Mendelssohn. Sibelius. Shostakovich

The overture and scherzo from Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream appear to have been worn from one burst of inspiration, but in actual fact one was written seventeen years after the other. In 1826 the seventeen-year-old composer had begun to read Shakespeare’s plays in translation by the German romantic poet Ludwig Tieck. As a result, on 6 August that year he completed his fantasy concerto overture, which immediately became his “calling card”. First it was performed at the Mendelssohns’ home, in 1827 it was performed in Szczecin and the next year on a bright sunny day it created a sensation in London, later followed by performances in Paris. Of the chords of the wind instruments that open the overture Franz Liszt said that they are like eyelids closing and opening so that the listener’s eyesight can penetrate the magical world of the elves. But not just of the elves: the imitation of an asinine “hee-haw” refers to the part of Shakespeare’s play when Nick Bottom is transformed into a beast. On 14 October 1843 in Potsdam the premiere of Ludwig Tieck’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream took place; by this time Tieck was Director of theatres in Berlin. It was logical that the Berlin conductor Felix Mendelssohn would compose another twelve musical numbers for it, including one of the orchestral entr’actes – the Scherzo.
Anna Bulycheva

The violin was Jean Sibelius’ favourite instrument, and in his youth the composer dreamt constantly of a glittering career as a virtuoso violinist. Sadly these dreams were not to be: he had begun to learn the instrument too late, and Sibelius had also had an injury to his shoulder which ultimately forced him to abandon his ambitious plans. Nevertheless, the composer never lost interest in the violin and could spend ages improvising on it. Approaching his fortieth birthday, he remarked “there is still a part of me that wishes to be a violinist, and this part of me manifests itself in an unusual way.” Sibelius soon started working on his only violin concerto, in which he displays his deep love for and intimate knowledge of the instrument.
The concerto is remarkable for its extreme complexity: it reflects clearly the composer’s desire to showcase the violin’s unparalleled expressive possibilities – the ones that were beyond his own reach as a performer. The premiere of the work in Berlin was an astounding success, and his music led one of the critics to a make a charming comparison with “the picturesque Scandinavian winter landscapes where artists use the refined play of white on white to achieve rate and at times hypnotic and powerful effects.”
Nadezhda Kulygina

In early March 1969 Dmitry Shostakovich completed one of his most perpetual works – the Fourteenth Symphony, executed in the form of a vocal cycle for bass, soprano and chamber orchestra. The symphony is composed of eleven parts. The texts of the first two are by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who died tragically during the Spanish Civil War. The third is based on a ballade by the German Romantic Klemens Brentano in the French translation by Guillaume Apollinaire. Parts four to eight were written to words by Apollinaire, part nine to words by Wilhelm Küchelbeker and the last two sections to words by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Shostakovich sensed that the Fourteenth Symphony was a synthesis of his mature works, that everything he had written “over many, many years” was mere “preparation for this work” (from a letter to I.D. Glikman dated 19 March that same year). But the sixty-two-year-old composer’s symphony contains not a trace of that lofty conciliation and lucidity typical for “final” works created by great geniuses in their late years. It is saturated with a feeling of protest, disappointment, the fear of ceasing to exist and, at the same time, an attraction towards it.
The Fourteenth Symphony is dedicated to Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), whose War Requiem Shostakovich considered a masterpiece of contemporary music. But Shostakovich’s symphony is a unique negative of the Requiem: in structure it is closer to a mass for the dead, though in content it is not. The separate parts of the Fourteenth Symphony are distorted, “travesty” variations of the parts of a requiem: where there should be a  Lacrimosa in the Requiem, with Shostakovich (Madam, Look! ) there is almost obscene hysterical laughter, instead of the Sanctus – a hymn to the Great Jehovah – the sultan is cursed, while the closing Libera me de morte aeterna motif is replaced by maxims on the absolute power of death. There are many other examples of such interchanges of meaning between the Fourteenth Symphony and a requiem mass. Here the elegy O Delvig, Delvig! takes the place of the  Benedictus – traditionally the brightest, most glorious part of a mass and dedicated to the Holy Spirit; not by chance alone is this section free of the spirit of negativism that pervades the rest of the symphony.
Levon Akopian