title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: By no fault of Jarre, due to 22 millimeters of rain and lack of proper preparation for and execution of the event, it took several hours for all people to be able to leave the area, and many cars were stuck until the next day. The problems subsequently became a big issue in Danish media, since, had there been an accident, it would be extremely difficult for help to get to the location. Two years previously, nine people were killed at Roskilde Festival, which had brought focus on security at large concerts. Preparations for AERO were later proven to have been lacking, and the police investigation concluded, in part, that permission for the concert should not have been granted. Reactions from spectators were mixed, some claiming it was unsafe, and others saying it was a case of overreacting.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: A concert in September of that same year at a wind farm near Aalborg in Denmark proved problematic when 22 mm of rain fell on the venue, causing long delays for spectators. It also marked a change in direction in Jarre's live concerts; from Rendez-vous Houston onwards he had been accompanied by a full complement of live musicians, but at Aalborg he was accompanied only by Francis Rimbert, and having guests like the Klarup Girls Choir, Safri Duo and the Aalborg Symphonic Orchestra.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In 2003 he released "Geometry of Love" on Warner Music label, it was commissioned by Jean-Roch as soundtrack for his 'V.I.P. Room' nightclub in France. The physical CD was a long time out of print, but in 2018 remastered reissue was released on CD again. The album cover is a pixelated and turned counter-clockwise photo of Jarre's girlfriend at the time, Isabelle Adjani.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In October 2004 he returned to China to open its "Year of France" cultural exchange. Jarre gave two performances, the first at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City, and the second in Tiananmen Square. More than 15,000 spectators watched the concert at the Meridian Gate, and each concert was transmitted nationwide on live television. Jarre collaborated with musician Chen Lin. Accompanying his traditional musical repertoire, 600 projectors shone coloured light and images across various screens and objects.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In September 2004, Jarre released both a DVD and a CD in one package "AERO". A compilation album made in 5.1 surround sound, it contains re-recorded versions of some of his most famous tracks, including tracks from "Oxygène" and "Équinoxe". Accompanying the audio, the DVD features a visual image of Anne Parillaud's eyes, recorded in real time as she listened to the album. Jarre used the minimalist imagery to reinforce the audio content of the DVD.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In his role of UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Jarre performed a concert named Water for Life in Morocco, on 16 December 2006, to celebrate the United Nations Year of Desertification in the world. The performance was in front of the Erg Chebbi Dunes of Merzouga, in the Sahara. A free event, it was attended by about 25,000 people. Images of water and the environment were projected onto nine vertical screens, held in place by sand which was watered to keep it hard. Several permanent drinking fountains were built on the site, along with a permanent electricity installation. Jarre was accompanied by over 60 Moroccan artists. Jarre released "Téo & Téa" in 2007, a studio album that described the different stages of a loving relationship.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In that same year released on EMI label a new recording of his 1976 album named "". Jarre performed 10 concerts ("Oxygène Live") in December 2007, held in the Théâtre Marigny, located in the Champs-Élysées, Paris. Later in 2008 Jarre performed several concerts to celebrate the 30th anniversary of "Oxygène", in theaters in Europe. Following one such performance at the Royal Albert Hall Jarre met Queen guitarrist Brian May, who proposed he create a concert in Tenerife for the International Year of Astronomy, but a lack of sponsorship meant that the concert did not take place. In 2009 he was selected as the artistic director of the World Sky Race, and also accepted a role as Goodwill Ambassador for the International Year of Astronomy. In 2009 he started an indoor tour in arenas throughout Europe.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: On 1 March 2010, Jean-Michel Jarre started the second leg of his 2009–10 Indoors tour; on 10 June, he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by "Mojo" magazine. On 1 July 2011, Jarre performed a large-scale concert in Monaco to celebrate the marriage of Prince Albert and his bride Charlene. A later concert was held at Carthage during the city's 12 August 2013 musical festival.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In June 2013, Jarre was elected as president of the "Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d´Auteurs et Compositeurs" (CISAC). In Spring 2015, Jarre released the first music from a new studio album, released in October 2015, following around four years of work. The album, "" (working title: "E-Project"), comprises a number of collaborations with other artists. The first of these to be released was the collaboration with Gesaffelstein entitled "Conquistador", followed by "Glory", with M83. The track was also featured as part of the soundtrack of a short film entitled EMIC.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: Other collaborations on the album include "Zero Gravity" tracks with; Armin van Buuren for "Stardust", John Carpenter for ""A Question of Blood"", Little Boots for "If..!" and Pete Townshend for "Travelator, Pt. 2". The album became Jarre's first album in over 25 years to make the UK Top 10 at No. 8. In December 2016, the album was nominated for the Grammys 2017 Awards in the "Best Dance/Electronic Album" category. In June 2015, in collaboration with Jean-Michel Jarre, the transmedia project "Soundhunters" was released on the platform of the Franco-German channel ARTE. The transmedia conceptualized by the Blies brothers (Stéphane Hueber-Blies and Nicolas Blies), François Le Gall and Marion Guth of the Luxembourg production company a_BAHN, is openly inspired by the album "Zoolook" to which it pays tribute.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: On 5 October 2016, Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 announced that Jarre would be a member of its advisory panel. The transmedia is composed of a web documentary using "Zoolook"s creative process involving 4 international artists (Simonne Jones, Mikael Seifu, Daedelus and Luke Vibert); a 52' documentary film directed by broadcast in September 2015 on ARTE (with the participation of Chassol, Matthew Herbert, Blixa Bargeld, Jean-Michel Jarre, Matmos, Kiz, Joseph Bertolozzi); and finally a participatory tribute music album whose tracks were chosen by Jean-Michel Jarre, entitled "Zoolook Revisited". "Soundhunters" won the Fipa d'Or 2015 in Biarritz. "Soundhunters" was also presented in conference at SXSW and Convergence NYFF 2016.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In 2016, "" was released with 15 more collaborators, including Pet Shop Boys, Hans Zimmer, Yello and Gary Numan. One track (8 "Exit") includes speech by Edward Snowden. Electronica 2 has been nominated in the "Album de musiques électroniques ou dance" category for the Grammy 2017 in USA & Victoires de la Musique 2017 awards in France. On 11 April 2016, it was revealed that Jarre worked in collaboration with British virtual band Gorillaz on their fifth studio album "Humanz". He also composed during 2016 the soundtrack for the French news network France Info. This soundtrack was released as "Radiophonie Vol. 9" on 13 January 2017.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In 2017, he performed a concert near the fortress of Masada, for the purpose of saving the Dead Sea and to highlight "the anti-environmental policies of Donald Trump." He also performed a special concert for the opening of the "Año Jubilar" (Jubilee year) at the Monasterio de Santo Toribio de Liébana, in Spain. Both concerts were heavily based in the Electronica Tour concept. During May 2017, Jarre toured in Canada and USA for the first time in his career, and in July 2017 another leg of the tour was held in Europe.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: In March 2018, Jarre performed in South America for the first time as part of his Electronica Tour in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. These concerts were originally scheduled for November 2017, but problems with the production company caused the rescheduling. The 2018 leg of the tour continued in Canada and the United States during April, including the presentation of the Electronica show with a reduced track list in the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, ending with a one-off concert at Riyadh to celebrate the 88th Saudi National Day (23 September). This concert was called "The Green Concert", and involved laser projections on the skyscrapers of the financial center of Riyadh. In September 2018, a studio compilation album entitled "Planet Jarre – 50 Years of Music", consisting of forty-one songs in "four quite different styles of composition", was released.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: On 26 November 2018, Jarre and Scott Kirkland of The Crystal Method announced that they would be collaborating on a track on Jarre's next "Electronica" album. In January 2019, HSBC revealed their new musical identity, composed by Jarre. On 3 October 2019, French editor Robert Laffont published Melancolique Rodeo, Jarre's autobiography. Jarre started a promotional tour for his book. On 7 November 2019, Jarre announced the release of an application for the iOS operating system named EōN. This application contains morphing graphics created by an algorithm developed by Alexis André of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, and music generated from 7 hours of recorded material by Jarre. This music is always different on every device. The AI algorithm which composes on the fly based on the rules set by Jarre was developed by BLEASS. A limited deluxe box set was later released with excerpts from the application.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: On 31 December 2020, Jarre held a virtual New Year's Eve concert online. He performed from a studio in Paris, but it appeared virtually from a Notre Dame setting. The show has had over 75 million viewers as of 5 January 2021. The show was done in support of his new album ""Welcome to the other side,"" which features 12 tracks from his previously released music. The recording of the concert was released on CD, LP and Blu-ray in September 2021.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: On 21 June 2021, Jarre was awarded Commander to the Legion of Honour by French president Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée presidential palace in Paris. After the ceremony he performed at the same venue as part of the Fête de la Musique. In March 2022 Jarre presented a live project, "Oxymore", at Radio France's Hyper Weekend Festival located at Paris. His twenty-second studio album "Oxymore" was released on 22 October, 2022 by Sony Music and Menart Records as a tribute to Pierre Henry. Some songs were accompanied by a remix created by different artists such as Brian Eno, Nina Kraviz, Armin van Buuren, the first single from the album "Brutalism" was released along with a remix made by Depeche Mode member Martin Gore. In July 2022, his music publishing catalog was acquired by BMG Rights Management.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: Jarre was married to Flore Guillard from 1975 until 1977. He met his second wife, actress Charlotte Rampling, at a dinner party in St Tropez in 1976. The two married, and Jarre gained custody of his daughter Émilie Charlotte, and Rampling did the same with her son Barnaby, also Jarre and Rampling had David as a son. Jarre and Rampling separated in 1996 and divorced in 2002. He had a brief relationship with Isabelle Adjani, and married French actress Anne Parillaud in May 2005. In November 2010 the couple announced their divorce. Jarre has a half-sister, Stéphanie Jarre, from one of Maurice Jarre's other marriages. His stepbrother, Kevin Jarre, died in 2011. Although Maurice and Jean-Michel remained estranged, following Maurice's death in 2009, Jarre paid tribute to his legacy.


title: Jean-Michel Jarre

text: Jarre said about his father: "My father and I never really achieved a real relationship. We probably saw each other 20 or 25 times in our lifetime. When you are able, at my age, to count the times you have seen your father, it says something... I think it's better to have conflict, or, if you have a parent who dies, you grieve, but the feeling of absence is very difficult to fill, and it took me a while to absorb that.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Raymond Daniel Manzarek Jr. (né Manczarek; February 12, 1939 – May 20, 2013) was an American keyboardist. He is best known as a member of the Doors, co-founding the band with singer and lyricist Jim Morrison in 1965.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Manzarek was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 as a member of the Doors. He was a co-founding member of Nite City from 1977 to 1978, and of Manzarek–Krieger from 2001 until his death in 2013. "USA Today" described him as "one of the best keyboardists ever".


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Raymond Daniel Manczarek Jr. was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. He was born to parents of Polish descent, Helena Kolenda (1918–2012) and Raymond Manczarek Sr. (1914–1987). His grandparents emigrated from Poland in the 1890s.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Upon graduating from St. Rita of Cascia High School in 1956, Manzarek matriculated at DePaul University, where he played piano in his fraternity's jazz band (the Beta Pi Mu Combo), participated in intramural football, served as treasurer of the Speech Club, and organized a charity concert with Sonny Rollins and Dave Brubeck. He graduated from the University's College of Commerce with a degree in economics in 1960.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In late-1961, Manzarek briefly enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Unable to acclimatize to the curriculum, he transferred to the Department of Motion Pictures, Television and Radio as a graduate student before dropping out altogether after breaking up with a girlfriend. Although he attempted to enlist in the Army Signal Corps as a camera operator, he was instead assigned to the highly selective Army Security Agency as a prospective intelligence analyst.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Following his return to the United States, he re-enrolled in UCLA's graduate film program in 1962, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in cinematography in 1965. During this period, he met future wife Dorothy Fujikawa and undergraduate film student Jim Morrison. At the time, Manzarek was in a band called Rick & the Ravens with his brothers Rick and Jim. Forty days after finishing film school, thinking they had gone their separate ways, Manzarek and Morrison met by chance on Venice Beach in California. Morrison said he had written some songs, and Manzarek expressed an interest in hearing them, whereupon Morrison sang rough versions of "Moonlight Drive", "My Eyes Have Seen You" and "Summer's Almost Gone". During this time, Manzarek also met teenage guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore at a Transcendental Meditation lecture and recruited them for the incipient band. Densmore said, "There wouldn't be any Doors without Maharishi."


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In January 1966, the Doors became the house band at the London Fog on the Sunset Strip. According to Manzarek, "Nobody ever came in the place... an occasional sailor or two on leave, a few drunks. All in all it was a very depressing experience, but it gave us time to really get the music together". When the Doors were fired from the London Fog, they were hired to be the house band at the Whisky a Go Go. The Doors' first recording contract was with Columbia Records. After a few months of inactivity, they learned they were on Columbia's drop list. At that point, they asked to be released from their contract. Following a few months of live gigs, Jac Holzman "rediscovered" the Doors and signed them to Elektra Records.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: The Doors lacked a bass guitarist (except during recording sessions), so for live performances Manzarek played the bass parts on a Fender Rhodes piano keyboard bass. His signature sound was that of the Vox Continental combo organ, an instrument used by many other psychedelic rock bands of the era. He also used a Gibson G-101 Kalamazoo combo organ (which looks like a Farfisa) for the band's later albums.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: During the Morrison era, Manzarek was the group's regular backing vocalist. He occasionally sang lead, as exemplified by covers of Muddy Waters's "Close to You" (released on 1970's "Absolutely Live") and "You Need Meat (Don't Go No Further)" (recorded during the "L.A. Woman" sessions and initially released as the B-side of "Love Her Madly"). He went on to share lead vocals with Krieger on the albums ("Other Voices" and "Full Circle") released after Morrison's death.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: After recording two solo albums on Mercury Records to a muted reception in 1974, Manzarek played in several groups, most notably Nite City. He recorded a rock adaptation of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" (1983; co-produced by Philip Glass), briefly played with Iggy Pop, sat in on one track on the eponymous 1987 album "Echo & the Bunnymen", backed San Francisco poet Michael McClure's poetry readings and worked on improvisational compositions with poet Michael C. Ford. He also worked extensively with "Hearts of Fire" screenwriter and former SRC front man Scott Richardson on a series of spoken word and blues recordings entitled "Tornado Souvenirs". Manzarek produced the first four albums of the seminal punk band X, also contributing occasionally on keyboards. Two of those have been also included on "Rolling Stone"s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: His memoir, "Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors", was published in 1998. "The Poet in Exile" (2001) is a novel exploring the urban legend that Jim Morrison may have faked his death. Manzarek's second novel, "Snake Moon", released in April 2006, is a Civil War ghost story. In 2000, a collaboration poetry album entitled "Freshly Dug" was released with British singer, poet, actor and pioneer punk rocker Darryl Read. Read had previously worked with Manzarek on the "Beat Existentialist" album in 1994, and their last poetical and musical collaboration was in 2007 with the album "Bleeding Paradise". Also in 2000, he co-wrote and directed the film "Love Her Madly", which was credited to a story idea by Jim Morrison. The film was shown at the closing night of the 2004 Santa Cruz Film Festival, but otherwise received limited distribution and critical review.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In 2006, he collaborated with composer and trumpeter Bal. The album that resulted, "Atonal Head", is an exploration in the realm of electronica. The two musicians integrated jazz, rock, ethnic and classical music into their computer-based creations. On August 4, 2007, Manzarek hosted a program on BBC Radio 2 about the 40th anniversary of the recording of "Light My Fire" and the group's musical and spiritual influences.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In April 2009, Manzarek and Robby Krieger appeared as special guests for Daryl Hall's monthly concert webcast "Live From Daryl's House". They performed several Doors tunes ("People Are Strange", "The Crystal Ship", "Roadhouse Blues" and "Break on Through (To the Other Side)") with Hall providing lead vocals. In his last years, he often sat in with local bands in the Napa County area, where he relocated in the early 2000s.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In 2009, Manzarek collaborated with "Weird Al" Yankovic by playing keyboards on the single "Craigslist", which is a pastiche of the Doors. On the day of Manzarek's death, Yankovic published a personal video of this studio session which he said had been an "extreme honor" and "one of the absolute high points of my life". In May 2010, Manzarek recorded with slide guitarist Roy Rogers. A collaborative album between the two, entitled "Translucent Blues", was released in mid-2011; its lyrical content is primarily penned by songwriter/poets Jim Carroll and Michael McClure. During June through August 2011, Manzarek recorded "Breakn' a Sweat" with DJ Skrillex and his fellow former Doors members Robby Krieger and John Densmore. In August 2013, "Twisted Tales", another Manzarek–Rogers collaboration, was released and dedicated to Manzarek after his passing.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Manzarek married fellow UCLA alumna Dorothy Aiko Fujikawa in Los Angeles on December 21, 1967, with Jim Morrison and his longtime companion Pamela Courson as witnesses. Manzarek and Fujikawa remained married until his death. They have a son, Pablo, born on August 28, 1973, and they have three grandchildren. In the early-1970s, the Manzareks divided their time between an apartment in West Hollywood, California, and a small penthouse on New York City's Upper West Side. They subsequently resided in Beverly Hills, California (including ten years in a house on Rodeo Drive), for several decades. For the last decade of his life, Manzarek and his wife lived in a refurbished farmhouse near Vichy Springs, California, in the Napa Valley.


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In March 2013, Manzarek was diagnosed with a rare cancer called cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer) and traveled to Germany for special treatment. During that time, prior to his death, he reconciled with Densmore and spoke to Krieger. He also performed a private concert for his doctors and nurses. Manzarek was "feeling better" until things took a turn for the worse, according to his manager. On May 20, 2013, Manzarek died at a hospital in Rosenheim, Germany, at the age of 74. He was surrounded by his wife and brothers. Krieger said upon hearing the news of his death, "I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today. I'm just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him." Densmore said, "There was no keyboard player on the planet more appropriate to support Jim Morrison's words. Ray, I felt totally in sync with you musically. It was like we were of one mind, holding down the foundation for Robby and Jim to float on top of. I will miss my musical brother."


title: Ray Manzarek

text: Greg Harris, president and CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said in reaction to Manzarek's death that "The world of rock 'n' roll lost one of its greats with the passing of Ray Manzarek." Harris also said that "he was instrumental in shaping one of the most influential, controversial and revolutionary groups of the 1960s. Such memorable tracks as "Light My Fire", "People Are Strange" and "Hello, I Love You"—to name but a few—owe much to Manzarek's innovative playing."


title: Ray Manzarek

text: On February 12, 2016, at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, Densmore and Krieger reunited for the first time in 15 years to perform in tribute to Manzarek and benefit Stand Up to Cancer. That day would have been Manzarek's 77th birthday. The night featured Exene Cervenka and John Doe of the band X, Rami Jaffee of the Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots' Robert DeLeo, Jane's Addiction's Stephen Perkins, Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara, and Andrew Watt (among others).


title: Ray Manzarek

text: In April 2018, the film "Break On Thru: A Celebration of Ray Manzarek and the Doors" premiered at the 2018 Asbury Park Music & Film Festival. The film highlights the 2016 concert in honor of what would have been Manzarek's 79th birthday, and it includes new footage and interviews. The film won the APMFF Best Film Feature Award at the festival.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Brahmaputra is a trans-boundary river which flows through Tibet, northeast India, and Bangladesh. It is also known as the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibetan, the Siang/Dihang River in Arunachali, Luit in Assamese, and Jamuna River in Bangla. It is the 9th largest river in the world by discharge, and the 15th longest.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: With its origin in the Manasarovar Lake region, near Mount Kailash, on the northern side of the Himalayas in Burang County of Tibet where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo River, It flows along southern Tibet to break through the Himalayas in great gorges (including the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon) and into Arunachal Pradesh. It flows southwest through the Assam Valley as the Brahmaputra and south through Bangladesh as the Jamuna (not to be confused with the Yamuna of India). In the vast Ganges Delta, it merges with the Ganges, popularly known as the Padma in Bangladesh, and becomes the Meghna and ultimately empties into the Bay of Bengal.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: About long, the Brahmaputra is an important river for irrigation and transportation in the region. The average depth of the river is and its maximum depth is (at Sadiya). The river is prone to catastrophic flooding in the spring when the Himalayan snow melts. The average discharge of the river is about , and floods reach about . It is a classic example of a braided river and is highly susceptible to channel migration and avulsion. It is also one of the few rivers in the world that exhibits a tidal bore. It is navigable for most of its length.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The river drains the Himalayas east of the Indo-Nepal border, south-central portion of the Tibetan plateau above the Ganga basin, south-eastern portion of Tibet, the Patkai hills, the northern slopes of the Meghalaya hills, the Assam plains, and the northern portion of Bangladesh. The basin, especially south of Tibet, is characterized by high levels of rainfall. Kangchenjunga (8,586 m) is the only peak above 8,000 m and hence is the highest point within the Brahmaputra basin.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Brahmaputra's upper course was long unknown, and its identity with the Yarlung Tsangpo was only established by exploration in 1884–86. The river is often called the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra river.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The lower reaches are sacred to Hindus. While most rivers on the Indian subcontinent have female names, this river has a rare male name. Brahmaputra means "son of Brahma" in Sanskrit.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: It is known by various names in different regional languages: in Assamese; Yarlung Tsangpo; . It is also called Tsangpo-Brahmaputra and red river of India (when referring to the whole river including the stretch within the Tibet Autonomous Region).


