Скачать или смотреть Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn - Piano Improvisation by Charles Manning

In this presentation, pianist Charles Manning improvises the “Wedding March” in C Major, composed in 1842 by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), a German composer of the early Romantic period. The piece is from one of Mendelssohn’s best-known works, the incidental music, Op. 61, written for Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” King Frederick William IV of Prussia commissioned the work when Mendelssohn was the music director of the King’s Academy of the Arts and of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The Op. 61 incidental music is comprised of 14 numbers: the overture, 12 movements, and the finale. Probably Mendelssohn’s most popular piece of music, the famous “Wedding March” is the ninth movement, “Hochzeitmarsch,” played in the intermezzo between acts IV and V.

Commonly used as a wedding recessional, “Wedding March” is often paired with the “Bridal Chorus” from the opera “Lohengrin” by Richard Wagner, which is played as the processional for the bride. “Wedding March” was first performed at a wedding in Tiverton, England in 1847. On his visits to Britain, Mendelssohn often played for Queen Victoria, who loved his music. After Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, used the “Wedding March” at her wedding to Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1858, the piece became very popular for many weddings in Western countries. The “Wedding March” is considered to be “one of the most ubiquitous pieces of music ever written.”

Felix Mendelssohn’s prolific output of compositions includes symphonies, other orchestral music (including “Wedding March”), concertos, chamber music, piano music, organ music, opera, choral works, and songs. He was a renowned keyboard performer (both on piano and organ), and a noted conductor and teacher. The composer Robert Schumann wrote of Mendelssohn as being “the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant musician, the one who most clearly sees through the contradictions of the age and for the first time reconciles them.”