“…the music acquired a kind of amiable expression, which even now almost drives me mad…”
Sacred music is not a part of the MCO’s standard repertoire, although the orchestra has made steps in that direction in the last few years. At the Arts Festival 2008 in Harstad, Robin Ticciati conducted Haydn’s Theresienmesse, and a year later, the MCO played Bach’s cantata “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen”, featuring principal trumpeter Christopher Dicken as the soloist. Daniel Harding conducted highly-praised renditions of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Haydn’s Creation at the Symphony Festival in Turin, and led a performance of Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL, with great success.
This year, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s oratorio Elijah is on the programme for the Lucerne Festival, with Daniel Harding, Thomas Quasthoff, Julia Kleiter, Bernarda Fink, Michael Shade and the Swedish Radio Choir – an ideal cast for this project.
Mendelssohn left behind a wide-ranging oeuvre, in which sacred music holds a special place, though there are only a few oratorios: Paul, op. 36 (1835), and Elijah, op. 70 (1846), and the fragment Christ, op. 97. Elijah was a commissioned work, and premiered in 1846 at the Birmingham Music Festival to great acclaim. The oratorio was among the most beloved genres of the first half of the 19th century. As oratorios were often commissioned by private music associations, they were performed in concert halls as well as in churches. The musical academies in the bigger cities were important agents in this development. The Sing-Akademie of Berlin, of which Mendelssohn was a member, had especial significance: this academy was dedicated to the oratorio legacy of George Friederich Handel, and with the rediscovery of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829, the institution cemented its role as the preserver of past generations’ musical treasures.
The composition of Elijah lasted almost ten years. Mendelssohn considered writing another oratorio just after the premiere of Paul, but had some difficulty finding a topic and an appropriate libretto. (In addition, the composer kept making changes to Paul after the premiere.) Mendelssohn required a deep religious sincerity for his oratorios. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who attempted to combat the secularization of the genre by musically dramatizing the plot (a technique which often resulted in music with superficial effects but little deeper meaning), Mendelssohn considered the underlying themes and questions of his biblical material and tried to address these themes in a contemporary way. He imagined Elijah, the main character, as stark, unerring and passionate – an Old-Testament warrior in God’s name, as true to the spirit of the Bible as possible (the libretto consists almost solely of texts from the Old Testament). The final product, however, was a multi-dimensional, “modern” character, who progresses from an angry fighter battling the priests of Baal to a crisis-racked and doubtful soul, and ends up a true believer, who can at last understand the nature of belief through witnessing God’s manifestation.
Musically, Mendelssohn consciously continued the tradition of Bach and Handel, but did not attempt to reject his own time. His instrumentation and harmony bear unmistakable signs of early Romanticism, while his enthusiastic, almost operatic choral numbers are an aural reminiscence of the Baroque era. The large orchestra and choir of Elijah have caused the piece to be performed more often in festivals than as a part of regular concert series. In Mendelssohn’s time, it was customary for regional orchestras and choirs to come together to form large ensembles for music festivals; otherwise, such a large-scale work could scarcely have been performed.