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The upper reaches of the Brahmaputra River, known as the Yarlung Tsangpo from the Tibetan language, originates on the Angsi Glacier, near Mount Kailash, located on the northern side of the Himalayas in Burang County of Tibet. The source of the river was earlier thought to be on the Chemayungdung glacier, which covers the slopes of the Himalayas about southeast of Lake Manasarovar in southwestern Tibet.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The river is long, and its drainage area is according to the new findings, while previous documents showed its length varied from to and its drainage area between 520,000 and 1.73 million km.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: From its source, the river runs for nearly in a generally easterly direction between the main range of the Himalayas to the south and the Kailas Range to the north.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: In Tibet, the Tsangpo receives a number of tributaries. The most important left-bank tributaries are the Raka Zangbo (Raka Tsangpo), which joins the river west of Xigazê (Shigatse), and the Lhasa (Kyi), which flows past the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and joins the Tsangpo at Qüxü. The Nyang River joins the Tsangpo from the north at Zela (Tsela Dzong). On the right bank, a second river called the Nyang Qu (Nyang Chu) meets the Tsangpo at Xigazê.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: After passing Pi (Pe) in Tibet, the river turns suddenly to the north and northeast and cuts a course through a succession of great narrow gorges between the mountainous massifs of Gyala Peri and Namcha Barwa in a series of rapids and cascades. Thereafter, the river turns south and southwest and flows through a deep gorge (the "Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon") across the eastern extremity of the Himalayas with canyon walls that extend upward for and more on each side. During that stretch, the river crosses the China-India line of actual control to enter northern Arunachal Pradesh, where it is known as the Dihang (or Siang) River, and turns more southerly.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Yarlung Tsangpo leaves the part of Tibet to enter Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, where the river is called Siang. It makes a very rapid descent from its original height in Tibet and finally appears in the plains, where it is called Dihang. It flows for about southward after which, it is joined by the Dibang River and the Lohit River at the head of the Assam Valley. Below the Lohit, the river is called Brahmaputra and Doima (mother of water) and Burlung-Buthur by native Bodo tribals, it then enters the state of Assam, and becomes very wide—as wide as in parts of Assam.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The reason for such an unusual course and drastic change is that the river is antecedent to the Himalayas, meaning that it had existed before them and has entrenched itself since they started rising.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Dihang, winding out of the mountains, turns towards the southeast and descends into a low-lying basin as it enters northeastern Assam state. Just west of the town of Sadiya, the river again turns to the southwest and is joined by two mountain streams, the Lohit, and the Dibang. Below that confluence, about from the Bay of Bengal, the river becomes known conventionally as the Brahmaputra ("Son of Brahma"). In Assam, the river is mighty, even in the dry season, and during the rains, its banks are more than apart. As the river follows its braided course through the valley, it receives several rapidly flowing Himalayan streams, including the Subansiri, Kameng, Bhareli, Dhansiri, Manas, Champamati, Saralbhanga, and Sankosh Rivers. The main tributaries from the hills and from the plateau to the south are the Burhi Dihing, the Disang, the Dikhu, and the Kopili.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: Between Dibrugarh and Lakhimpur Districts, the river divides into two channels—the northern Kherkutia channel and the southern Brahmaputra channel. The two channels join again about downstream, forming the Majuli island, which is the largest river island in the world. At Guwahati, near the ancient pilgrimage centre of Hajo, the Brahmaputra cuts through the rocks of the Shillong Plateau, and is at its narrowest at bank-to-bank. The terrain of this area made it logistically ideal for the Battle of Saraighat, the military confrontation between the Mughal Empire and the Ahom Kingdom in March 1671. The first combined railroad/roadway bridge across the Brahmaputra was constructed at Saraighat. It was opened to traffic in April 1962.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The environment of the Brahmaputra floodplains in Assam have been described as the Brahmaputra Valley semi-evergreen forests ecoregion.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: In Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra is joined by the Teesta River (or Tista), one of its largest tributaries. Below the Tista, the Brahmaputra splits into two distributary branches. The western branch, which contains the majority of the river's flow, continues due south as the Jamuna () to merge with the lower Ganga, called the Padma River (). The eastern branch, formerly the larger, but now much smaller, is called the lower or Old Brahmaputra (). It curves southeast to join the Meghna River near Dhaka. The Padma and Meghna converge near Chandpur and flow out into the Bay of Bengal. This final part of the river is called Meghna.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Brahmaputra enters the plains of Bangladesh after turning south around the Garo Hills below Dhuburi, India. After flowing past Chilmari, Bangladesh, it is joined on its right bank by the Tista River and then follows a 240  km (150-mi) course due south as the Jamuna River. (South of Gaibanda, the Old Brahmaputra leaves the left bank of the mainstream and flows past Jamalpur and Mymensingh to join the Meghna River at Bhairab Bazar.) Before its confluence with the Ganga, the Jamuna receives the combined waters of the Baral, Atrai, and Hurasagar Rivers on its right bank and becomes the point of departure of the large Dhaleswari River on its left bank. A tributary of the Dhaleswari, the Buriganga ("Old Ganga"), flows past Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and joins the Meghna River above Munshiganj.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Jamuna joins with the Ganga north of Goalundo Ghat, below which, as the Padma, their combined waters flow to the southeast for a distance of about . After several smaller channels branch off to feed the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta to the south, the main body of the Padma reaches its confluence with the Meghna River near Chandpur and then enters the Bay of Bengal through the Meghna estuary and lesser channels flowing through the delta. The growth of the Ganga-Brahmaputra Delta is dominated by tidal processes.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Ganga Delta, fed by the waters of numerous rivers, including the Ganga and Brahmaputra, is , one of the largest river deltas in the world.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The basin of the Brahmaputra river is 651 334  km and it is a good example of a braided river and meanders quite a bit and frequently forms temporary sand bars. A region of significant tectonic activity has developed in the Jamuna River and is associated with the Himalayan uplift and development of the Bengal foredeep. Several researchers have hypothesized that the underlying structural control on the location of the major river systems of Bangladesh. A zone of 'structural weakness' along the present course of the Ganga-Jamuna-Padma Rivers due to either a subsiding trough or a fault at depth has been observed by Morgan and McIntire. (1959). Scijmonsbergen (1999) contends that width changes in the Jamuna may respond to these faults and they may also cause increased sedimentation upstream of the fault. He presented a few images to argue that a fault downstream of the Bangabandhu Multipurpose Bridge has affected channel migration. Huge accumulations of sediment that have been fed from Himalayan erosion has been produced due to the deepening of the Bengal Basin, with the thickness of sediment above the Precambrian basement increasing from a few hundred meters in the shelf region to over 18  km in the Bengal foredeep to the south. The tectonic and climatic context for the large water and sediment discharges in the rivers of Bangladesh was set by the ongoing subsidence in the Bengal Basin, combined with high rates of Himalayan uplift. The control of uplift and subsidence is, however, clear. The courses of the Jamuna and Ganga Rivers are first-order controls due to the fact that they are most influenced by the uplifted Plcistoccnc terraces of the Barind and Madhupur tracts.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Ganga-Brahmaputra system has the third-greatest average discharge of the world's rivers—roughly 30,770 m (1,086,500 ft) per second; and the river Brahmaputra alone supplies about 19,800 m (700,000 ft) per second of the total discharge. The rivers' combined suspended sediment load of about 1.87 billion tonnes (1.84 billion tons) per year is the world's highest.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: In the past, the lower course of the Brahmaputra was different and passed through the Jamalpur and Mymensingh districts. In an 8.8 magnitude earthquake on 2 April 1762, however, the main channel of the Brahmaputra at Bhahadurabad point was switched southwards and opened as Jamuna due to the result of tectonic uplift of the Madhupur tract.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: Rising temperature is one of the major causes of snow-melting at the upper Brahmaputra catchment. The discharge of the river Brahmaputra is highly affected by the melting of snow at the upper part of its catchment. Then of river flow due to the melting of snow in the river Brahmaputra basin affects the downstream discharge of the river. This increase in discharge due to the significant retreat of snow gives rise to severe catastrophic problems such as flood and erosion.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Brahmaputra River is characterized by its significant rates of sediment discharge, the large and variable flows, along with its rapid channel aggradations and accelerated rates of basin denudation. Over time, the deepening of the Bengal Basin caused by erosion will result in the increase in hydraulic radius, and hence allowing for the huge accumulation of sediments fed from the Himalayan erosion by efficient sediment transportation. The thickness of the sediment accumulated above the Precambrian basement has increased over the years from a few hundred meters to over 18  km in the Bengal fore-deep to the south. The ongoing subsidence of the Bengal Basin and the high rate of Himalayan uplift continues to contribute to the large water and sediment discharges of fine sand and silt, with 1% clay, in the Brahmaputra River.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: Climatic change plays a crucial role in affecting the basin hydrology. Throughout the year, there is a significant rise in hydrograph, with a broad peak between July and September. The Brahmaputra River experiences two high-water seasons, one in early summer caused by snowmelt in the mountains, and one in late summer caused by runoff from monsoon rains. The river flow is strongly influenced by snow and ice melting of the glaciers, which are located mainly on the eastern Himalaya regions in the upstream parts of the basin. The snow and glacier melt contribution to the total annual runoff is about 27%, while the annual rainfall contributes to about 1.9m and 19,830 m3 /s of discharge. The highest recorded daily discharge in the Brahmaputra at Pandu was 72,726 m3 /s August 1962 while the lowest was 1,757 m3 /s in February 1968. The increased rates of snow and glacial melt are likely to increase summer flows in some river systems for a few decades, followed by a reduction in flow as the glaciers disappear and snowfall diminishes. This is particularly true for the dry season when water availability is crucial for the irrigation systems.