As musi­cal genius­es go, you don’t get much more genius than Felix Mendelssohn. Born into a wealthy Jew­ish fam­i­ly in Ham­burg in 1809, Felix was deeply involved in music from an ear­ly age; by the time he was four­teen, he had writ­ten twelve string sym­phonies. In 1821 his piano teacher, Carl Zel­ter, intro­duced the eleven year old Felix to the writer Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe, who was then in his sev­en­ties. Goethe was great­ly impressed by him, lead­ing to a mem­o­rable con­ver­sa­tion between Goethe and Zel­ter com­par­ing Felix with the young Mozart, whom Goethe had also wit­nessed, many years before:

“Musi­cal prodigies…are prob­a­bly no longer so rare; but what this lit­tle man can do in extem­po­ris­ing and play­ing at sight, bor­ders the mirac­u­lous, and I could not have believed it pos­si­ble at so ear­ly an age.”

“And yet you heard Mozart in his sev­enth year at Frank­furt?” said Zel­ter.

“Yes”, answered Goethe, “…but what your pupil already accom­plish­es, bears the same rela­tion to the Mozart of that time that the cul­ti­vat­ed talk of a grown-up per­son bears to the prat­tle of a child.”

The grown-up Mendelssohn had a good friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor in vio­lin vir­tu­oso and com­pos­er, Fer­di­nand David. The two had met as late teenagers in the late 1820s in Berlin where Felix was already an accom­plished com­pos­er and Fer­di­nand was a vio­lin­ist in the orches­tra at the Königsstädtis­ches The­atre. In a remark­able coin­ci­dence, it was dis­cov­ered that the two had been born in the exact same house in Ham­burg, a year apart!

A few years lat­er, in the sum­mer of 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend: “I should like to write a vio­lin con­cer­to for you next win­ter. One in E minor runs through my head, the begin­ning of which gives me no peace.” In the end, it took him anoth­er six years to com­plete it, reg­u­lar­ly con­sult­ing David about vio­lin tech­nique. Ever the per­fec­tion­ist, Mendelssohn con­tin­u­al­ly made minor adjust­ments to the con­cer­to, right up to its pre­miere in Leipzig on March 13, 1845. The con­cer­to became an instant clas­sic and remains one of the cor­ner­stones of the reper­toire, being the most fre­quent­ly per­formed vio­lin con­cer­tos in his­to­ry.

So I give you Felix Mendelssohn’s Vio­lin Con­cer­to in E minor, Op. 64, per­formed by Ray Chen and the Gothen­burg Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, and if you can free up the twen­ty nine min­utes required to wal­low in its total glo­ry, you will find it a worth­while expe­ri­ence, believe me.