The fairy tale of the beautiful Melusine
The fairy tale of the beautiful Melusine , op. 32 ( MWV P 12 ) is a concert overture by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and was written in 1833. A performance of Conradin Kreutzer's opera Melusina in Berlin (the libretto was by Franz Grillparzer and was originally for a setting by Ludwig van Beethoven ) encouraged Mendelssohn to write his own overture on the subject.
The first performance of the revised version took place in November 1835 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus . The audience reacted rather cautiously to the work, while the composer Robert Schumann again praised it in the highest tones when he spoke of "shooting fish with gold scales, pearls in open shells".
To the music
Mendelssohn's piece deals with the myth of the legendary figure Melusine . As a punishment for revenging her father, she has to spend one day a week as a mermaid . Her husband's discovery of her secret earns her the fate of keeping this figure for the rest of her life.
Mendelssohn himself spoke out, among other things in response to Schumann's opinion, against the fact that his composition was about "red corals and green sea animals, about magic castles and deep seas"; it is to be understood as a description of the mood rather than the plot.
literature
- Robert Schumann: Overture to the fairy tale of the beautiful Melusina (1835), in: Collected writings on music and musicians , Vol. 1, pp. 236–239, Leipzig: Wiegand 1854
Web links
- The fairy tale of the beautiful Melusine : sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project