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hands; they have since been transcribed by others for violin, flute, and even orchestra.
This piece was the last of the songs. It is an entirely separate piece: Mendelssohn’s farewell to the genre. It was the last piece he wrote for piano and cello. He died two years after he wrote it. It was discovered and published posthumously. As the last, it is hard not to see it as an innocent, always innocent, summary of the songs, even of his musical philosophy: decorum, structure, giving the audience exactly what it wants, with some subtle virtuosic passages to add some modest pianistic glory. Mendelssohn kept his genius in a box, and never seemed to regret it. He was a banker’s grandson, and he never forgot it.
This is probably how Mendelssohn heard all his songs:
sung not by the voice, but by the cello. After a lyrical beginning, a darker agitated midsection is the Rorschach blot inversion of the cheerful opening theme. Although
the happy theme falls, the less cheerful one rises, which is the opposite of what you might expect. The piece alternates between its cheerful initial key and its relative minor, a more gradual way of varying its depth. Rachmaninoff would sim- ply go from a major to a minor in two notes, a typically Tatar modulation (now beloved in science fiction film scores), but Mendelssohn, writing some 60 years earlier, attaches a slower fuse to his drama. At the end, the cello dips in its darkest register for a second before emerging into the sunlight to finish the initial theme, so both sections are combined into one sweeping phrase, the way Hitchcock was renowned for his continuous pans, so everything in a scene was shot without stopping or cutting. This last phrase is
a “Hitchcock pan.” Everything is illuminated in an inno- cent light from abeautiful life in a beautiful era. Unlike the neurosis of Beethoven, this is the sheer lucidity of Mozart, without the darkness of Bach.
It is interesting that the most autochthonous musicians, sprung from their own mold, were Mendelssohn and Chopin, who claimed no other influence than Bach.
Bach himself was, however, a creature of the age before him, who rethought what already existed into more complex structures. Bach lived on the shoulders of giants, but Mendelssohn and Chopin found Bach sufficient unto
the day.
EDVARD GRIEG (1843-1907)
Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Minor, Op. 36
It is interesting that Grieg borrows from himself both a wedding and a funeral march; maybe this sonata should be called One Wedding and a Funeral.
As Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Piano and Cello is really
a concerto where both piano and cello take turns being virtuoso soloists and virtuoso orchestras, Grieg’s monumen- tal cello sonata could be his second piano concerto. It is the only piece he wrote for piano and cello. After my teacher, Russell Sherman, learned the Grieg piano concerto, he told me, “You know, it’s surprisingly good.” Everyone expects Grieg’s music to be Song of Norway, or The Sound of Music set in Lofoten, but, as Grieg said, “music which matters, however national it may be, is lifted high above the purely national level.”
To quote Grieg from Wu Han’s and David Finckel’s own ArtistLed site: “Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on ethereal heights. My aim in my music is exactly what Ibsen says about his plays: ‘I want to build homes for the people in which they can be happy and contented.’” So that’s a triple quote: me quoting ArtistLed, quoting Grieg, quoting Ibsen.
Let us now forget Grieg and delve into the fascinating
life of Ibsen. (Digression is, after all, the soul of Romantic music.) But let me instead quote Ingmar Bergman, who said he wanted to be one of the craftsmen working his whole life building a gargoyle on the cathedral. Bergman’s modesty,
2018 Summer Season 211