Mendelssohn and the Riches of Leipzig

J.S BACH (1685-1750): Allemanda from the solo Violin Partita No 2 in D minor BWV1004 (1720), arranged with piano accompaniment by Robert Schumann

Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856) Märchenbilder (Fairy Tale Pictures) for piano & viola, Opus 113 (1851)

Ludwig THUILLE (1861-1907): Sextet for piano & wind quintet in B flat Opus 6 (1888)

Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847): Piano Quartet in B minor Opus 3 (1825)
- 200th anniversary of the composer's birth

Leipzig, the city of Bach, enjoyed another glorious period of music-making when Felix Mendelssohn took up his position as the town’s general music director, adding the originality of his own compositions to the skill with which he organised and directed concerts. Mendelssohn, the bicentenary of whose birth occurs in 2009, acknowledged his great predecessor in taking several initiatives to revive the regular performance of Bach’s music and he and Schumann, another contemporary ornament of musical life in Leipzig, both felt the need to supply simple keyboard accompaniments for the awe-inspiring and strange experience of Bach’s unaccompanied works for violin and cello. We hear, as an insight into a time when Bach still seemed a musty survivor of the baroque era to many listeners, the opening movement of the Partita No 2 for solo violin with Schumann’s respectful keyboard filling-out of the work’s chordal implications, and also Mendelssohn’s own superlative and precocious Piano Quartet in B minor. Schumann contributes some of his characteristically tender and fanciful instrumental songfulness in his Märchenbilder (Fairy Tale Pictures) for piano and viola; and a work that had its first performance in Leipzig, the Sextet for piano and wind quintet by a 19th century composer new to our programs, Ludwig Thuille, testifies to the lingering prestige won for the city by the Mendelssohn regime, even in post-Mendelssohnian times.