Do you ever get bogged down and/or completely overwhelmed with the amount of information thrown your way? As folks living in the ‘digital age,’ it is nearly impossible to escape it: print news stories about the pandemic, reports on the radio about the election, friends’ anxiety-ridden social media posts, emails, text messages, a barrage of advertising everywhere, and the list can go on... Words, words, and more words.
If we rewind time by 200 years and go ‘across the pond’ to Germany, we’d
find ourselves in Felix Mendelssohn’s world. Mendelssohn was a prolific
composer who wrote in a variety of media, including choral, orchestral,
chamber, and keyboard works. A staple of his compositions for piano are sets of
pieces he called Lieder ohne Worte,
or in English, Songs Without Words.
In total, he wrote 48 of these Songs
Without Words, and they are divided into eight books of six each. Two of
the books were published posthumously. (The opus numbers of the eight books
are: 19b, 30, 38, 53, 62, 67, 85, and 102.)
In a week, where we’ve again been inundated with words, messaging,
reporting, etc., I thought we might do well to experience some music without
any sort of subtext. In other words, music for music’s sake that frees the
listener to interpret and think about whatever passes through their mind. Mendelssohn
himself said of his Lieder ohne Worte:
If
you ask me what I had in mind when I wrote it, I would say: just the song as it
is. And if I happen to have certain words in mind for one or another of these
songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never
mean the same things to others. Only the song can say the same thing, can
arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling that is not
expressed, however, by the same words.
These pieces are some of my favorites of the entire piano repertoire –
both for playing and for teaching. I’ve included two of these Songs Without Words as part of our
service this weekend. I hope you enjoy them as well.
👍
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