Tag: Mendelssohn

Free Download Benedict Taylor Ph.D., "Rethinking Mendelssohn"
English | ISBN: 0190611782 | 2020 | 538 pages | PDF | 27 MB
As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer’s posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer’s music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture.

Free Download Bach in Berlin : nation and culture in Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion By Bach, Johann Sebastian; Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix; Applegate, Celia
2005 | 288 Pages | ISBN: 080144389X | PDF | 2 MB
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s supreme musical masterpieces, yet in the years after Bach’s death it was forgotten by all but a small number of his pupils and admirers. The public rediscovered it in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the work before a glittering audience of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Prussian royals, and civic notables. The concert soon became the stuff of legend, sparking a revival of interest in and performance of Bach that has continued to this day. Mendelssohn’s performance gave rise to the notion that recovering and performing Bach’s music was somehow "national work." In 1865 Wagner would claim that Bach embodied "the history of the German spirit’s inmost life." That the man most responsible for the revival of a masterwork of German Protestant culture was himself a converted Jew struck contemporaries as less remarkable than it does us today-a statement that embraces both the great achievements and the disasters of 150 years of German history. In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans’ collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were "the people of music." Applegate assesses the impact on music’s cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself

Free Download Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics By Daniel O. Dahlstrom (auth.), Reinier Munk (eds.)
2011 | 382 Pages | ISBN: 9400724500 | PDF | 4 MB
This book presents an extended dialogue in essay form between specialists in the work of Moses Mendelssohn, and experts in important trends in related late-seventeenth and eighteenth century thought. The first group of contributors explores themes in Mendelssohn’s metaphysics and aesthetics, presenting both their internal argumentative coherence and their historical context. The second outlines the context of Mendelssohn’s views on specific topics, and describes his contribution to the discussion of them.The essays are organized in four sections. The first pairs two essays on Mendelssohn’s theory of language and writing. The second section offers three essays addressing a number of topics in Mathematics and philosophy in Mendelssohn. A group of eight essays follows, dealing with Metaphysics in a historical context. The fourth section presents five essays discussing Mendelssohn’s Aesthetics in a historical context. Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics arises from a conference held in Amsterdam in 2009, which gathered numerous authorities to address the central theme. Taken together, these eighteen essays present a sophisticated portrait of Mendelssohn, packed with detail and rich in complexity.