"In the name of Mozart, Haydn and old Bach, I name thee journeyman." These are the words with Carl Friedrich Zelter admitted his pupil Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy on 3rd February 1824, his 15th birthday, to the "guild" of composers. This was more than a playful ritual: with this formula the "divine, precious boy" (the words are Goethe's) was to be bound to the tradition in which he had, in any case, been reared. Mozart, Haydn and old Bach had constituted the foundations of Zelter's teaching. Their works had provided Felix and his sister Fanny, four years his senior, who was also a very talented musician and one of Zelter's pupils, with a model to emulate, a goal which they had enthusiastically pursued in Zelter's Singakademie
since 1819. ...
Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and their contemporaries expressed their attitude to life in song, that most intimate of genres, better than in almost any other form. Being pupils of Zelter, they had been raised in the spirit of 18th century aesthetics of song, the idea of "noble simplicity". This explains the fact that Felix was strangely unmoved by Schubert's vocal output. He considered himself an heir to the classical tradition in music; accordingly he wrote "Songs in the popular vein" with a simple structure that was strophic or strophic with variations, to simple tunes with texts which were declaimed without any emphasis whatsoever.
Ingeborg Allihn
Translation: Gery Bramall
Felix & Fanny Mendelssohn
Lieder
1. Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (Heine)
2. Die Liebende schreibt (Goethe)
3. Ferne (Droysen)
4. Es weiss und rät es doch leiner (Eichendorff)
5. Pagenlied (Eichendorf)
6. Suleika Op. 34,4 (Goethe/Willemer)
7. Suleika Op. 57,3 (Goethe/Willemer)
8. Frage (Voss)
9. Der Mond (Geibel)
10. Frühlingslied Op. 71,2 (Klingemann)
11. Frühlingslied, Op. 34,3 (Klingemann)
12. Verlust (Heine) - Fanny Mendelssohn
13. Die Nonne (Uhland) - Fanny Mendelssohn
14. Sehnsucht (Droysen) - Fanny Mendelssohn
15. Der Blumenstrauss (Klingemann)
16. Frühlingslied (Lenau)
17. Im Herbst (Klingemann)
18. Neue Liebe (Heine)
19. Sonntagslied (Klingemann)
20. Wenn sich zwei Herzen scheiden (Geibel)
21. Romanze (Aus dem Spanischen)
22. Frühlingsglaube (Uhland)
23. Winterlied (Aus dem Schwedischen)
24. Erster Verlust (Goethe)
25. Bei der Wiege (Klingemann)
26. Nachtlied (Eichendorff)
27. Andres Maienlied (Hölty)
Barbara Bonney, soprano
Geoffrey Parsons, piano
Recorded: TELDEC Studio Berlin, April 1991
Quality: mp3, varied kbps
Size: 125 MB

Fanny Mendelssohn