Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Symphonies Nos. 1-5

Mozart of the 19th century

Rrobert Schumann once called his friend and admired his colleague Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. With this he certainly alluded to Mendelssohn’s early mastery, who completed his first symphony at the age of 15. But the aspect of Apollonian serenity, which Mozart was considered to be the form of in the 19th century, also obviously played a role for Schumann in Mendelssohn’s comparison with Mozart; for although Mendelssohn was a true child of his time, Romanticism through and through, gloom and despair did not shape his feelings, as was often the case with Schumann, who was plagued by psychological problems. “In German Romanticism, which is, so to speak, marked by an unfulfilled longing for the unattainable ‘Blue Flower’, Mendelssohn occupies an exceptional position. His music, too, is marked by longing, but in most cases this leads to a fulfilled state of happiness,” says Christoph Poppen in an interview about this recording. With this in mind, the conductor sees his debut recording with the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, which has just been formed from the merger of the radio orchestras of Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken, as a contribution to the long overdue rehabilitation of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy as one of the great composers of German Romanticism.