The Mentor: Famous Composers, Vol. 1, Num. 41, Serial No. 41

At the age of eleven Felix was composing with extraordinary rapidity, producing sixty pieces during the first year of composition, and the next year he was writing opera.

The Mendelssohn family had established the custom of holding musical festivals in the dining room of their home on alternate Sunday mornings. The music was rendered by a small orchestra under the direction of Felix. For each of these festivals the boy had some new composition. Thus, at the festival on his fifteenth birthday a private performance of his first three-act opera was held.

At the age of sixteen his father took him to Paris, where he met Rossini and Meyerbeer and other well known composers. With these men he worked and discoursed on music as if he were their equal in experience.

When only a little over seventeen he completed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which made an immediate success. During 1829 the composer made his first of ten trips to England, where “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was produced. On this occasion the director of the performance left the entire score in a coach on his return from the theater; but Mendelssohn wrote another from memory without a single error.

The next few years were full of activity. Mendelssohn produced many compositions, and filled the position of director of music, first at Düsseldorf, then at the Gewandhaus, Leipsic. The latter position was the highest honor in the German music world.

In 1837 he was married to Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud, whom he took on his concert tours, and it was during a tour in England with her that he received a call to Berlin from the king of Prussia. He left Berlin with the title of Kapellmeister.

The worry of his Berlin duties, a number of which he frankly told the king he could not fill, on account of the work at the Gewandhaus, began to wear on his health. Despite his weakened condition, he continued to do things. In 1843 he opened a college of music. Three years later he introduced Jenny Lind at the Gewandhaus, and then made a tour with her in England.

His activity was telling on his failing health, and when he reached Frankfort in 1847, returning from England, the news of his sister Fanny’s death caused him to collapse in the street. Five weeks later he had sufficiently recovered to take a trip with his family to Interlaken, where he remained until September, when he returned to Leipsic and lived in privacy.

On October 9 he asked Madam Frege to sing his latest songs. She left the room to get some lights, and on her return found him insensible. He lingered until November 4, when he died in the presence of his wife, his brother Paul, and three friends. A cross marks the site of his grave in Berlin.

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Monograph Number Three in The Mentor Reading Course

Of all the great masters of music, Franz Schubert had the least instruction of any. His life was full of the gloom and sorrow that surrounded so many of the earlier composers.

He was born in Vienna, January 31, 1797, one of a family of fourteen, nine of whom died in infancy. His first music lessons were given by his father on the violin and by his brother on the pianoforte. In 1808 he was sent to preparatory school; but could not stay after 1813, as he had failed in examinations. Although the Emperor of Austria offered him a scholarship, he refused it.

He began composing at the age of sixteen, and at twenty-five had written over 600 pieces. He had much difficulty with the publication of his works; but finally succeeded in making a commission arrangement with a publishing house.

Just how he lived from 1813 to 1818 no one knows. His music was not published until after that time, and he never appeared in public. It was not until the middle of 1818 that he was engaged as teacher for the family of Johann Esterházy. He called on Beethoven with some songs that he had dedicated to that great master. Beethoven was so deaf that all conversation had to be carried on by pencil and paper. Schubert was so bashful that Beethoven’s first remark about some of the variations caused him to lose his head. He rushed from the house in terror. This was in 1822.

The next two years were full of disappointment; for he met with failure at the first production of “Alfonso and Estrella.” This broke down his health. He left Vienna with the Esterházys for six months, and returned in somewhat better health.

By 1826 there was some demand for his songs, but an almost total ignoring of his larger works. His application for Kapellmeister was rejected, and also that for director in the Haftheater. Just before Beethoven’s death he paid a second visit, and found the great master favorably inclined toward his work. Three weeks later he was pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral.

March 26, 1828, was the date of his first public concert of his own compositions. This netted him one hundred and sixty dollars. In the fall of the same year he fell ill, and died November 19. He was buried in Währing, “three places higher up than Beethoven.” A marble tomb with a bust of the composer placed between two columns marks his grave.

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Monograph Number Four in The Mentor Reading Course

Although Schumann had begun to take a hand at composition before he was seven years old, he did not begin a real study of music until he was twenty. He was born at Zwickau, June 8, 1810, and lived there until 1826, when he began the study of law at the University of Leipsic. He wrote verse when at the university, and read more poetry and literature than law. In 1830, he took up the study of music under two masters. Herr Wieck was his teacher of pianoforte, and Heinrich Donn of composition.

Although he had already composed a great deal, it was not until after 1840 that he studied harmony. Friends calling on him and his wife one evening said that they found the master and his wife “studying Cherubini’s counterpoint for the first time.”

His opportunity to become a virtuoso was lost when he lamed the fourth finger of his right hand while trying a stunt in practising. Schumann believed that he could train himself to reach beyond an octave by the use of his fourth finger, and it was in an attempt to do this that he disabled his hand.

