Edition: U.S. / Global

Moving Mendelssohn Beyond Weddings; A Project to Rediscover a Life's Work

Published: January 31, 2002

It began, said Stephen Somary, if not precisely with a midsummer night's dream, with a dream nonetheless. He would conduct and record all the music by a favorite composer, Felix Mendelssohn.

Mr. Somary, then a 24-year-old music assistant to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and a conductor of the Bronx Arts Ensemble, had long been gripped by the legend of Mendelssohn (1809-47), who enraptured the royal courts and concert halls of Europe before dying at 38, shattered by the sudden death of his beloved sister and musical soul mate, Fanny Hensel.

But Mr. Somary, son of the conductor Johannes Somary, soon woke up to reality. Wasn't he overreaching just a bit? And Mendelssohn, ''Wedding March'' aside, wasn't he, well, passé?

Now, however, 13 years later, after a European hiatus to advance his conducting career, Mr. Somary, 37, is hard at it, running what he and a Mendelssohn scholar call their Mendelssohn Project with an agenda far more ambitious than his original concept.

He still hopes to record the ever-growing Mendelssohn canon, expanded now by what he says are hundreds of unpublished or rediscovered pieces, including what may be a completely unknown Allegro for bassoon and piano. These have been found in archives from Krakow, Poland, and other cities in the former Communist bloc to Milan, Stockholm and New York and in private collections the world over.

But he and his business partner, John Michael Cooper, 39, associate professor of musicology at the University of North Texas in Denton, say they also have plans for popular films and books and lectures and concerts, with the goal of restoring Mendelssohn's reputation, sabotaged by Richard Wagner and the Nazis and altogether shortchanged by posterity.

''Basically, we want to get his music known and get him loved,'' Mr. Somary said.

To that end, this week Dr. Cooper unveiled what he called some of their Mendelssohn recoveries and discoveries at a lecture at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center. Tomorrow night Mr. Somary and his father will lead a program of Mendelssohn ''premieres'' at a Manhattan church, including a revised version of the ''Italian'' Symphony.

If this seems like an unsung effort on behalf of a musical figure commonly pigeonholed as polished but passionless, a polite composer of polite music who never equaled his adolescent triumphs, Mr. Somary and Dr. Cooper beg to differ. And they are not alone. For some years now, experts say, a Mendelssohn vogue could be glimpsed in a surge of scholarship and interest in re-examining assumptions long left unchallenged.

''The question is not how he compares to Beethoven or Wagner,'' said R. Larry Todd, chairman of the music department at Duke University and widely regarded as the dean of Mendelssohn scholars in the United States. He called Mendelssohn a painter in music. ''His was a more delicate path to beauty,'' he said.

The scope of Mendelssohn's life and work have long been known. His grandfather, Moses, a peddler from Dessau, a city between Berlin and Leipzig, became a renowned Jewish philosopher. But Moses's son, Abraham, a wealthy Hamburg banker, converted the family to Lutheranism, adding a new family name, Bartholdy. Young Felix studied the piano, composing comic operas by age 11 and two of his most enduring works, the String Octet in E flat and ''Overture for a Midsummer Night's Dream,'' in his mid-teens.


While Mendelssohn himself published only 72 works with opus numbers and another 31 minor, unnumbered pieces, his compositions actually total some 750, Mr. Somary and Dr. Cooper say. Others were published after his death, but well over 200 works, they say, remain unpublished, and some, like a ''children's symphony'' alluded to in a letter, remain undiscovered.

Their sleuthing goes on in well-established Mendelssohn collections in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek and in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, England, and through auction catalogs and other private and Mendelssohn family sources. Among the lost works they say they have recovered is the unsigned Allegro in D minor for bassoon and piano, a rare bassoon showcase probably composed in the 1840's and found in the Library of the Verdi Conservatory in Milan. If authenticated, it would be an important find, Dr. Todd said.

Another unpublished piece they say they have recovered is an hourlong cantata Mendelssohn wrote in 1828, when he was 19, for a festival celebrating the Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. There are also many revisions of renowned works, including variations on the D minor Piano Trio (Op. 49), ''Die erste Walpurgnisnacht'' and the Violin Concerto in E minor (Op. 64).