I decided not to give up working on it, so today I think I made it a little better. I figure Mendelssohn didn't stop working on his pieces after only a few days, so neither should I.
I'm blown away by Mendelssohn's musical brilliance, which I've somehow previously not paid as much attention to.
I've always liked his work (now over 200 years old, so it's not like it's surprising I've been listening to it), but I'm rediscovering it. His sister was also a great composer. His children were distinguished professors and intellectuals in Berlin and Leipzig (where Felix founded the Leipzig Conservatory). Heck, the man's grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher. Very distinguished family!
The revered German poet, philosopher and statesman Goethe knew Mozart as a child and heard him perform. Of Mendelssohn, who at 12 played his compositions for Goethe as an older man, he said,
"Musical prodigies ... are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age." "And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?" said Zelter. "Yes", answered Goethe, "... but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child."
That's one heck of an endorsement of genius; Goethe was figured to be pretty much a god to cultured Germans in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
"What's all this history got to do with your piece of crappy music, Les?"
"Nothing, except it's inspiring for me. I'll be dead soon enough, so you can say you knew me when."
"Uh, I hate to break this to you, but when you're dead, I'm dead, too. That's how it works with alter-egos."
"Better throw some good parties before that death thing happens then, huh?"
