An informative and entertaining audio-visual concert at the Gewandhaus Leipzig (1997) with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the violinist Frank Michael Erben conducted by Kurt Masur and hosted by Armin Koch who analyzes the composer Felix Mendelssohn's most famous works. Felix Mendelssohn - Concerto for Violin in E minor, Op. 64 6:57 I. Allegro molto appasionato 16:04 II. Andante 19:42 III. Allegreto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace Watch more episodes of the series "Discovering Masterpieces of Classical Music": goo.gl/KBV6cR Subscribe to EuroArts: goo.gl/jrui3M Is there such a thing as "happy music"? The term seems somewhat bold and very much at odds with the popular view that great art is invariably bound up with suffering and crisis. And yet the music of the German Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn speaks of virtually nothing but the joy of being alive, of a time of new departures, the thirst for action, curiosity and discovery, adventurous voyages and foreign lands, fairy tales and legends, water sprites, elves und benevolent spirits. Nomen est omen.: in Latin felix means "happy". "He is the Mozart of the 19° century," wrote his contemporary und fellow rnusician Robert Schumann; "he is the most intelligent musician to have seen through the contradictions ofthe age and to have been the first to reconcile them." This is an assessment that would inevitably be misleading if it were to invite associations of a jovial bon vivant to whom inspiration came easily and effortlessly. Exactly the opposite was the case: Mendelssohn's quintessentially middle-class existence was governed by a strictwork ethic and an almost superhuman sense of responsibility towards his own creativity and to his profession and calling. Not only as a composer but also as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts and as founder of the Leipzig Conservatory, Mendelssohn was consumed by his work to the point of self-sacrifice. And so It remained until his early death on 4November 1847, at the age of onythirty-eight. The grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a product of the Berlin Singakademie, the initiator of the Bach Revival in Germany, a practicing Protestant whose "Reformation" Symphony culminates in a statement of Luther's chorale "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" and a pioneering representative of the aspiring German educational elite, he had in his early years rubbed shoulders with Hegel, Alexander and Wilhelm Humboldt und Goethe and was one of the key figures of a period buoyed up by its sense of hope. In works such as his "Italien" Symphony, his oratorios St Paul and Elijah, his Songs without Words for piano and his Violin Concerto, these ideals all find abiding expression: his Christian faith, his pronounced love of beauty, his delight in travel and his poetical mind. And his boundless amazement at the world, with all its wonders and mysteries. Anyone who visits Leipzig today is bound to find themselves almost by accident on the trail of Felix Mendelssohn, even if the majority of the historic sites associated with him have failed to survive the intervening years: some of them disappeared in the building frenzy of the early years of Wilhelmine Germany, while others were destroyed in the Second World War or systematically torn down by the powers that be of the German Democratic Republic. But at least Mendelssohn's final address in the city, his home in the Königstraße (now Goldschniidtstruße), was saved and lovingly restored, not least thanks to the active support and infectious enthusiasm of the conductor Kurt Musur. The Mendelssohns' former apartment an the first floor of the building clearly reveals the composer's love of light rooms and of tasteful but simple, unornamented and functional furnishings, an impression confirmed by a glance at the composer's study, which has been reconstructed in a style that is true to the original. "Res severa (est) verum gaudium" —this quotation from Senecas Epistulae morales was once emblazoned in large letters on the front of the concert hall in the old Leipzig Gewandhaus: "True joy is a serious matter." This austere moral injunction became the motto of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in an age when the middle-class values of seriousness, hard work and assiduity determined all aspects of life, including people's pleasure in music. From 1781 the former premises of the city's Clothiers' Guild that bad been used for the annual Leipzig Fair offered the recently founded Große Concert-Gesellschaft a worthy framework for its concerts, with its wood-panelled hall and fabulaus acoustics, and at the same time provided the new orchestra with a striking name. By the same token, the Leipzig Conservatory that Mendelssohn helped to set up was housed in a small building in the courtyard of the Gewandhaus.

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