Great Composers: Felix Mendelssohn 

For me it's 17:20

It's showing up as that for me now as well, but I'll keep an eye on this for the time being in case it crops up again.

Wagner liked M’s music.

I love Berlioz's music more than Mendelssohn's, but let's be honest-the guy, by his own admission, hatched a plan to kill his cheating girlfriend while he dressed in a French maid outfit. The fact that a character such as that could be friends with the infinitely more pious and reserved Mendelssohn downright astonished me, _especially_ considering that they each had disdain for the other's music. Berlioz's sheer influence in the history of Romanticism and even the orchestra itself is profound and not one many acknowledge even today. One of the biggest challenges towards putting together a Berlioz video-which has been in the work, script-wise, for a while-is that he was such an enigmatic character, capable of brilliant work even though even his friends thought him rather nuts.

LOL. From the Classical Music for Dummies perspective, that is indeed a strange man--but it would seem, from the way they made a huge to-do about that relatively insignificant story (it's historically significant only because it was right after that, in Nice, that he penned three of his concert overtures), that Berlioz was a raging lunatic. that was all that there was in l'episode de la vie d'un artiste. Fact is, he was no more eccentric than his colleagues, peers and brethren in the Romantic era of the Arts, such as Alkan, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Dreyschock, Wordsworth, Shelley, Elliot, Delacroix, Cezanne...and the list goes on, as you can see. So, biographically he may have had some interesting episodes that set him apart for juicy details, but musically and philosophically, he was quite the puritan of old ideas, hearkening to Rameau, Gluck, Beethoven and Spontini (certainly an old fashioned composer by the standards of his time.) However, his unique, often strange, harmonic language and disdain for rigid adherence to forms and rules--let alone his singular genius and trendsetting influence in the use of sound, whether orchestral, vocal, instrumental and even noise--made him stand out as any of the voices of what we (lazily and ignorantly*) call "greats" today. Even Donald Francis Tovey, an avowed detractor of Berlioz, recognized how "Boiling oil awaits [him] for [his] irreverent treatment of Berlioz in the fourth volume of [his] Essays. Nevertheless, [he] claim[s] to see a great deal more than his out-and-out admirers see in Berlioz, for they give [him] no sufficient evidence that they see enough in the art of music to measure anything so important as Berlioz’s actual musical achievement." I'll be honest: I don't find him all that enigmatic in context of the period, and while many people did find him strange, he was no nut. He was truly shrewd and resourceful, embittered and tempered by experience. His biggest concern in life was writing music that he thought was possible (which Parisians thought impossible and others, like the Germans, English and Russians found fantastic, though not fully comprehensible), getting it performed and being accepted for it. The fact that those dreams intersected with his detested career as a critic (where he was equally brilliant, but so resentful of it) created more enemies and detractors than he deserved (as is evinced in the story of the premiere of L'enfance du Christ, where he withheld his name from the program as the composer as a test to the biases of the newspaper critics, and his detractors fell in his trap, extolling the work--one even foaming that Berlioz could never write such exquisite music...) and so he suffered petulantly, publicly, to the ridicule of his enemies. But still, through it all, I find quite a sober, human, hustling composer whose one fault and greatness, simultaneously, is his adamant decision never to allow conventions and rules to hinder him from letting his fancy fly. *I refer here to the general trend of music purveyance, scholarship and appreciation heretofore of the typical musician, music director, musicologist, critic, etc, and not you. What I discovered yesterday, perusing your young channel was how diverse, erudite and curious you are, and you do something that I've long, long, long ago been fighting for with all the meager voice I have--to re-explore, rediscover and revere the music of composer long forgotten and ignored. This work is sacred and long overdue, and I think that technology, being as tremendously useful as it is, both in this medium, and in the fact that we can stream the millions of tracks of obscure music on, say Naxos, is so promising and encouraging to this end.

Well, I'm not holding Berlioz's life or work to any different standard than the other artists you mentioned, and that's part of his appeal-that a "conservative" could be a "revolutionary" figure, to put it in the simplest terms. Yet most every time Berlioz pops up in the biography of another musician, there's some oddball story about him, thus my assessment of him as "weird"-as in "enigmatic"-in this particular video. (At the very least, even if the Berlioz anecdotes are embellished, he's almost the exact opposite of Mendelssohn, who was very much bound by the rules. How they managed a friendship remains baffling.)

I wouldn't consider it a rebranding as much as little tweaks here and there to improve production quality. As much as I loved the old font, there was little I could do for thumbnail visibility despite my best efforts. If I find a handwritten-looking font that's visible, I'll definitely switch to that.

If you use adobe cc you could look at the available Typekit fonts. Quite high quality and easy to use. I use them quite a bit, but for other reasons. It seems that they also have a free plan for typekit too.

I've always sort of viewed the idea of prodigy as being "which one was the most prolific at a young age" versus "who was the better composer," making prodigiousness a more objective calculation. There are great prodigies who amounted to very little or nothing at all, and great musicians who weren't prodigies in the slightest.

Classical Nerd Well, taken to the extreme, this would mean whatever kid started humming nursery rhymes the earliest would be the greatest prodigy... I understand your point of view though. Still, I can understand people who consider Mozart the quintessential example of a child prodigy because of how quickly he came to produce excellent music of so many forms, as well as his skills as a performer. Personally, I like most of the very early Mozart pieces better than the very early Mendelssohn ones.

@@ClassicalNerd _comment of the year_

It is. You can find a lot of it on RU-vid.

Which specific pieces by Mendelssohn do you think is mediocre? Just curious

I am curious too, could you name some?

This is an ancient video, before I knew German. :)