Elijah (oratorio) Austrian bass Joseph Staudigl. Mendelssohn had discussed an oratorio based on Elijah in the late 1830s with his friend Karl Klingemann, who had provided him with the libretto for his comic operetta "Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde", which resulted in a partial text that Klingemann was unable to finish. Mendelssohn then turned to , the librettist for his earlier oratorio "St. Paul", who quickly abandoned Klingemann's work and produced his own text that combined the story of Elijah as told in the Book of Kings with psalms. In 1845, the Birmingham Festival commissioned an oratorio from Mendelssohn, who worked with
Paul Hermann (composer) Paul Hermann (composer) Paul Hermann (Budapest, March 27, 1902 – unknown 1944), also known as Pál Hermann, was a virtuoso cellist and composer. Hermann was born in Budapest, Hungary, on 27 March 1902 and came from a Jewish family. About his early childhood not much more than an anecdote remains: he was only prepared to study for his piano lessons if for every étude he prepared, he would receive one cent. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 1915–1919 and developed close relationships, both musical and personal, with his teachers of composition Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály,