Dreams

 

Dear friends of piano music,

"What should we dream of, as we are?" was the line of a song that my pupils at the comprehensive school wanted to hear over and over again, and which always made me very thoughtful and sad. For example, many of my pupils couldn't tell a deer from a squirrel - and that at the age of eleven or twelve: yes, what should you dream of? Of a habitable planet, perhaps.

How happy, on the other hand, was Felix Mendelssohn. He not only had his music, he lived in a time full of ideals and utopias. "My soul still seeking for the land of Greece" (Goethe, Iphigenia In Tauris). At that time one was longing for an idealized antiquity, for Italy, for woodland solitude (German: „Waldeinsamkeit“), for a humanistic education, for the ideal development of the personality, perhaps even for a religion of reason based on the model of Nathan the Wise. Life was not easy then either, there was political unrest, wars, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, typhus and diphtheria claimed countless victims, and repression against people of Jewish faith was not unknown to Mendelssohn either. But he lived in a time full of dreams and ideals, his “song without words” in A major gives us a lively impression of it with his “sublime serenity”. Felix - the lucky one!

Best wishes!

Kerstin

Mendelssohn: Songs Without Words 19/4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjzOmyiQORA 


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