9 - The music for keyboard

Summary

Felix Mendelssohn was, like Brahms a generation later, one of the great pianists of his time, without having striven for a virtuoso career. On the organ he had no peer; virtually alone he popularized – in the best sense of the word – Bach's organ music, and his compositions for organ are a cornerstone of the post-Baroque repertory for the instrument. But his music for piano does not enjoy this status. Unlike Brahms, unlike his contemporaries Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and unlike revered past masters such as J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, Mendelssohn did not regard the piano as a preferred medium for his most significant artistic statements, and this attitude expresses itself in his choice of keyboard genres and in the dimensions and character of individual works. It is a question not of their quality – most of the keyboard music is of the highest order – but of how he weighed the importance of the genres that he cultivated. Nonetheless, his music for piano and for organ constitutes one of the more significant keyboard repertories of his century, and his contributions to the cultivation of serious keyboard music in public performance were, in their time, unsurpassed.