music history

The Hensels’ Year in Music

The Hensels’ Year in Music

“The Advantage of Artists”

In 1841, the composer Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn-Bartholdy) presented her husband Wilhelm with a remarkable Christmas present: a cycle of thirteen short pieces for piano, entitled Das Jahr (The Year). The cycle contains one piece for each month of the year, and closes with a postlude.

In 1841, Fanny Hensel had written to an artist friend about her project:

“I’m engaged on another small work that’s giving me much fun, namely a series of 12 piano pieces meant to depict the months; I’ve already progressed more than half way. When I finish, I’ll make clean copies of the pieces, and they will be provided with vignettes. And so we try to ornament and prettify our lives–that is the advantage of artists, that they can strew such beautifications about, for those nearby to take an interest in.”

Quoted and translated in R. Larry Todd, Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 275.

The Chorale "Wachet auf" in Mendelssohn's Paulus

The Chorale "Wachet auf" in Mendelssohn's Paulus

In 1829, at the age of 20, Felix Mendelssohn directed the first performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since the composer’s death in 1750. Felix and his sister, the composer Fanny Mendelssohn, had grown up studying harmony with a Bach specialist, Carl Friedrich Zelter. The siblings’ grandmother, Bella Salomon, encouraged Felix’s interest by arranging for a copy of Bach’s extremely rare St. Matthew Passion to be made as a gift for the teenage Felix around 1823 or 1824. By 1829, Felix Mendelssohn had completed the research, editing, copying, organization and rehearsal required to direct the Berlin Singakademie in a performance of the work, and in doing so, he more or less single-handedly began a revival of interest in Bach’s music which continues unabated to this day.

Mendelssohn’s love for Bach led him to experiment with bringing Bach’s techniques into his own compositions. FIve years after his revival of the St. Matthew Passion, Mendelssohn began one of his boldest neo-Baroque compositions: an oratorio based on the life of St. Paul.

A Pretty Short Introduction to J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion

A Pretty Short Introduction to J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion

J.S. Bach (1685-1750) wrote his St. Matthew Passion in 1727 for the Good Friday service at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where he was Kapellmeister (Director of Music). Scored for two orchestras, two choirs, and soloists, this piece tells the story of Christ’s passion in the manner of an oratorio or unstaged opera, with different singers representing different characters in the Passion narrative—much like we do when we read the Passion together on Good Friday here at Ascension.