Mendelssohn. Bruch. Elgar

Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony in A Major, Op. 90, is one of the most vivid romantic period works ever produced. This symphony combines the mature and individual style of the composer with his faithfulness to classical traditions and influences of the new age. The refinement of the melodic development and the unconstraint of the polyphonic scenes imbue the symphony with a particular charm. It was not by chance that Mendelssohn was known as the “Mozart of the 19^th century”, while Stravinsky considered the Italian Symphony an exemplar of elegance in music.
Written under impressions of the composer’s travels in Italy (1830  – 1831), the symphony goes far beyond depictions of landscapes or programme scene imagery. Its music breathes youth, true joie de vivre and bubbling and ecstatic emotions  – these burst in with the very first notes of the Allegro vivace, the most expansive of the symphony’s movements. The soaring main theme is shaded by songful lyrical images that flow unusually naturally yet which at the same time are brilliantly developed (the fugato of the strings).
The laconic second, slow movement of the symphony Andante con moto, also in sonata form, unites a bleak chorale and everyday song and dance themes. The typically Austrian Ländler of the third movement, Con moto moderato, reminds one of the Schubertian origins of romanticism, punctuated by equally recognisable voices of hunting horns in the march-like trio. The whirlwind spin of the Saltarello, only for a second rendered gloomy by sad memories, is triumphant in the finale Presto  – a scene of boisterous and festive merriment, a street carnival.

The seventy-three-year-old Max Bruch needed all of his courage to perform his Double Concerto, Op. 88, in 1911. Two years after Schoenberg’s first atonal works in 1909 and two years before the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, Bruch ventured to compose in the style of his creative youth  – as if he had always remained a younger contemporary of Schumann and Brahms, a fervent follower of von Weber and Mendelssohn. The era of modernism took its revenge on Bruch, undeservedly labelling him with the reputation of a retrograde. The composer of the popular Violin Concerto in G Minor, Op. 26, was accused of being a second-rate imitator of Brahms while no-one pointed out the fact that Bruch’s concerto had been written ten years before Brahms’ Violin Concerto.
Apropos, a great future awaited the young musician from the very outset. At the age of fourteen, Bruch conducted the premiere of his own early symphony in Cologne, by the age of nineteen he had graduated from the conservatoire in composition and piano studies and, at the age of twenty, he was already teaching music theory topics at the conservatoire in Cologne. Premieres of his operas, oratorios, symphonies, instrumental concerti, chamber ensembles and vocal cycles followed one after another. His performing and teaching career developed with equal alacrity; Max Bruch’s pupils included such outstanding 20^th century maestri as Italy’s Ottorino Respighi and Great Britain’s Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Today Bruch’s most popular works include Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, the Adagio on Celtic Melodies, the Hebrew melody Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra and arrangements of Russian and Swedish songs and dances. Contemporaries had a high regard for the talent of Bruch, a fervent and vivid romantic, a first-class melodist, a maestro of refined musical form, a dedicated scholar and a truly dazzling professional. In 1893, the same year as Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and Grieg, he was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of Music by the University of Cambridge. When listening to Bruch’s Double Concerto, it is perhaps better to try and forget that it was composed in 1911. By thinking ourselves into the “golden age” of German musical romanticism and, like the composer, being within the circle of his great predecessors and contemporaries, we come face to face with a classical example of the style and a source of direct emotion and rare melodic charm. The Concerto was first performed in Wilhelmshaven in 1912. The version of the Concerto for Violin and Viola proved immensely popular.
Iosif Raiskin

Edward Elgar completed his Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra (Enigma) in 1899; the work was to become his very own calling card. Legend has it that after an entire day’s teaching Elgar improvised a theme in which one can hear understandable weariness and which, to Russians, recalls the Song of the Volga Boatmen. The theme drew the attention of the composer’s wife Caroline Alice Elgar, and he then improvised the variations. The initials and the invented names conceal the identities of people close to the composer. The romantic and refined first variation, a direct continuation of the theme, is dedicated to his wife. In variation No 6 the theme is given to the violas (Isabel Fitton studied the viola under Elgar). Once the hero of the seventh variation  – the architect Arthur Troyte Griffith  – and the composer were caught in a thunderstorm and sought shelter at the home of Winifred Norbury (see the eighth variation). Variation No 9, Nimrod (August Johannes Jaeger), stands alone for the amazing beauty and orchestral expression of its Adagio  – one of Elgar’s masterpieces. The Old Testament patriarch Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel is represented by one of the composer’s friends who served with the London music publisher Novello & Co.
Of the other pieces, several are sweet nothings. Dorabella is the stuttering Dora Penny, while variation No 11 is a portrait not of George Robertson Sinclair, a Hereford organist, but his beloved bulldog. In the thirteenth bar of variation No 13, to the background of the measured sounds of the violas and the tremolo of the kettledrums depicting the crashing of waves and the noise of a ship’s machinery, the clarinet performs the secondary theme from Mendelssohn’s overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, subsequently repeated by the trumpets and trombones: the heroine of the variation has set sail for Australia. The finale, in which the orchestra may be joined by the organ, is Edward Elgar himself. During his lifetime, he revealed all of the mysterious codes in his comments on the work. Yet for the next generation he left an even deeper enigma: the variations would appear to conceal some hidden and resonant theme in the score that even today remains elusive... To this day people are still trying to find it and these searches force us to return to Enigma, looking for some deeper meaning beneath the leaves of this private photo album.
Anna Bulycheva