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The course of the Brahmaputra River has changed drastically in the past two and a half centuries, moving its river course westwards for a distance of about , leaving its old river course, appropriately named the old Brahmaputra river, behind. In the past, the floodplain of the old river course had soils which were more properly formed compared to graded sediments on the operating Jamuna river. This change of river course resulted in modifications to the soil-forming process, which include acidification, the breakdown of clays and buildup of organic matter, with the soils showing an increasing amount of biotic homogenization, mottling, the coating around Peds and maturing soil arrangement, shape and pattern. In the future, the consequences of local ground subsidence coupled with flood prevention propositions, for instance, localised breakwaters, that increase flood-plain water depths outside the water breakers, may alter the water levels of the floodplains. Throughout the years, bars, scroll bars, and sand dunes are formed at the edge of the flood plain by deposition. The height difference of the channel topography is often not more than 1m-2m. Furthermore, flooding over the history of the river has caused the formation of river levees due to deposition from the overbank flow. The height difference between the levee top and the surrounding floodplains is typically 1m along small channels and 2-3m along major channels. Crevasse splay, a sedimentary fluvial deposit which forms when a stream breaks its natural or artificial levees and deposits sediment on a floodplain, are often formed due to a breach in the levee, forming a lobe of sediments which progrades onto the adjacent floodplain. Lastly, flood basins are often formed between the levees of adjacent rivers.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: During the monsoon season (June–October), floods are a very common occurrence. Deforestation in the Brahmaputra watershed has resulted in increased siltation levels, flash floods, and soil erosion in critical downstream habitat, such as the Kaziranga National Park in middle Assam. Occasionally, massive flooding causes huge losses to crops, life, and property. Periodic flooding is a natural phenomenon which is ecologically important because it helps maintain the lowland grasslands and associated wildlife. Periodic floods also deposit fresh alluvium, replenishing the fertile soil of the Brahmaputra River Valley. Thus flooding, agriculture, and agricultural practices are closely connected.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The effects of flooding can be devastating and cause significant damage to crops and houses, serious bank erosive with consequent loss of homesteads, school and land, and loss of many lives, livestock, and fisheries. During the 1998 flood, over 70% of the land area of Bangladesh was inundated, affecting 31 million people and 1 million homesteads. In the 1998 flood which had an unusually long duration from July to September, claimed 918 human lives and was responsible for damaging 16 00 and 6000  km of roads and embankments respectively, and affecting 6000  km of standing crops. The 2004 floods, over 25% of the population of Bangladesh or 36 million people, were affected by the floods; 800 people died; 952 000 houses were destroyed and 1.4 million were badly damaged; 24 000 educational institutions were affected including the destruction of 1200 primary schools, 2 million governments and private tube wells were affected, over 3 million latrines were damaged or washed away, this increases the risks of waterborne diseases including diarrhea and cholera. Also, 1.1 M ha of the rice crop was submerged and lost before it could be harvested, with 7% of the yearly "aus" (early season) rice crop lost; 270 000 ha of grazing land was affected, 5600 livestock perished together with 254 00 poultry and 63 MT of lost fish production.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: Flood-control measures are taken by the water resource department and the Brahmaputra Board, but until now the flood problem remains unsolved. At least a third of the land of Majuli Island has been eroded by the river. Recently, it is suggested that a highway protected by concrete mat along the river bank and excavation of the river bed can curb this menace. This project, named the Brahmaputra River Restoration Project, is yet to be implemented by the government. Recently the Central Government approved the construction of Brahmaputra Express Highways.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The course of the Brahmaputra River has changed dramatically over the past 250 years, with evidence of large-scale avulsion, in the period 1776–1850, of 80  km from east of the Madhupur tract to the west of it. Prior to 1843, the Brahmaputra flowed within the channel now termed the "Old Brahmaputra". The banks of the river are mostly weakly cohesive sand and silts, which usually erodes through large scale slab failure, where previously deposited materials undergo scour and bank erosion during flood periods. Presently, the river's erosion rate has decreased to 30m per year as compared to 150m per year from 1973 to 1992. This erosion has, however, destroyed so much land that it has caused 0.7 million people to become homeless due to loss of land.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: Several studies have discussed the reasons for the avulsion of the river into its present course, and have suggested a number of reasons including tectonic activity, switches in the upstream course of the Teesta River, the influence of increased discharge, catastrophic floods and river capture into an old river course. From an analysis of maps of the river between 1776 and 1843, it was concluded in a study that the river avulsion was more likely gradual than catastrophic and sudden, and may have been generated by bank erosion, perhaps around a large mid-channel bar, causing a diversion of the channel into the existing floodplain channel.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Brahmaputra channel is governed by the peak and low flow periods during which its bed undergoes tremendous modification. The Brahmaputra's bank line migration is inconsistent with time. The Brahmaputra river bed has widened significantly since 1916 and appears to be shifting more towards the south than towards the north. Together with the contemporary slow migration of the river, the left bank is being eroded away faster than the right bank.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The Brahmaputra River experiences high levels of bank erosion (usually via slab failure) and channel migration caused by its strong current, lack of riverbank vegetation, and loose sand and silt which compose its banks. It is thus difficult to build permanent structures on the river, and protective structures designed to limit the river's erosional effects often face numerous issues during and after construction. In fact, a 2004 report by the Bangladesh Disaster and Emergency Sub-Group (BDER) has stated that several of such protective systems have 'just failed'. However, some progress has been made in the form of construction works which stabilize sections of the river, albeit with the need for heavy maintenance. The Bangabandhu Bridge, the only bridge to span the river's major distributary, the Jamuna, was thus opened in June 1998. Constructed at a narrow braid belt of the river, it is 4.8  km long with a platform 18.5 m wide, and it is used to carry railroad traffic as well as gas, power and telecommunication lines. Due to the variable nature of the river, the prediction of the river's future course is crucial in planning upstream engineering to prevent flooding on the bridge.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: China had built the Zangmu Dam in the upper course of the Brahmaputra River in the Tibet region and it was operationalised on 13 October 2015.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: Early Greek accounts of Curtius and Strabo give its name as Dyardanes (Ancient greek Δυαρδάνης) and Oidanes. In the past, the course of the lower Brahmaputra was different and passed through the Jamalpur and Mymensingh districts. Some water still flows through that course, now called the Old Brahmaputra, as a distributary of the main channel.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: A question about the river system in Bangladesh is when and why the Brahmaputra changed its main course, at the site of the Jamuna and the "Old Brahmaputra" fork that can be seen by comparing modern maps to historic maps before the 1800s. The Brahmaputra likely flowed directly south along its present main channel for much of the time since the last glacial maximum, switching back and forth between the two courses several times throughout the Holocene.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: One idea about the most recent avulsion is that the change in the course of the main waters of the Brahmaputra took place suddenly in 1787, the year of the heavy flooding of the river Tista.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: In the middle of the 18th century, at least three fair-sized streams flowed between the Rajshahi and Dhaka Divisions, viz., the Daokoba, a branch of the Tista, the Monash or Konai, and the Salangi. The Lahajang and the Elengjany were also important rivers. In Renault's time, the Brahmaputra as a first step towards securing a more direct course to the sea by leaving the Mahdupur Jungle to the east began to send a considerable volume of water down the Jinai or Jabuna from Jamalpur into the Monash and Salangi. These rivers gradually coalesced and kept shifting to the west till they met the Daokoba, which was showing an equally rapid tendency to cut towards the east. The junction of these rivers gave the Brahmaputra a course worthy of her immense power, and the rivers to right and left silted up. In Renault's Altas they very much resemble the rivers of Jessore, which dried up after the hundred-mouthed Ganga had cut her new channel to join the Meghna at the south of the Munshiganj subdivision.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: In 1809, Francis Buchanan-Hamilton wrote that the new channel between Bhawanipur and Dewanranj "was scarcely inferior to the mighty river, and threatens to sweep away the intermediate country". By 1830, the old channel had been reduced to its present insignificance. It was navigable by country boats throughout the year and by launches only during rains, but at the point as low as Jamalpur it was formidable throughout the cold weather. Similar was the position for two or three months just below Mymensingh also.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The waters of the River Brahmaputra are shared by Tibet, India, and Bangladesh. In the 1990s and 2000s, there was repeated speculation that mentioned Chinese plans to build a dam at the Great Bend, with a view to diverting the waters to the north of the country. This has been denied by the Chinese government for many years. At the Kathmandu Workshop of Strategic Foresight Group in August 2009 on Water Security in the Himalayan Region, which brought together in a rare development leading hydrologists from the basin countries, the Chinese scientists argued that it was not feasible for China to undertake such a diversion. However, on 22 April 2010, China confirmed that it was indeed building the Zangmu Dam on the Brahmaputra in Tibet, but assured India that the project would not have any significant effect on the downstream flow to India. This claim has also been reiterated by the Government of India, in an attempt to assuage domestic criticism of Chinese dam construction on the river, but is one that remains hotly debated. Recent years have seen an intensification of grassroots opposition, especially in the state of Assam, against Chinese upstream dam building, as well as growing criticism of the Indian government for its perceived failure to respond appropriately to Chinese hydropower plans.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: In a meeting of scientists at Dhaka at 2010, 25 leading experts from the basin countries issued a Dhaka Declaration on Water Security calling for the exchange of information in low-flow periods, and other means of collaboration. Even though the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention does not prevent any of the basin countries from building a dam upstream, customary law offers some relief to the lower riparian countries. There is also the potential for China, India, and Bangladesh to cooperate on transboundary water navigation.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: The lives of many millions of Indian and Bangladeshi citizens are reliant on the Brahmaputra river. Its delta is home to 130 million people and 600 000 people live on the riverine islands. These people rely on the annual 'normal' flood to bring moisture and fresh sediments to the floodplain soils, hence providing the necessities for agricultural and marine farming. In fact, two of the three seasonal rice varieties (aus and aman) cannot survive without the floodwater. Furthermore, the fish caught both on the floodplain during flood season and from the many floodplain ponds are the main source of protein for many rural populations.