With his pianoforte master Wieck, he founded a music journal, which he edited alone from 1835 to 1844. He attempted concerts in Vienna in 1838; but failed and returned to Leipsic. In 1840 he received the degree of Ph. D. from the University of Jena. He married Clara Wieck in the same year; although her father objected strongly to the match. His wife, under the name of Clara Schumann, became one of the most famous pianists and teachers in Europe. So the musician’s fame went to his wife; while Schumann made fame for himself as a composer. He became teacher of score reading in the college that Mendelssohn founded at Leipsic in 1843, and in 1847 conducted the Liedertafel. In 1850 he succeeded Ferdinand Hiller as general music director of Düsseldorf.

Owing to insanity, which threatened him as early as 1833, he had to resign in 1853, and in 1854 he jumped into the Rhine. He was committed to an asylum at Endenish, where he died July 29, 1856. He was buried in Bonn. A simple headstone marks his grave.

FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN

Monograph Number Five in The Mentor Reading Course

“Imagine a delicate man of extreme refinement of mien and manner, sitting at the piano and playing with no sway of body and scarcely any movement of the arms, depending entirely upon his narrow, feminine hands and slender fingers!”

This is the picture of Chopin as seen by an amateur pupil. This great pianist, the inspiration of Liszt and the expounder of Polish dance music and national songs, was born at Zela Zowa Wola, near Warsaw, March 1, 1809. He was supported at college at Warsaw by an annuity of one hundred and twenty dollars, the gift of Prince Antoine Radziwill, who had written music for Goethe’s “Faust.”

The friendship of the prince is what brought Chopin into the circle of the most graceful and refined society of the early nineteenth century, that of Poland.

At nineteen Chopin made his début as a pianist in Vienna. Robert Schumann heard him play his first piece, “Don Giovanni Fantasie,” which led him to remark that the pianist was “the boldest and proudest spirit of the times.” Just after this same concert the leading German musical journal said, “M. Chopin has placed himself in the first rank of pianists,” and praised “his delicacy of touch, his rare mechanical dexterity, and the splendid clearness of his phrasing.”

In 1831 he stopped at Paris when on his way for an intended tour in England. He stayed there and made that city his permanent home. It was at this time that he met Madame Dudevant, better known by her literary pseudonym, George Sand, who was destined to have a great influence on his life.

Six years later, in failing health, he went to Majorca, where he recovered for a time, due to the constant attention and tender care of George Sand. However, in 1840 the pulmonary disease attacked him again, and the last years of his life were a constant struggle against ill health.

Chopin brought a new spirit into music, a new feeling and a new technic into piano playing. He was regarded with admiration not unmixed with awe. As his life drew near its end the music world watched and worshiped him as it might a divine spirit. He died October 17, 1849.

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course

The life of Johannes Brahms was an unsettled and wandering one. It was not until his later years that he chose a definite city for his home.

He was born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833, the son of a double-bass player in a theater, who was his first teacher. His life was uneventful until the age of twenty, when he began his public career with a concert tour in company with Remenyi, the Hungarian violinist.

Joachim, the famous student of Mendelssohn, attended the concert at Göttingen, where Brahms was to play the “Kreutzer” sonata of Beethoven. The piano turned out to be a semitone below the required pitch. Brahms played the piece from memory, transposing it from A to B flat. Joachim discerned what the feat implied, and after the concert introduced himself to the pianist, laying the foundation of a lifelong friendship, through which Brahms met Liszt and Schumann. The latter, after hearing but a few of his compositions, pronounced him “the master of the music of the future.”

The Prince of Lippe-Detmold engaged him as choir director and music master in 1854. He kept the position a few years and then resigned. He then wandered about, giving occasional concerts at Hamburg and Zurich. In 1863 he was appointed director of the Singakademie; but resigned within a year.

He seems to have had no public activity or settled work for the next four years, when he went on a concert tour with Joachim, and later with Stockhausen. In 1871 he began to direct the concerts of the “Gesellschaft der Musik-freunde,” which he continued to do until 1874. He spent the remainder of his life in Vienna, whence he took journeys to Italy in the spring and Switzerland in the summer.

He refused to go to England to take an honorary degree, Doctor of Music, offered by Cambridge University. In 1881 the University of Breslau conferred an honorary Ph. D. on him. Before his death he was granted two more honors. He was created a knight of the Prussian order, “Pour le Mérité,” in 1886, and he gained the freedom of his town in 1889. He died at Vienna, April 3, 1897.

1

Chamber music is the term used for pieces played by a group (“ensemble”) of instrumentalists too small to be called an orchestra. Most frequently these pieces are for a few players of string instruments (quartets, quintets, etc.), with or without piano. Program music is music that seeks to depict or suggest a thunderstorm, the babbling of a brook, or any incident, scene, or poetic fancy associated with it by the composer.