MUSIC

A long-lost Mendelssohn score gets its 21st century premiere

Mining archives leads Southwestern Univ. professor to find missing Mendelssohn music.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Monday, February 16, 2009

By all accounts, Felix Mendelssohn's "Fantasy and Variations for Two Pianos and Orchestra on the Gypsy March from Weber's 'Preziosa' " was well received when it was first played in 1833 in London.

The German composer had written the piece for orchestra and two pianos to feature his friend Ignaz Moscheles , a piano celebrity of the time. The two friends performed the piece at the King's Theatre to great applause, with Mendelssohn and Moscheles each giving his own version of the flourishing finale.

But after the premiere, the score was set aside, and the music was never heard again.

On Saturday, after years of academic detective work and countless hours piecing together heavily revised manuscripts, Southwestern University professor J. Michael Cooper will reintroduce "Fantasy and Variations" to the world when the Austin Civic Orchestra performs the full piece for the first time since 1833.

Cooper, who has resurrected half a dozen other missing Mendelssohn scores, said he wanted to unveil the piece in 2009 to coincide with the worldwide celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth.

Unearthing missing manuscripts is at the center of Mendelssohn scholarship. Of the 400 or so pieces the composer penned, only about 160 survive today in published form. Mendelssohn was notoriously reluctant to publish his music, so many of his works are unpublished and out of public circulation. Also, a dramatic shift in popular musical taste after his death in 1847 along with the anti-Semitism of late 19th and early 20th century Europe denigrated Mendelssohn's reputation, leaving him out of favor with many musicians and scholars.

In 1996, Cooper found a reference to the missing score in an auction catalog that indicated that the score was in the archive of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. The score had been there for more than a century after famed Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein , who possessed it, donated his collection to the conservatory.

"To the librarians, it was just another one of the thousands of historic music manuscripts in their collection," Cooper said. "They didn't know what they had."

Though Cooper located the missing score in 1997, he wasn't able to get a look at it until 2003. "The archive was for a long time reluctant to share what they had with Western scholars," Cooper said. "It just took a matter of time for attitudes to change."

To secure a copy of the manuscript, along with permission to prepare the piece for performance, Cooper had to strike a deal that's not uncommon for music scholars who study materials at cash-strapped eastern European libraries. At the school librarians' request, he sent them a $200 encyclopedia of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky .

In return, Cooper got full-color digital scans of the 70-page score for the orchestral portion of the piece and various loose sheets of the hastily sketched out piano parts. Using those sketches, Cooper reassembled the orchestral parts. Cooper's friend, pianist Jonathan Bellman of the University of Northern Colorado, re-created the missing piano parts. Together, Cooper and Bellman reconstructed the finales performed by Mendelssohn and Moscheles.

"The (score) was so heavily worked-over it was maddening piecing it back together," Cooper said. "Mendelssohn constantly re-wrote his work. He was obsessive. He referred to it as his 'revision sickness.' "

At Saturday's concert, both of the original finales will be played, and the audience will vote for its favorite.

Mendelssohn was born in 1809 to a prominent Jewish family that later converted to Christianity. A prolific composer and accomplished performer, he gained considerable popularity during his lifetime. He was fairly well-off from a combination of family money, commissions and teaching positions, and he resisted publishing his music like most of his peers did.

"He considered publishing a necessary evil for someone who needed to make their living from it," Cooper said. "He liked to change pieces for every particular performance and audience."

Mendelssohn's slightly more restrained musical style set him apart from his peers, who had a more lush and dramatic style. And his Jewish heritage, along with his success, also aggravated his contemporaries, especially fellow German composer Richard Wagner, who publicly disparaged Mendelssohn's achievements in an anti-Semitic essay.

The denigration would last more than a century, leaving Mendelssohn's music out of the classical repertoire. By the time the Nazi regime took over Germany, Mendelssohn's work was banned from performance altogether, as was the publication of his music.

It wasn't until after World War II that scholars began to resurrect Mendelssohn's wider reputation, Cooper said. Mendelssohn's music is now regularly performed. But there's more work to be done.

"There are still many Mendelssohn rediscoveries to be had out there," Cooper said. "We're still undoing the active suppression of his music."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699