title: Brahmaputra River

text: From east to west till Parshuram Kund, then from southwest to northeast from Parshuram Kund to Patum, finally from east to southwest from Parshuram Kund to Burhidhing:


title: Brahmaputra River

text: 9 new bridges, including 3 bridges in Guwahati (New Saraighat bridge parallel to the old bridge, and 2 new bridges in greenfield locations at Bharalumukh & Kurua), 1 new bridge in Tezpur parallel to the old bridge, and 5 greenfield bridges in new locations (Dhubri, Bijoynagar, Gohpur tunnel, Nemtighat, & Sivasagar) elsewhere in Assam have been approved. 5 of these were announced in 2017 by India's Minister for MoRTH, Nitin Gadkari.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphonies, concertos, piano music, organ music and chamber music. His best-known works include the overture and incidental music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (which includes his "Wedding March"), the "Italian Symphony", the "Scottish Symphony", the oratorio "St. Paul", the oratorio "Elijah", the overture "The Hebrides", the mature Violin Concerto and the String Octet. The melody for the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is also his. Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words" are his most famous solo piano compositions.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's grandfather was the renowned Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, but Felix was initially raised without religion. He was baptised at the age of seven, becoming a Reformed Christian. He was recognised early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalise on his talent. His sister Fanny Mendelssohn received a similar musical education and was a talented composer and pianist in her own right; some of her early songs were published under her brother's name and her "Easter Sonata" was for a time mistakenly attributed to him after being lost and rediscovered in the 1970s.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn enjoyed early success in Germany, and revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, notably with his performance of the "St Matthew Passion" in 1829. He became well received in his travels throughout Europe as a composer, conductor and soloist; his ten visits to Britain – during which many of his major works were premiered – form an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes set him apart from more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Charles-Valentin Alkan and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatory, which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes and antisemitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his creative originality has been re-evaluated. He is now among the most popular composers of the Romantic era.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Felix Mendelssohn was born on 3 February 1809, in Hamburg, at the time an independent city-state, in the same house where, a year later, the dedicatee and first performer of his Violin Concerto, Ferdinand David, would be born. Mendelssohn's father, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, was the son of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, whose family was prominent in the German Jewish community. Until his baptism at age seven, Mendelssohn was brought up largely without religion. His mother, Lea Salomon, was a member of the Itzig family and a sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy. Mendelssohn was the second of four children; his older sister Fanny also displayed exceptional and precocious musical talent.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The family moved to Berlin in 1811, leaving Hamburg in disguise in fear of French reprisal for the Mendelssohn bank's role in breaking Napoleon's Continental System blockade. Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn sought to give their children – Fanny, Felix, Paul and Rebecka – the best education possible. Fanny became a pianist well known in Berlin musical circles as a composer; originally Abraham had thought that she, rather than Felix, would be the more musical. But it was not considered proper, by either Abraham or Felix, for a woman to pursue a career in music, so she remained an active but non-professional musician. Abraham was initially disinclined to allow Felix to follow a musical career until it became clear that he was seriously dedicated.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn grew up in an intellectual environment. Frequent visitors to the salon organised by his parents at their home in Berlin included artists, musicians and scientists, among them Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (whom Mendelssohn's sister Rebecka would later marry). The musician Sarah Rothenburg has written of the household that "Europe came to their living room".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Abraham Mendelssohn renounced the Jewish religion prior to Felix's birth; he and his wife decided not to have Felix circumcised, in contravention of the Jewish tradition. Felix and his siblings were at first brought up without religious education; on 21 March 1816, they were baptized in a private ceremony in the family's Berlin apartment by the Reformed Protestant minister of the Jerusalem Church, at which time Felix was given the additional names Jakob Ludwig. Abraham and his wife Lea were baptised in 1822, and formally adopted the surname Mendelssohn Bartholdy (which they had used since 1812) for themselves and for their children.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The name Bartholdy was added at the suggestion of Lea's brother, Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, who had inherited a property of this name in Luisenstadt and adopted it as his own surname. In an 1829 letter to Felix, Abraham explained that adopting the Bartholdy name was meant to demonstrate a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses: "There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius". (Letter to Felix of 8 July 1829). On embarking on his musical career, Felix did not entirely drop the name Mendelssohn as Abraham had requested, but in deference to his father signed his letters and had his visiting cards printed using the form 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. In 1829, his sister Fanny wrote to him of "Bartholdy [...] this name that we all dislike".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six, and at seven was tutored by Marie Bigot in Paris. Later in Berlin, all four Mendelssohn children studied piano with Ludwig Berger, who was himself a former student of Muzio Clementi. From at least May 1819 Mendelssohn (initially with his sister Fanny) studied counterpoint and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin. This was an important influence on his future career. Zelter had almost certainly been recommended as a teacher by his aunt Sarah Levy, who had been a pupil of W. F. Bach and a patron of C. P. E. Bach. Sarah Levy displayed some talent as a keyboard player, and often played with Zelter's orchestra at the Berliner Singakademie; she and the Mendelssohn family were among its leading patrons. Sarah had formed an important collection of Bach family manuscripts which she bequeathed to the Singakademie; Zelter, whose tastes in music were conservative, was also an admirer of the Bach tradition. This undoubtedly played a significant part in forming Felix Mendelssohn's musical tastes, as his works reflect this study of Baroque and early classical music. His fugues and chorales especially reflect a tonal clarity and use of counterpoint reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music influenced him deeply.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn probably made his first public concert appearance at the age of nine, when he participated in a chamber music concert accompanying a horn duo. He was a prolific composer from an early age. As an adolescent, his works were often performed at home with a private orchestra for the associates of his wealthy parents amongst the intellectual elite of Berlin. Between the ages of 12 and 14, Mendelssohn wrote 13 string symphonies for such concerts, and a number of chamber works. His first work, a piano quartet, was published when he was 13. It was probably Abraham Mendelssohn who procured the publication of this quartet by the house of Schlesinger. In 1824 the 15-year-old wrote his first symphony for full orchestra (in C minor, Op. 11).


