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Advent with Mendelssohn
November 29, 2017 @ 6:00 pm – December 13, 2017 @ 6:30 pm
Join us on three successive Wednesdays: November 29th, December 6th, and December 13th, for brief, quiet, meditative worship services during the season of Advent. The music of Felix Mendelssohn – an 19th century Lutheran composer – will be featured as we focus on the coming of the Lord into the world and the miracle of his birth as a real human being.
Take a mid-week break from the hectic holiday schedule and spend some time in God’s Word!
Worship starts at 6pm and lasts for a little over 30 minutes.
A little more about Felix Mendelssohn with excerpts from Britannica.com:
Felix was born of Jewish parents, Abraham and Lea Salomon Mendelssohn, from whom he took his first piano lessons. Though the Mendelssohn family was proud of their ancestry, they considered it desirable in accordance with 19th-century liberal ideas to mark their emancipation from the ghetto by adopting the Christian faith. Accordingly, Felix, together with his brother and two sisters, was baptized in 1816 as a Lutheran. In 1822, when his parents were also baptized, the entire family adopted the surname Bartholdy, following the example of Felix’s maternal uncle, who had chosen to adopt the name of a family farm.
Mendelssohn was an extremely precocious musical composer. He wrote numerous compositions during his boyhood, among them 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concerti, sonatas, and fugues. Most of these works were long preserved in manuscript in the Prussian State Library in Berlin but are believed to have been lost in World War II. He made his first public appearance in 1818—at age nine—in Berlin.
Mendelssohn also became active as a conductor. On March 11, 1829, at the Singakademie, Berlin, he conducted the first performance since Bach’s death of the St. Matthew Passion, thus inaugurating the Bach revival of the 19th century.
Some of his more famous works are: an oratorio on the prophet Elijah, “Songs without Words,” a musical score on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and a number of symphonies. Felix also wrote a lesser known symphony based on “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” called the Reformation Symphony that was in tribute to the faith he and his family held dear.