Sietze de Vries (Netherlands)

Cultural consciousness permeates the work of many representatives of romanticism in music. Musicians follow the traditions of their predecessors, re-evaluate them and present the listener with unusual and at times even unexpected “innovative clothing”. the work of the most important baroque era figure – Johann Sebastian Bach – exerted a tremendous influence on the development of composition schools of subsequent ages. First and foremost, that fact that he turned to the organ, an instrument without which it is impossible to imagine German culture and to an extent German history itself, links Johann Sebastian Bach’s music to that of representatives of German (Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Max Reger) and Hungarian (Franz Liszt) musical culture. Johann Sebastian Bach’s works have been studied by composers to the greatest degree imaginable. Raised on the genres, forms and principles of polyphonic composition, these composers aimed to come close to Bach’s ideal.
The organ and organ music, initially connected with spiritual matters, even today retain that position. Only in comparison with “Bach’s organ”, with the romantics it was not only performed in churches during services in but came to be a concert instrument too.
Anna Kolenkova

The organ works of Felix Mendelssohn formed part of a powerful course of the uninterrupted German organ tradition. From his youngest years, this composer and performer had been drawn by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, of which he had a superb knowledge. It was thanks to Mendelssohn’s publishing activities that contemporaries were able to discover the music of the great German maestro (it is to Mendelssohn that we owe the renaissance of the brilliant St Matthew Passion in concert). The composer himself was a concert organist. His music was particularly admired in Great Britain, where he gave concerts at St Paul’s Cathedral, Christ Church and Westminster Abbey in London as well as in Birmingham. Having absorbed the baroque organ tradition, Mendelssohn gave his works a “flavour” of the Romantic era. Only his Preludes and Fugues (Op. 37, 1838) and Sonatas (Op. 65, 1845) were published. Other compositions for organ existed only in manuscript form. For a long time it was believed that several of them were lost. Quite recently in Kraków two manuscript notebooks were found that contained pieces by the young Mendelssohn.