Jonathan O'Neill > Recent Status Updates

"...may you taste only the sweets and none of the bitterness of authorship... may the public pelt you with roses, and never with sand; and may the printer's ink never draw black lines upon your soul"
- Felix to Fanny

Finally, after he had discouraged her from publishing throughout their entire lives, Fanny went and did it anyway and asking one last time for his blessing, Felix comes around.

[Felix] has a glorious dark eye, and Byron's expression of a 'dome of thought' could never be more appropriately applied than to his lofty and intellectual forehead...
...Dark, lustrous, unfathomable eyes... They were black, but without the usual opaqueness of black eyes, shining, not with a surface light, but with a pure, serene, planetary flame.
- J.Bayard Taylor

[Wagner played] the seductive Venusberg theme from Tannhauser, on which he was then at work. When Felix asked, "What is that?" Wagner replied, "Do you think I am going to reveal it to you?" whereupon Felix at once reproduced it himself at the piano.

I'm thankful that, while this is very much a Felix bio, the author gives Fanny a notable amount of page time as well, following her progress as a composer and illuminating derivatives between her and her brother's works where applicable.
Her 'Das Jahr' is well worth your time. A cycle of piano character pieces on the 12 months. Some beauties in there, for sure!

Proud to announce that Felix was my Top Artist on Spotify this year with 15217 minutes listened! :D
I'm not sure that tops my Beethoven listening from several years ago but it still puts me in the top 0.001% of global fans.... Let's be honest, no one on Earth listened to more Mendelssohn than me this year! :D

Kant definía la Ilustración como el escape de la humanidad de su autoinfligida inmadurez; y definía la inmadurez como la inhabilidad de hacer uso del propio entendimiento sin la guía de otro.

An 11-yr-old Ludwig was read Kant by his mother and I think he took this particular message (¡Ten el coraje de usar tu propio entendimiento!) and ran with it!

At one musical matinée given by Felix, Liszt appeared in Hungarian uniform and played a series of pyrotechnical variations on a Hungarian folk melody. Then, insisting his host reciprocate, Liszt watched incredulously as Felix replicated the Hungarian melody, executed one variation after another, and managed to imitate Liszt's "movements and raptures" without offending him.

"Hold my beer."
- Mendelssohn

Para que haya música, primero tiene que haber silencio. Si el silencio fuera un paño blanco, la música sería el bordado. ¿Donde íbamos a poner nuestra música si no fuera en el silencio?

Schumann and Mendelssohn were largely responsible for the 19th-century Schubert revival. Schumann discovered several unpublished symphonies and Felix took the decision, and the time, to resuscitate the "Great" symphony (no.9) and "effectively transformed Schubert from a respected "ballad" composer to a symphonist of stature".

Just finished listening to Bach's 7 Toccatas (BWV 910-916) on harpsichord and, I must say, it really makes you appreciate 2 things.
1.The virtuosity of the harpsichordist, Pieter-Jan Belder, and
2. The invention of the piano-forte! 😁

Leonid Sabanayev wrote a scathing review of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite in 'News of the Season', Moscow, December 25, 1916 only to find, all too late, that the performance was actually cancelled and Prokofiev's Suite was never performed.... Awkward! 😆

Iryna Zarutska, Charlie Kirk, and in Australia, 12 and 15-yr-old boys, Chol Achiek and Dau Akueng chased down and hacked to death through suburban streets of Melbourne's West.
These times feel full of evil and madness and my faith in the goodness of humanity is pretty much spent. Apathy, callousness, intolerance to other's views and the rejection of open discourse in favour of violence appear the new norm.

On Fanny's birthday Felix praised her new compositions and... later alluded to some in his own piano miniatures but could not bring himself to support her entering the lists as a "professional" composer. This issue would haunt the final ten years of Fanny's life.

Fanny: "It's crucial to have your consent, for without it I might not undertake anything of the kind."

The first 6 'Lieder ohne Worte' (Op.19b) were released in Bonn in late 1833, the official debut of the new term, and indeed new genre, which would become synonomous with Mendelssohnism.

I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, Raff is a giant, not to speak of Rubinstein, who is after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.
Tchaikovsky's Diary, 1886

😲 Pyotr, you slimy devil!! 😁

Berlioz, musically speaking, is a lunatic; a classical composer only in Paris, the great city of quacks. His music is simply and undisguisedly nonsense. He is a kind of Orchestral Liszt, than which I could name nothing more intensely disagreeable.

Shots fired! A few innocents caught in the cross-fire too! :D

"... Bestial cries are heard: neighing horses, the squeal of a brass pig, crying jackasses, amorous quacks of a monstrous toad... Listening to this screaming music (a jazz band concert) for a minute or two, one conjures up an orchestra of madmen, sexual maniacs, led by a man-stallion beating time with an enormous phallos"
- Maxim Gorky

"La música formaba parte en la vida de nuestra casa, es cierto, pero si en la casa de Mozart la música era el pan de cada día, en la nuestra era la manera de ganarlo. Era más frecuente escuchar los gritos de mi padre borracho y el llanto de mi madre que el pianoforte."

Didn't realise this would be Beethoven recounting memories in first person. What an exhausting mind for the author to attempt to imitate :D

I wasn't intending to read this right away and I'll probably still just dip my toes for a bit while I finish some other books but this from the sample excerpts was just too good to ignore:

"The Finale of [of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony] is to me for the most part dull and ugly.... Oh, the pages of stupid and hopelessly vulgar music! The unspeakable cheapness of the chief tune, 'Freude, Freude'!"

:D :D

Anyone got an old review of a very popular book that they couldn't have cared less about since closing the final page but which gets an enormous amount of likes and comments. Mine is Kuang's 'The Dragon Republic'. I'm like, "Ooh, a notification!" And then I see it's just a DR like again! 🤣

Disappointed with Felix's reaction to the music of Hector Berlioz. I knew this already from Berlioz's memoirs but, having now read a bit about Felix, his dislike/dismissal of B's work seem at odds with his generally open-minded and sponge-like nature regarding all types of music.
Though he enjoyed international success, I don't think the musical world was fully ready for some of Berlioz's more radical innovations...