Score: 18 pages, piano part: 6 pages, cello part: 4 pages, viola part: 4 pages, violin part: 4 pages. duration: ca. 5'. This is the famous wedding march from Op. 61 composed in 1842 and commonly performed as a recessional march at the end of a wedding. The piece was originally composed for orchestra then arranged for organ and performed by Mendelssohn himself.
Mendelssohn: Wedding March
Mendelssohns Wedding March is so
popular that its difficult to imagine a wedding without it. It seems like its
been around for eternity. In any case, it was only 150 years or so ago that the
Wedding March came about. It was performed in Potsdam for the first time in
1842, as a piece of Mendelssohns music for the Shakespeare play A Midsummer
Nights Dream. It was first used for a wedding in 1858
Mendelssohn Background
Felix
Mendelssohn (1809 1847) was, by all
means, a German mastermind composer, musician and orchestra conductor of the Romantic period.
Consequently, Mendelssohn composed in the usual forms of the time - symphonies, concertos, oratorios,
piano music, and chamber music. To summarize, his most famous works
include his music for A Midsummer Night's Dream,
the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, The
Hebrides Overture, his later Concerto for Violin & Orchestra, and
his Octet for Strings. His most well-known piano pieces, by and large,
are the Songs Without Words.
Artistic Standing
Musical tastes change from time to time. Moreover,
just such a change occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This plus
rampant antisemitism brought a corresponding amount of undue criticism. Fortunately,
however, his artistic inventiveness has indeed been critically re-evaluated. As
a result, Mendelssohn is once again among the most prevalent composers of the Romantic
era.
Early Family Life
Mendelssohn was, in fact, born into a prominent Jewish family.
His grandfather was, notably, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Felix was,
in fact, raised without religion. At the age of seven, he was all of a sudden baptized
as a Reformed Christian. He was, moreover, a child musical
prodigy. Nevertheless, his parents did not attempt to exploit his talent.
Early Adulthood
Mendelssohn was, in general, successful in
Germany. He conducted, in particular, a revival of the music of Johann
Sebastian Bach, specifically with his presentation of the St Matthew
Passion in 1829. Felix was truly in demand throughout Europe as a
composer, conductor, and soloist. For example, he visited Britain ten times. There,
he premiered, namely, many of his major works. His taste in music was. To be
sure, inventive and well-crafted yet markedly conservative. This conservatism
separated him by all means from more audacious musical colleagues like Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz.
Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatoire which, to clarify, became a defender
of this conservative viewpoint.
Mature Adulthood
Schumann notably wrote that
"Mendelssohn was the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant
musician, the one who most clearly sees through the contradictions of the age
and for the first time reconciles them." This observation points to a
couple of features in particular that illustrate Mendelssohn's works and his artistic
procedure.
Musical Features
In the first place, his musical
style was fixed in his methodical mastery of the style of preceding masters. This
being said, he certainly recognized and even developed early romanticism from
the music of Beethoven and Weber. Secondly, it indicates that Mendelssohn sought
to strengthen his inherited musical legacy rather than to exchange it with new
forms and styles or replace it with exotic orchestration. Consequently,
he diverged his contemporaries in t
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