how and why he incorporated chorales and "pseudo-chorales" in three oratorios (Paulus, Op. 36, 1836; Elijah, Op. 70, 1846; Christus, Op. 97, 1847, unfinished), and two symphonies (#2 "Lobgesang" Op. 52, 1840;5 "Reformation," 1830, Op. 107, publ. posth.) It also considers the effects of these issues on musical performance. Four influences upon Mendelssohn's inclusion of the chorale form are investigated: the music of J. S. Bach (1685 – 1750); Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834, theologian); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832, author and poet); and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841, painter and architect). The five works are analyzed in an attempt to illustrate how these influences led Mendelssohn to introduce chorales, with or without texts, with the intention...
Analytical Quest of Four Selected Harmonized Chorales of Johann Sabastian Bach
International Journal of Education Humanities and Social Science
Chorale No 9 (Ermuntre dich mein schwacher Geist), Chorale No 14 (O Herre Gott, dein gottlich Wort), Chorale No 73 (Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut) and Chorale No 81 (Christus, der uns selig macht), are selected Lutheran chorales harmonized by Johann Sabastian Bach, an iconic composer of the Baroque era. In his harmonic processes, Bach explored various altered chords, harmonic devices, and non-harmonic tones. Focusing on a case study design, purposive sampling technique, and document analysis, the authors attempt to provide a formal analysis of the four selected harmonized chorales, employing parameters such as scale, vocal rages, melodic organization, harmony and tonality, non-chord tones, texture, and form. The analysis unravels his harmonic vocabulary to determine his compositional style. The harmonized chorales of Johann Sabastian Bach are therefore good educational materials of harmony and counterpoint andragogy for music students.
14. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Two-Choir Passion
Open Book Publishers, 2018
On the front and back covers of this collection of essays is shadowed, and across the ensuing opening we discern, the entire evidence in writing of John Milton's composition of the poem he began under the title Song and developed by stages of revision into At a Solemn Musick. John Milton is not a modernist author. Yet this double-page spread in his autograph of his earlier writing preserved as 'The Milton Manuscript'' (shelfmark R.3.4) in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, shows every characteristic of authorial drafts from later times in later hands.
Conflict and Dialectic of Faiths in Felix Mendelssohn's Responsorium et Hymnus
Kwartalnik Młodych Muzykologów UJ, 2018
This essay aims at discussing the problem of Felix Mendelssohn’s attitude towards different religions shown in his choral piece Responsorium et Hymnus Op. 121 for male choir with cello and double bass. Considering the arguments concerning composer’s self-identity provided by Jeffrey Sposato, we could interpret the Lutheran chorale appearing at the end of this Catholic liturgical work as means by which Mendelssohn tried to manifest his Lutheran faith and therefore to criticize Catholicism. However, if we examine more carefully the very end of this composition, we would find that the musical material, characteristic for each faith, form a dialectical and dynamic relation. It seems that—instead of criticizing Catholicism—Felix showed the possibility and the necessity of different faiths to coexist, which, according to the idea of religious pluralism and tolerance proposed by composer’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, is the only way to discover religious truth. At the end of this paper, I would like to propose that the reception history of Felix Mendelssohn’s work and life from the post-Wagnerian and anti-semitic criticism to so-called Mendelssohn Renaissance in the second half of 20th century also went through a dialectic course. We cannot fully understand and interpret them without taking a multi-aspect view.
The Role of the Chorale in the Oratorios and Symphonies of
2016
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2020
Please visit <derekremes.com/publications/> to download Vol. 2: Examples, Appendices, and Bibliography. (The file is too large for the Academia website.) The present work investigates the compositional pedagogy of J. S. Bach and his circle. According to Bach, the Fundamental-Regeln (fundamental principles) of composition are derived from thoroughbass and the keyboard. I have discovered that, in an autograph manuscript likely used in his lessons, Bach used the words licentia and fundamental to rationalize a contrapuntal phenomenon known as anticipationes transitus in precisely the same manner as J. D. Heinichen did in his treatise, Der General-Bass in der Composition (1728). Given that Bach knew Heinichen’s treatise and that both men associate thoroughbass with composition, this study posits that Bach’s Fundamental-Regeln are related to Heinichen’s rationalization of modern contrapuntal licenses in relation to a “fundamental,” stile antico background. Additional support for linking Bach and Heinichen comes from my discovery that the anonymous “Vorschriften und Grundsätze” (1738), which originates from Bach’s circle, includes the same table of “fundamental” thoroughbass figures as Heinichen’s earlier 1711 treatise. For these reasons, Heinichen’s conception of thoroughbass, which differs significantly from late-eighteenth-century thoroughbass theory, plays a foundational role in this reconstruction of compositional pedagogy in Bach’s circle. Based on an account by C. P. E. Bach, his father’s teaching involved three topic areas: thoroughbass, chorale, and fugue, each of which receives a chapter in this study. Chapter One argues that the primary reason thoroughbass emerged in Germany c.1700 as the dominant pedagogical and compositional method is that thoroughbass promotes an understanding of compositional relationships in a manner that tablature does not. Bach may have attributed such significance to thoroughbass because it enables a single player to control a polyphonic texture in real time through the simplification, synthesis, and embodiment of traditional contrapuntal teachings. Chapter one also explores the two most significant aspects of Heinichen’s thoroughbass theory: what I call “contrapuntal function” and “scale-degree function,” which are combined in Heinichen’s method of improvising a prelude. Next, Chapter Two explores the implications of the recent attribution of the Sibley Chorale Book to Bach’s circle and calls for a greater awareness of a generic distinction between chorale harmonization in the ornate, four-part, vocal Choralgesang style and the simpler, thoroughbass- and keyboard-centered Choralgesang style, which is in essence only two-voice (soprano and bass). A growing body of sources from Bach’s circle containing multiple basslines under each chorale support the hypothesis that Bach’s teaching also included this technique. Finally, Chapter Three begins by examining the relationship between chorale and fugue and by suggesting a possible pedagogical method of transitioning between the two. Next, thoroughbass fugues from Bach’s circle are explored, including two such works that Bach apparently used in lessons. Chapter Three closes with an investigation of the techniques of invertible counterpoint and canon as they relate to Bach’s teaching and presents some of their underlying principles in mathematical form.
