A refined intellectual and a prodigious pianist, Felix Mendelssohn embodied a romanticism less tormented than that of Schubert or Schumann, but rich in literary imagination and inexhaustible melodic genius. Devoted to the memory of Bach, whose St. Matthew Passion he revived, he shared with the old Cantor a great interest in the cello, to which he dedicated two Sonatas, splendid Variations concertantes as well as an Album Leaf and a Romance with a noble and serene theme. Alternately passionate, strictly polyphonic, elegiac or transparently light, his art quotes Hasidic melodies and Lutheran chorales, subtly expressing the complexity of a man born of an illustrious line of Jewish intellectuals, then converted to Protestantism.
Types
- Music
- Music
- Classical music
- Concert