Peter Donohoe plays Mendelssohn

Michael Keelan: This is KBACH’s First Take and I'm Michael Keelan. I'm talking with pianist Peter Donohoe about his new album, which is Volume 3 of Felix Mendelssohn's solo piano music. This album has Mendelssohn's sonatas and some of the shorter pieces as well. Thanks for talking with us on First Take today.

Peter Donohoe: It's a great pleasure to be with you.

Michael Keelan: The first two volumes of Mendelssohn were mostly the Songs Without Words, and this, of course, has the sonatas on it. Did this require a different approach for you to play these larger pieces?

Peter Donohoe: Well, actually, no. All Mendelssohn's music, at least the piano music and most of everything else as well, is so vocal that the fact that the majority of the first two albums were the Songs Without Words just makes it easier to approach the sonatas. I should actually mention that on this album, there is only the Sonata No. 1, Opus 6, and the Sonata No. 3, Opus 106. We didn't have space, unfortunately, to do No. 2, but perhaps next time. Perhaps there'll be a Volume 4, you never know.

Michael Keelan: And this is a related question. Many composers, pianist-composers of this great Romantic generation—Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin—are not as well known for their sonatas as for shorter character pieces. Do these sonatas feel to you like essentially concert hall music, or rather more like grand-scale salon music?

Peter Donohoe: I think the latter. As you say, all—I've never even really thought of it, but yes, it's true. Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, their sonatas are less frequently played, for sure. I would say that they are very much grand salon pieces rather than pieces for huge concert halls, but they're wonderful in their inspiration.

In fact, the whole of Mendelssohn is—I think he has to be number one in my list of underrated composers. So many of my colleagues seem to regard Mendelssohn as a lesser composer than the other great Romantics, and I really don't agree. He was actually one of the biggest influences on me when I was very young. In fact, I even wrote a piano sonata that turned out to be unintentionally stolen from the Ruy Blas Overture.

Michael Keelan: Referring there to Mendelssohn's Opus 95 Overture.

Peter Donohoe: I was, I think I was probably 11 at the time. I was so besotted with the sound of his music, and it's just carried on all throughout my life. Except that I haven't really publicly played it so much until really quite recently, probably the last 10 years or so. I feel old enough to approach this style now. So, it's taken me quite a long time to feel comfortable with myself, I suppose, is the truth.

Michael Keelan: Both of the sonatas that you include here have resemblances to Beethoven sonatas, and very specific late Beethoven sonatas, which, for Mendelssohn at that time, would have been very recent pieces. What is more specifically Mendelssohn about those sonatas as opposed to the references to Beethoven?

Peter Donohoe: Beethoven does not write long, melodic lines, or rarely does. I think there are exceptions, but most of the time, his symphonic works, sonatas, quartets, etc., seem to me to be built around short motifs. Very architecturally aware and unbelievably great, monumental pieces, but built on short motifs rather than long melodies. Whereas Mendelssohn uses long melodies in the way that Schubert does.

And so you have a completely different architectural sense, and it's exemplified by the fact that he wrote all those Songs Without Words, all of which are just wonderful masterpieces in a very miniature form.

Michael Keelan: Mendelssohn's most performed string quartet, his A-minor quartet, is also based on a late Beethoven quartet. We don't usually think of him as an heir to Beethoven. You know, if you ask who is the heir to Beethoven, you might say Brahms, you might say Wagner. They both considered themselves, in a way, heirs to Beethoven, but very few people would say Mendelssohn.

Peter Donohoe: The way that Mendelssohn uses rhythm is rather similar to Beethoven. In a way that perhaps Chopin and—well, definitely Chopin, and to some degree Schumann, did not use.

As you say, Brahms and Wagner really themselves were very self-consciously successors to Beethoven. I think particularly Brahms, because he used the same techniques of putting together his symphonic works using small motifs. Wagner is another matter, of course, because of his belief in endless melody. Although I know that Wagner himself did regard himself as the great successor to Beethoven. I'm not completely sure why, because there are so many aspects of both composers that are very different.

But we're talking of Mendelssohn here, and of course, there was not very much love lost between Wagner and Mendelssohn.

Michael Keelan: Partly because of Wagner's prejudices, although there are moments in Wagner that you can hear he was influenced by Mendelssohn, too.

Peter Donohoe: It's true.

Michael Keelan: What of Mendelssohn's music, whether on this album or another one, gives an indication to you of what his own playing must have been like as a pianist?

Peter Donohoe: That's a very, very interesting question and quite difficult to answer. I think that similar difficulties in answering your question would apply to any composer of that period, particularly the great piano composers.

For me, it's very important that the music is coherent to the modern listener. Much more important, in my mind, than trying to recreate what it may have sounded like—which we don't know anyway—at the time. I do try to know as much as I possibly can about the period, about the things that the composer said. Anything that's available to me in terms of concrete information as to what went on and how it sounded is very interesting. The degree to which it affects the way one plays is something I don't really know the answer to.

Michael Keelan: That's a good transition into a mention of another piece on the album, which is the paraphrase by Franz Liszt of excerpts from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I found that a very refreshing arrangement. I know one might have different opinions about how faithful Liszt was obligated to be to Mendelssohn, but do you think of that paraphrase as basically Mendelssohn or basically Liszt, or neither?

Peter Donohoe: To a very large degree, I think it's basically Liszt, but it's obviously indebted to Mendelssohn, and Liszt would be the first person to say so. It's a companion piece, in a way, to the transcription by Rachmaninoff of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which appeared on the second album of this series. That particular transcription is literally a transcription of the original—very, very faithful and very brilliantly done.

Liszt's piece is—from the title you can tell—is basically a fantasy on themes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. And there's a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek as well. You know, the very famous fanfare that opens the Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream has a very unexpected, interrupted cadence at the end of it. So, you expect something that just doesn't happen, and that's quite obviously deliberate, I think.

With Liszt, it's always unbelievably natural writing for the piano. And of course, he was showing off a little bit, as he tended to do—much more in his operatic fantasies than he does in his more serious pieces. This is not really Liszt at his most serious. It's not me at my most serious, either. It's just a wonderful example of what he could do with the piano.

Michael Keelan: It's some seriously good piano playing, with my guest Peter Donohoe and his new album of Mendelssohn's piano works. I hope there will be a fourth album with the preludes and fugues and that last sonata. Thanks very much for talking with us on First Take today.

Peter Donohoe: Thank you. Great pleasure to talk to you.