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: At age 16 Mendelssohn wrote his String Octet in E-flat major, a work which has been regarded as "mark[ing] the beginning of his maturity as a composer." This Octet and his Overture to Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which he wrote a year later in 1826, are the best-known of his early works. (Later, in 1843, he also wrote incidental music for the play, including the famous "Wedding March".) The Overture is perhaps the earliest example of a concert overture – that is, a piece not written deliberately to accompany a staged performance but to evoke a literary theme in performance on a concert platform; this was a genre which became a popular form in musical Romanticism.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In 1824 Mendelssohn studied under the composer and piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, who confessed in his diaries that he had little to teach him. Moscheles and Mendelssohn became close colleagues and lifelong friends. The year 1827 saw the premiere – and sole performance in his lifetime – of Mendelssohn's opera "Die Hochzeit des Camacho". The failure of this production left him disinclined to venture into the genre again.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Besides music, Mendelssohn's education included art, literature, languages, and philosophy. He had a particular interest in classical literature and translated Terence's "Andria" for his tutor Heyse in 1825; Heyse was impressed and had it published in 1826 as a work of "his pupil, F****" [i.e. "Felix" (asterisks as provided in original text)]. This translation also qualified Mendelssohn to study at the University of Berlin, where from 1826 to 1829 he attended lectures on aesthetics by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, on history by Eduard Gans, and on geography by Carl Ritter.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In 1821 Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his friend and correspondent, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (then in his seventies), who was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter:


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn was invited to meet Goethe on several later occasions, and set a number of Goethe's poems to music. His other compositions inspired by Goethe include the overture "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" (Op. 27, 1828), and the cantata "Die erste Walpurgisnacht" ("The First Walpurgis Night", Op. 60, 1832).


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In 1829, with the backing of Zelter and the assistance of the actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance in Berlin of Bach's "St Matthew Passion". Four years previously his grandmother, Bella Salomon, had given him a copy of the manuscript of this (by then all-but-forgotten) masterpiece. The orchestra and choir for the performance were provided by the Berlin Singakademie. The success of this performance, one of the very few since Bach's death and the first ever outside of Leipzig, was the central event in the revival of Bach's music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe. It earned Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age of 20. It also led to one of the few explicit references which Mendelssohn made to his origins: "To think that it took an actor and a Jew's son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!"


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Over the next few years Mendelssohn travelled widely. His first visit to England was in 1829; other places visited during the 1830s included Vienna, Florence, Milan, Rome and Naples, in all of which he met with local and visiting musicians and artists. These years proved to be the germination for some of his most famous works, including the "Hebrides Overture" and the "Scottish" and "Italian" symphonies.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: On Zelter's death in 1832, Mendelssohn had hopes of succeeding him as conductor of the Singakademie; but at a vote in January 1833 he was defeated for the post by Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen. This may have been because of Mendelssohn's youth, and fear of possible innovations; it was also suspected by some to be attributable to his Jewish ancestry. Following this rebuff, Mendelssohn divided most of his professional time over the next few years between Britain and Düsseldorf, where he was appointed musical director (his first paid post as a musician) in 1833.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In the spring of that year Mendelssohn directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf, beginning with a performance of George Frideric Handel's oratorio "Israel in Egypt" prepared from the original score, which he had found in London. This precipitated a Handel revival in Germany, similar to the reawakened interest in J. S. Bach following his performance of the "St. Matthew Passion". Mendelssohn worked with the dramatist Karl Immermann to improve local theatre standards, and made his first appearance as an opera conductor in Immermann's production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" at the end of 1833, where he took umbrage at the audience's protests about the cost of tickets. His frustration at his everyday duties in Düsseldorf, and the city's provincialism, led him to resign his position at the end of 1834. He had offers from both Munich and Leipzig for important musical posts, namely, direction of the Munich Opera, the editorship of the prestigious Leipzig music journal the "Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung", and direction of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; he accepted the latter in 1835.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In Leipzig, Mendelssohn concentrated on developing the town's musical life by working with the orchestra, the opera house, the Thomanerchor (of which Bach had been a director), and the city's other choral and musical institutions. Mendelssohn's concerts included, in addition to many of his own works, three series of "historical concerts" featuring music of the eighteenth century, and a number of works by his contemporaries. He was deluged by offers of music from rising and would-be composers; among these was Richard Wagner, who submitted his early Symphony, the score of which, to Wagner's disgust, Mendelssohn lost or mislaid. Mendelssohn also revived interest in the music of Franz Schubert. Robert Schumann discovered the manuscript of Schubert's Ninth Symphony and sent it to Mendelssohn, who promptly premiered it in Leipzig on 21 March 1839, more than a decade after Schubert's death.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: A landmark event during Mendelssohn's Leipzig years was the premiere of his oratorio "Paulus", (the English version of this is known as "St. Paul"), given at the Lower Rhenish Festival in Düsseldorf in 1836, shortly after the death of the composer's father, which affected him greatly; Felix wrote that he would "never cease to endeavour to gain his approval ... although I can no longer enjoy it". "St. Paul" seemed to many of Mendelssohn's contemporaries to be his finest work, and sealed his European reputation.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: When Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the Prussian throne in 1840 with ambitions to develop Berlin as a cultural centre (including the establishment of a music school, and reform of music for the church), the obvious choice to head these reforms was Mendelssohn. He was reluctant to undertake the task, especially in the light of his existing strong position in Leipzig. Mendelssohn nonetheless spent some time in Berlin, writing some church music such as "Die Deutsche Liturgie", and, at the King's request, music for productions of Sophocles's "Antigone" (1841 – an overture and seven pieces) and "Oedipus at Colonus" (1845), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1843) and Racine's "Athalie" (1845). But the funds for the school never materialised, and many of the court's promises to Mendelssohn regarding finances, title, and concert programming were broken. He was therefore not displeased to have the excuse to return to Leipzig.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In 1843 Mendelssohn founded a major music school – the Leipzig Conservatory, now the Hochschule für Musik und Theater "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy". where he persuaded Ignaz Moscheles and Robert Schumann to join him. Other prominent musicians, including the string players Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim and the music theorist Moritz Hauptmann, also became staff members. After Mendelssohn's death in 1847, his musically conservative tradition was carried on when Moscheles succeeded him as head of the Conservatory.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn first visited Britain in 1829, where Moscheles, who had already settled in London, introduced him to influential musical circles. In the summer he visited Edinburgh, where he met among others the composer John Thomson, whom he later recommended for the post of Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He made ten visits to Britain, lasting about 20 months; he won a strong following, which enabled him to make a good impression on British musical life. He composed and performed, and also edited for British publishers the first critical editions of oratorios of Handel and of the organ music of J. S. Bach. Scotland inspired two of his most famous works: the overture "The Hebrides" (also known as "Fingal's Cave"); and the "Scottish Symphony" (Symphony No. 3). An English Heritage blue plaque commemorating Mendelssohn's residence in London was placed at 4 Hobart Place in Belgravia, London, in 2013.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: His protégé, the British composer and pianist William Sterndale Bennett, worked closely with Mendelssohn during this period, both in London and Leipzig. He first heard Bennett perform in London in 1833 aged 17. Bennett appeared with Mendelssohn in concerts in Leipzig throughout the 1836/1837 season.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: On Mendelssohn's eighth British visit in the summer of 1844, he conducted five of the Philharmonic concerts in London, and wrote: "[N]ever before was anything like this season – we never went to bed before half-past one, every hour of every day was filled with engagements three weeks beforehand, and I got through more music in two months than in all the rest of the year." (Letter to Rebecka Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Soden, 22 July 1844). On subsequent visits Mendelssohn met Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, himself a composer, who both greatly admired his music.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's oratorio "Elijah" was commissioned by the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival and premiered on 26 August 1846, at the Town Hall, Birmingham. It was composed to a German text translated into English by William Bartholomew, who authored and translated many of Mendelssohn's works during his time in England.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: On his last visit to Britain in 1847, Mendelssohn was the soloist in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 and conducted his own "Scottish Symphony" with the Philharmonic Orchestra before the Queen and Prince Albert.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn suffered from poor health in the final years of his life, probably aggravated by nervous problems and overwork. A final tour of England left him exhausted and ill, and the death of his sister, Fanny, on 14 May 1847, caused him further distress. Less than six months later, on 4 November, aged 38, Mendelssohn died in Leipzig after a series of strokes. His grandfather Moses, Fanny, and both his parents had all died from similar apoplexies. Although he had been generally meticulous in the management of his affairs, he died intestate.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's funeral was held at the Paulinerkirche, Leipzig, and he was buried at the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof I in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The pallbearers included Moscheles, Schumann and Niels Gade. Mendelssohn had once described death, in a letter to a stranger, as a place "where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: While Mendelssohn was often presented as equable, happy, and placid in temperament, particularly in the detailed family memoirs published by his nephew Sebastian Hensel after the composer's death, this was misleading. The music historian R. Larry Todd notes "the remarkable process of idealization" of Mendelssohn's character "that crystallized in the memoirs of the composer's circle", including Hensel's. The nickname "discontented Polish count" was given to Mendelssohn on account of his aloofness, and he referred to the epithet in his letters. He was frequently given to fits of temper which occasionally led to collapse. Devrient mentions that on one occasion in the 1830s, when his wishes had been crossed, "his excitement was increased so fearfully ... that when the family was assembled ... he began to talk incoherently in English. The stern voice of his father at last checked the wild torrent of words; they took him to bed, and a profound sleep of twelve hours restored him to his normal state". Such fits may be related to his early death.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn was an enthusiastic visual artist who worked in pencil and watercolour, a skill which he enjoyed throughout his life. His correspondences indicate that he could write with considerable wit in German and English – these letters are sometimes accompanied by humorous sketches and cartoons.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: On 21 March 1816, at the age of seven years, Mendelssohn was baptised with his brother and sisters in a home ceremony by Johann Jakob Stegemann, minister of the Evangelical congregation of Berlin's Jerusalem Church and New Church. Although Mendelssohn was a conforming Christian as a member of the Reformed Church, he was both conscious and proud of his Jewish ancestry and notably of his connection with his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn. He was the prime mover in proposing to the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus a complete edition of Moses's works, which continued with the support of his uncle, Joseph Mendelssohn. Felix was notably reluctant, either in his letters or conversation, to comment on his innermost beliefs; his friend Devrient wrote that "[his] deep convictions were never uttered in intercourse with the world; only in rare and intimate moments did they ever appear, and then only in the slightest and most humorous allusions". Thus for example in a letter to his sister Rebecka, Mendelssohn rebukes her complaint about an unpleasant relative: "What do you mean by saying you are not hostile to Jews? I hope this was a joke [...] It is really sweet of you that you do not despise your family, isn't it?" Some modern scholars have devoted considerable energy to demonstrate either that Mendelssohn was deeply sympathetic to his ancestors' Jewish beliefs, or that he was hostile to this and sincere in his Christian beliefs.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Throughout his life Mendelssohn was wary of the more radical musical developments undertaken by some of his contemporaries. He was generally on friendly, if sometimes somewhat cool, terms with Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but in his letters expresses his frank disapproval of their works, for example writing of Liszt that his compositions were "inferior to his playing, and […] only calculated for virtuosos"; of Berlioz's overture "Les francs-juges" "[T]he orchestration is such a frightful muddle [...] that one ought to wash one's hands after handling one of his scores"; and of Meyerbeer's opera "Robert le diable" "I consider it ignoble", calling its villain Bertram "a poor devil". When his friend the composer Ferdinand Hiller suggested in conversation to Mendelssohn that he looked rather like Meyerbeer – they were actually distant cousins, both descendants of Rabbi Moses Isserles – Mendelssohn was so upset that he immediately went to get a haircut to differentiate himself.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: In particular, Mendelssohn seems to have regarded Paris and its music with the greatest of suspicion and an almost puritanical distaste. Attempts made during his visit there to interest him in Saint-Simonianism ended in embarrassing scenes. It is significant that the only musician with whom Mendelssohn remained a close personal friend, Ignaz Moscheles, was of an older generation and equally conservative in outlook. Moscheles preserved this conservative attitude at the Leipzig Conservatory until his own death in 1870.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn married Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud (10 October 1817 – 25 September 1853), the daughter of a French Reformed Church clergyman, on 28 March 1837. The couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Lili and Felix August. The second youngest child, Felix August, contracted measles in 1844 and was left with impaired health; he died in 1851. The eldest, Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (7 February 1838 – 23 February 1897), became a historian, and Professor of History at Heidelberg and Freiburg universities; he died in a psychiatric institution in Freiburg aged 59. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1841–1880) was a noted chemist and pioneered the manufacture of aniline dye. Marie married Victor Benecke and lived in London. Lili married Adolf Wach, later Professor of Law at Leipzig University.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The family papers inherited by Marie's and Lili's children form the basis of the extensive collection of Mendelssohn manuscripts, including the so-called "Green Books" of his correspondence, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Cécile Mendelssohn Bartholdy died less than six years after her husband, on 25 September 1853.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn became close to the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whom he met in October 1844. Papers confirming their relationship had not been made public. In 2013, George Biddlecombe confirmed in the "Journal of the Royal Musical Association" that "The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn met and worked with Lind many times, and started an opera, "Lorelei", for her, based on the legend of the Lorelei Rhine maidens; the opera was unfinished at his death. He is said to have tailored the aria "Hear Ye Israel", in his oratorio "Elijah", to Lind's voice, although she did not sing the part until after his death, at a concert in December 1848. In 1847, Mendelssohn attended a London performance of Meyerbeer's "Robert le diable" – an opera that musically he despised – in order to hear Lind's British debut, in the role of Alice. The music critic Henry Chorley, who was with him, wrote: "I see as I write the smile with which Mendelssohn, whose enjoyment of Mdlle. Lind's talent was unlimited, turned round and looked at me, as if a load of anxiety had been taken off his mind. His attachment to Mdlle. Lind's genius as a singer was unbounded, as was his desire for her success."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Upon Mendelssohn's death, Lind wrote: "[He was] the only person who brought fulfillment to my spirit, and almost as soon as I found him I lost him again." In 1849, she established the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation, which makes an award to a young resident British composer every two years in Mendelssohn's memory. The first winner of the scholarship, in 1856, was Arthur Sullivan, then aged 14. In 1869, Lind erected a plaque in Mendelssohn's memory at his birthplace in Hamburg.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Something of Mendelssohn's intense attachment to his personal vision of music is conveyed in his comments to a correspondent who suggested converting some of the "Songs Without Words" into lieder by adding texts: "What [the] music I love expresses to me, are not thoughts that are too "indefinite" for me to put into words, but on the contrary, too "definite"."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Schumann wrote of Mendelssohn that he was "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." This appreciation brings to the fore two features that characterized Mendelssohn's compositions and his compositional process. First, that his inspiration for musical style was rooted in his technical mastery and his interpretation of the style of previous masters, although he certainly recognized and developed the strains of early Romanticism in the music of Beethoven and Weber. The historian James Garratt writes that from his early career, "the view emerged that Mendelssohn's engagement with early music was a defining aspect of his creativity." This approach was recognized by Mendelssohn himself, who wrote that, in his meetings with Goethe, he gave the poet "historical exhibitions" at the keyboard; "every morning, for about an hour, I have to play a variety of works by great composers in chronological order, and must explain to him how they contributed to the advance of music." Secondly, it highlights that Mendelssohn was more concerned to reinvigorate the musical legacy which he inherited, rather than to replace it with new forms and styles, or with the use of more exotic orchestration. In these ways he differed significantly from many of his contemporaries in the early Romantic period, such as Wagner, Berlioz and Franz Liszt. Whilst Mendelssohn admired Liszt's virtuosity at the keyboard, he found his music jejune. Berlioz said of Mendelssohn that he had "perhaps studied the music of the dead too closely."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The musicologist Greg Vitercik considers that, while "Mendelssohn's music only rarely aspires to provoke", the stylistic innovations evident from his earliest works solve some of the contradictions between classical forms and the sentiments of Romanticism. The expressiveness of Romantic music presented a problem in adherence to sonata form; the final (recapitulation) section of a movement could seem, in the context of Romantic style, a bland element without passion or soul. Furthermore, it could be seen as a pedantic delay before reaching the emotional climax of a movement, which in the classical tradition had tended to be at the transition from the development section of the movement to the recapitulation; whereas Berlioz and other "modernists" sought to have the emotional climax at the end of a movement, if necessary by adding an extended coda to follow the recapitulation proper. Mendelssohn's solution to this problem was less sensational than Berlioz's approach, but was rooted in changing the structural balance of the formal components of the movement. Thus typically in a Mendelssohnian movement, the development-recapitulation transition might not be strongly marked, and the recapitulation section would be harmonically or melodically varied so as not to be a direct copy of the opening, exposition, section; this allowed a logical movement towards a final climax. Vitercik summarizes the effect as "to assimilate the dynamic trajectory of 'external form' to the 'logical' unfolding of the story of the theme".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Richard Taruskin wrote that, although Mendelssohn produced works of extraordinary mastery at a very early age,


