Sunday at 6pm at the Church of the Annunziata, second meeting of the Guide to Listening series – promoted by the Filarmonica Gioachino Rossini with the Municipality of Pesaro, in collaboration with AMAT, the Marche Region and the support of Sistemi Klein -, conducted by Maestro Mario Totaro, in context of the 2024 edition which is dedicated to The First Romantics. This second appointment is dedicated to the German composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Hamburg 1809 – Leipzig 1847). According to Robert Schumann “Mendelssohn is the Mozart of our historical moment, the most brilliant of musicians, the one who most clearly identified the contradictions of the era and the first to reconcile them”.
In Felix Mendelssohn classicism and romanticism integrate and interpenetrate in an ideal symbiosis. He manages to be imaginative and fairy-tale-like (with a genuinely romantic expressiveness) while remaining firmly tied to the ideals and rules of classicism. This unwavering adherence to classical aesthetics often attracted criticism (there has been talk of “conservatism” and even “academicism”), which in his case was completely unmotivated because Felix was a much more innovative musician than one might think. A part of this meeting will be dedicated to Felix’s older sister, Fanny, a very important composer who unfortunately remained in the shadows due to the customs of the time, which prevented women from publicly exercising that profession.
