Mendelssohn: Antigone - incidental music, Op. 55

Volume 2 of the MDR Klassik CD series presents Mendelssohn’s incidental music to the drama Antigone. Like the first volume (Athalia MDR1201), this live recording was made to mark the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in 2009. The intention of Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) and its Symphony Orchestra and Choir was to draw attention to his all too seldom performed incidental music.

Setting Sophocles’s tragedy to music was a fairly easy matter for Mendelssohn, his perfect knowledge of Ancient Greek making strict adherence to the classical metres no compositional obstacle for him. He enthusiastically wrote to his friend the historian Johann Gustav Droysen in 1841 “The mood and verse rhythms are so truly musical throughout that I do not need to consider the individual worlds and only have to set those moods and rythms to music, then the chorus is ready”.

The recording is based on a text version which impressively elucidates Mendelssohn’s approach to the dramatic genre. It was derived from Johann Jakob Christian Donner’s translations of Sophocles by Gerhard Lobling, dramatic producer of the MDR Concerts and initiator of the concert.

Live recording of the concert on 11 January 2009 in Main Auditorium of the New Gewandhaus in Leipzig.

Booklet: German, English, 36 pp

Total time : 79’58”

Featuring the huge talents of Bernius and his forces, this incidental music for the play was commissioned in 1841 by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. For this recording, the spoken text has been written by Helmuth Flashar. It is a live recording from the Europäisches Musikfest 2004, 4 September 2004, Liederhalle Stuttgart.

Felix Mendelssohn is associated with one brilliant score of incidental music for the theatre – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – but in fact he composed scores for no less than 15 stage works.The most significant of them, including the three works in this set, date from the period when he was employed by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who was strongly attracted to the spirit of Romanticism and the culture of Greek antiquity.

Mendelssohn was drawn to Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone by its strong dramatic sense and its universal themes, particularly Antigone’s pathos and heroism. In addition to setting several of the choruses, he composed interludes and background music for speeches and dialogues. His highly effective score is intensely noble and romantic yet also sensitive to the verse.

His music for Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus moves further away from Athenian dramatic form, with accompanied recitative, solos and duets for the principal characters, and is more elaborate. It has a tragic intensity not often heard in his music. His score of incidental music for Racine’s religious drama Athalie is typical of the composer’s style – characterised by flowing, sustained melodic invention, colourful orchestration and imaginative scoring for the voices. It displays the composer at the height of his powers both as a musical dramatist and an orchestral tone-poet.

The many castles in and around Berlin were once the splendid centre of musical activities in the times of the aristocratic courts. The nobility, during this period of enlightenment, were very interested in bringing the most important composers and musicians to Prussia. On this five CD set, can be found some of the musical treasures that were performed at the castles of Sanssouci, Charlottenburg and Rheinsberg. The Berliner Barock Company play these works on historical instruments.