Review of Moses Mendelssohn, Jubiläumsausgabe vol. 21. 1 and 2
H-Net, 2023
With the publication of a number of loose ends of scattered texts, fragments, and letters, the long-anticipated completion of the edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s Gesammelte Schriften known as Jubiläumsausgabe (jubilee edition) has finally come to its end. What had begun in a cheerfully upbeat and forward-looking mood in 1929 in Weimar Germany at the cusp of what is often referred to as the Jewish Renaissance has now, almost a century later, come to a bit of an anticlimactic close. Featuring thirty-nine tomes in twenty-four volumes, virtually every shred of writing Mendelssohn has ever been suspected to have composed or dictated to his son to go into his notebook has now been conscientiously assembled, carefully edited, and thoroughly commented.
Music Theory Online, 2020
Read online to see the complete examples: https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.3/mto.20.26.3.remes.html ABSTRACT: This article provides the first English translation of a little-known manuscript treatise by the central-German composer and Capellmeister, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749), titled Kürzer und gründliche Unterricht (Brief and Thorough Instruction, ca. 1719-49). Stölzel's method frames speculative theory (trias harmonica and the tabula tradition) practically in terms of thoroughbass in order to provide simple instruction on how to invent the bass and middle voices to an original chorale melody. In the second half of the treatise, Stölzel uses thoroughbass to describe not only harmony, but also counterpoint. He does so by explaining various dissonant intervallic constellations in terms of the traditional terms "agent" and "patient," which describe the two voices involved in a dissonant syncopatio. Stölzel's treatise thus has both historical and practical value, since his method of chorale harmonization can provide welcome guidance for today's students and pedagogues.
Mendelssohn’s Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, completed in October 1827, is one of several works by the young composer to feature the unmistakable influence of Beethoven’s “late” style. Op. 13 is therefore treated frequently as an apprentice work, an attempt by a teenage composer to come to terms with the style of an earlier and venerated master; Beethoven’s music is thus used as a critical yardstick in evaluating Mendelssohn’s work. Mendelssohn’s aims in his work, however, were often quite different from Beethoven’s. In this paper, I attempt to place Op. 13 within Mendelssohn’s own creative development, examining where his Beethovenian apprenticeship might fit within the development of his own style. I shall focus on a comparison between Mendelssohn’s work and Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, which served as primary model for the first and (to a lesser extent) last movements of Mendelssohn’s quartet. As a counter-example, placing Op. 13 in the context of earlier works, I shall also include a comparison between Op. 13 and the F-minor Sinfonia for string orchestra. Mendelssohn’s work displays greater formal clarity and rhetorical directness than that of his late-Beethovenian models. Mendelssohn avoids Beethoven’s tonal, thematic and emotional ambiguities, and his fractured musical surface, in favour of fluency and continuity. He also seeks a more obvious sense of unity: Beethoven achieves unity through subtle, implicit motivic connections which are not always directly audible; Mendelssohn’s Op. 13, on the other hand, is a cyclic work, the unity of which relies on explicitly audible connections between entire (self-sufficient) themes. In terms of expressive ambience, Op. 13 is clearly linked to Mendelssohn’s own earlier compositions. A number of the composer’s teenage works (notably the First Symphony, Op. 11, and several movements in his String Symphonies) are characterised by an agitated, dramatic expression, reminiscent of Haydn’s so-called Sturm und Drang works. Op. 13, especially in its outer movements, achieves a greater intensity and drive than Mendelssohn’s earlier explorations of agitated expression, and this is due in no small part to devices which he probably owes to his intense familiarity with Beethoven’s late works (e.g., the fragmentation and disruption of thematic materials, and the use of polyphony as a destabilising factor, a means of bringing two contrasted themes together, allowing one to question the other). Even in his partial adaptation of Beethoven’s means and thematic materials, then, Mendelssohn was not merely attempting to assimilate Beethoven’s style. Instead, he treated his models selectively, emulating those features in Beethoven’s work that helped him in consolidating and intensifying his own expressive aims.