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: he never outgrew his precocious youthful style. [...] He remained stylistically conservative [...] feeling no need to attract attention with a display of "revolutionary" novelty. Throughout his short career he remained comfortably faithful to the musical status quo – that is, the "classical" forms, as they were already thought of by his time. His version of romanticism, already evident in his earliest works, consisted in musical "pictorialism" of a fairly conventional, objective nature (though exquisitely wrought).


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The young Mendelssohn was greatly influenced in his childhood by the music of both J. S. Bach and C. P. E. Bach, and of Beethoven, Joseph Haydn and Mozart; traces of these composers can be seen in the 13 early string symphonies. These were written from 1821 to 1823, when he was between the ages of 12 and 14, principally for performance in the Mendelssohn household, and not published or publicly performed until long after his death.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: His first published works were his three piano quartets (1822–1825; Op. 1 in C minor, Op. 2 in F minor and Op. 3 in B minor); but his capacities are especially revealed in a group of works of his early maturity: the String Octet (1825), the Overture "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1826), which in its finished form also owes much to the influence of Adolf Bernhard Marx, at the time a close friend of Mendelssohn, and the two early string quartets: Op. 12 (1829) and Op. 13 (1827), which both show a remarkable grasp of the techniques and ideas of Beethoven's last quartets that Mendelssohn had been closely studying. These four works show an intuitive command of form, harmony, counterpoint, colour, and compositional technique, which in the opinion of R. Larry Todd justifies claims frequently made that Mendelssohn's precocity exceeded even that of Mozart in its intellectual grasp.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: A 2009 survey by the BBC of 16 music critics opined that Mendelssohn was the greatest composing prodigy in the history of Western classical music.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's mature symphonies are numbered approximately in the order of publication, rather than the order in which they were composed. The order of composition is: 1, 5, 4, 2, 3. The placement of No. 3 in this sequence is problematic because he worked on it for over a decade, starting the sketches soon after he began work on No. 5 but completing it after both Nos. 5 and 4.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The Symphony No. 1 in C minor for full orchestra was written in 1824, when Mendelssohn was aged 15. This work is experimental, showing the influences of Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. Mendelssohn conducted the symphony on his first visit to London in 1829, with the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society. For the third movement he substituted an orchestration of the Scherzo from his Octet. In this form the piece was a success, and laid the foundations of his British reputation.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: During 1829 and 1830 Mendelssohn wrote his Symphony No. 5, known as the "Reformation". It celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Reformation. Mendelssohn remained dissatisfied with the work and did not allow publication of the score.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's travels in Italy inspired him to compose the Symphony No. 4 in A major, known as the "Italian Symphony". He conducted the premiere in 1833, but did not allow the score to be published during his lifetime, as he continually sought to rewrite it.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The "Scottish Symphony" (Symphony No. 3 in A minor) was written and revised intermittently between 1829 (when Mendelssohn noted down the opening theme during a visit to Holyrood Palace) and 1842, when it was given its premiere in Leipzig, the last of his symphonies to be premiered in public. This piece evokes Scotland's atmosphere in the ethos of Romanticism, but does not employ any identified Scottish folk melodies.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: He wrote the symphony-cantata "Lobgesang" ("Hymn of Praise") in B-flat major, posthumously named Symphony No. 2, to mark the celebrations in Leipzig of the supposed 400th anniversary of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg; the first performance took place on 25 June 1840.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn wrote the concert overture "The Hebrides" ("Fingal's Cave") in 1830, inspired by visits to Scotland around the end of the 1820s. He visited Fingal's Cave, on the Hebridean isle of Staffa, as part of his Grand Tour of Europe, and was so impressed that he scribbled the opening theme of the overture on the spot, including it in a letter he wrote home the same evening. He wrote other concert overtures, notably "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" ("Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt", 1828), inspired by a pair of poems by Goethe and "The Fair Melusine (Die schöne Melusine)" (1830). A contemporary writer considered these works as "perhaps the most beautiful overtures that, so far, we Germans possess".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn also wrote in 1839 an overture to "Ruy Blas", commissioned for a charity performance of Victor Hugo's drama (which the composer hated). His incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Op. 61), including the well-known "Wedding March", was written in 1843, seventeen years after the Overture.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), was written for Ferdinand David. David, who had worked closely with Mendelssohn during the piece's preparation, gave the premiere of the concerto on his Guarneri violin. Joseph Joachim called it one of the four great violin concertos along with those of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruch.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn also wrote a lesser-known, early concerto for violin and strings in D minor (1822); four piano concertos ("no. 0" in A minor, 1822; 1 in G minor, 1831; 2 in D minor, 1837; and 3 in E minor, a posthumously published fragment from 1844); two concertos for two pianos and orchestra (E major, which he wrote at 14 [1823], and A-flat major, at 15 [1824]); and another double concerto, for violin and piano (1823). In addition, there are several single-movement works for soloist and orchestra. Those for piano are the "Rondo Brillante" of 1834, the "Capriccio Brillante" of 1832, and the "Serenade and Allegro Giocoso" of 1838. He also wrote two concertinos ("Konzertstücke"), Op. 113 and 114, originally for clarinet, basset horn and piano; Op. 113 was orchestrated by the composer.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's mature output contains numerous chamber works, many of which display an emotional intensity lacking in some of his larger works. In particular, his String Quartet No. 6, the last of his string quartets and his last major work – written following the death of his sister Fanny – is, in the opinion of the historian Peter Mercer-Taylor, exceptionally powerful and eloquent. Other mature works include two string quintets; sonatas for the clarinet, cello, viola and violin; and two piano trios. For the Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Mendelssohn uncharacteristically took the advice of his fellow composer, Ferdinand Hiller, and rewrote the piano part in a more Romantic, "Schumannesque" style, considerably heightening its effect.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: The musicologist Glenn Stanley observes that "[u]nlike Brahms, unlike his contemporaries Schumann, Chopin and Liszt, and unlike [his] revered past masters...Mendelssohn did not regard the piano as a preferred medium for his most significant artistic statements". Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words" ("Lieder ohne Worte"), eight cycles each containing six lyric pieces (two published posthumously), remain his most famous solo piano compositions. They became standard parlour recital items even during the composer's lifetime, and their overwhelming popularity, according to Todd, has itself caused many critics to underrate their musical value. As example, Charles Rosen equivocally commented, despite noting "how much beautiful music they contain", that "[i]t is not true that they are insipid, but they might as well be." During the 19th century, composers who were inspired to produce similar pieces of their own included Charles-Valentin Alkan (his five sets of "Chants", each ending with a barcarolle) and Anton Rubinstein.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Other notable piano works by Mendelssohn include his "Variations sérieuses", Op. 54 (1841), the "Rondo Capriccioso", the set of six "Preludes and Fugues", Op. 35 (written between 1832 and 1837), and the "Seven Characteristic Pieces", Op. 7 (1827).


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn played and composed for organ from the age of 11 until his death. His primary organ works are the "Three Preludes and Fugues", Op. 37 (1837), and the "Six Sonatas", Op. 65 (1845), of which Eric Werner wrote "next to Bach's works, Mendelssohn's Organ Sonatas belong to the required repertory of all organists".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn wrote some Singspiele for family performance in his youth. His opera "Die beiden Neffen" ("The Two Nephews") was rehearsed for him on his 15th birthday. 1829 saw "Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde" ("Son and Stranger" or "Return of the Roamer"), a comedy of mistaken identity written in honour of his parents' silver anniversary and unpublished during his lifetime. In 1825 he wrote a more sophisticated work, "Die Hochzeit des Camacho" ("Camacho's Wedding"), based on an episode in "Don Quixote", for public consumption. It was produced in Berlin in 1827, but coolly received. Mendelssohn left the theatre before the conclusion of the first performance, and subsequent performances were cancelled.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Although he never abandoned the idea of composing a full opera, and considered many subjects – including that of the Nibelung saga later adapted by Wagner, about which he corresponded with his sister Fanny – he never wrote more than a few pages of sketches for any project. In Mendelssohn's last years the opera manager Benjamin Lumley tried to contract him to write an opera from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" on a libretto by Eugène Scribe, and even announced it as forthcoming in 1847, the year of Mendelssohn's death. The libretto was eventually set by Fromental Halévy. At his death Mendelssohn left some sketches for an opera on the story of the Lorelei.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn's two large biblical oratorios, "St Paul" in 1836 and "Elijah" in 1846, are greatly influenced by J. S. Bach. The surviving fragments of an unfinished oratorio, "Christus", consist of a recitative, a chorus "There Shall a Star Come out of Jacob", and a male voice trio.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Strikingly different is the more overtly Romantic "Die erste Walpurgisnacht" ("The First Walpurgis Night"), a setting for chorus and orchestra of a ballad by Goethe describing pagan rituals of the Druids in the Harz mountains in the early days of Christianity. This score has been seen by the scholar Heinz-Klaus Metzger as a "Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn wrote five settings from "The Book of Psalms" for chorus and orchestra. Schumann opined in 1837 that his version of Psalm 42 was the "highest point that he [Mendelssohn] reached as a composer for the church. Indeed the highest point recent church music has reached at all."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn also wrote many smaller-scale sacred works for unaccompanied choir, such as a setting of Psalm 100, "Jauchzet dem Herrn, alle Welt", and for choir with organ. Most are written in or translated into English. Among the most famous is "Hear My Prayer", whose second half contains "O for the Wings of a Dove", which became often performed as a separate item. The piece is written for full choir, organ, and a treble or soprano soloist. Mendelssohn's biographer Todd comments, "The very popularity of the anthem in England [...] later exposed it to charges of superficiality from those contemptuous of Victorian mores."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: A hymn tune "Mendelssohn" – an adaptation by William Hayman Cummings of a melody from Mendelssohn's cantata "Festgesang" ("Festive Hymn"), a secular 1840s composition, which Mendelssohn felt unsuited to sacred music – has become the standard tune for Charles Wesley's popular Christmas hymn "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn wrote many songs, both for solo voice and for duet, with piano. It has been asserted that from 1819 (when he was 10) until his death there was "scarcely a single month in which he was not occupied with song composition". Many of these songs are simple, or slightly modified, strophic settings. Some, such as his best-known song "Auf Flügeln des Gesanges" ("On Wings of Song"), became popular. The scholar Susan Youens comments "If [Mendelssohn]'s emotional range in lied was narrower than Schubert's, that is hardly surprising: Schubert composed many more songs than Mendelssohn across a wider spectrum", and whilst Schubert had a declared intent to modernize the song style of his day, "[t]his was not Mendelssohn's mission."


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: A number of songs written by Mendelssohn's sister Fanny originally appeared under her brother's name; this may have been partly due to the prejudice of the family, and partly to her own retiring nature. In 1842, this resulted in an embarrassing moment when Queen Victoria, receiving Felix at Buckingham Palace, expressed her intention of singing to the composer her favourite of his songs, "Italien" (to words by Franz Grillparzer), which Felix confessed was by Fanny.


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: During his lifetime, Mendelssohn became renowned as a keyboard performer, both on the piano and organ. One of his obituarists noted: "First and chiefest we esteem his pianoforte-playing, with its amazing elasticity of touch, rapidity, and power; next his scientific and vigorous organ playing [...] his triumphs on these instruments are fresh in public recollection. In his concerts and recitals Mendelssohn performed works by some of his German predecessors, notably Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven and J.S. Bach, whose organ music he brought back into the repertoire "virtually alone".


title: Felix Mendelssohn

text: Mendelssohn admired the grand pianos of the Viennese maker Conrad Graf; he acquired one in 1832 which he used in the family house and recitals in Berlin, and later another for use in Düsseldorf. In private and public performances, Mendelssohn was celebrated for his improvisations. On one occasion in London, when asked by the soprano Maria Malibran after a recital to extemporise, he improvised a piece which included the melodies of all the songs she had sung. The music publisher Victor Novello, who was present, remarked "He has done some things that seem to me impossible, even after I have heard them done." At another recital in 1837, where Mendelssohn played the piano for a singer, Robert Schumann ignored the soprano and wrote "Mendelssohn accompanied like a God."