This Week in Classical Music-January 18, 2009

January 19, 2009

( Phoenix )
•Mendelssohn secrets?
•Part dedicates Symphony to Political prisoner

This week in classical music 1-16-09

It’s this week in Classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the Classical Music World; I’m Randy Kinkel.

Did composer Felix Mendelssohn, whose bicentenary is this year, commit suicide over unrequited love for singer Jenny Lind? It’s possible, if you believe Professor Curtis Price, former principal of the Royal Academy of Music, who claims to have seen documents deposited by Lind’s Husband and Mendelssohn student Otto Goldschmidt, which describes a letter from the composer to the singer (which Goldschmidt claims to have destroyed) declaring his passionate love for her and begging her to elope to America with him, or he would commit suicide. Several months after he wrote the letter, Mendelssohn was dead... The Goldschmidt documents’ content has never been made public, but Professor Price is calling for a full scholarly investigation” of the matter. The documents, deposited by Goldschmidt in 1896, are in the archive of the Mendelssohn Scholarship foundation, which was set up by Lind herself in 1849.

You might remember a few weeks ago when I reported on Estonian Composer Arvo Part’s new Symphony being available for viewing online—well, now the symphony has a new component—a dedication—to Mikhail Khordokovsky, a Russian Oil executive with political ambitions who was accused of fraud and imprisoned in Siberia. The composer says he is reaching out to all those imprisoned without rights in Russia”. He has described Khordovsky as “a Great Man”, and has said that Russia would be a better country had he become its leader.

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org; be listening each week at this time for another update, and join me every weekday at noon for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries; I’m Randy Kinkel, for 89.5 KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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