Rilling Brings Mendelssohn’s Lost Uncle to America

After 180 years, he's coming to America: The Uncle from Boston.

That’s the title of a comic opera composed by Felix Mendelssohn at age 14, and one never publicly performed–at least until last October 3, when Helmuth Rilling capped its discovery with a belated world premiere in Essen, Germany.

Royce Saltzman, executive director of the Oregon Bach Festival, confirmed this week that the opera would receive its American premiere in a concert version July 3 at the 2005 festival in Eugene with Rilling conducting.

The Festival’s artistic director, Rilling has earned his reputation as a Bach expert, but he has always had a special interest in Mendelssohn. The composer was a key figure in the Bach revival of the 1820s, and in the Germany of Rilling’s youth, Mendelssohn, as a Jew, was disregarded.

Rilling’s pursuit led him to the Berlin state library, where Mendelssohn’s handwritten score rested undisturbed.

He examined it out of curiosity, but what he found was stunning—a 250-page work that in its scope, structure, and technique belies the composer’s age and rivals that of Mozart’s early operas. On par with the composer’s beloved Midsummer Night’s Dream, the opera, in Rilling’s opinion, elevates Mendelssohn’s status as a key figure in the era of Romanticism.

Music critics at the Essen premiere agreed:
Mendelssohn writes with “striking assurance” with “bewitching woodwind passages” and “sometimes dares the extraordinary,” said Die Zeit.

“The exhumation and preparation of this charming, inventive, and expressive work was worth all the effort,” asserted the Essen Neue Ruhr Zeitung.

“A fresh, effervescent piece,” indicated Die Welt that “will serve graciously as a footnote to the history of music.”

“A brilliant performance to storms of applause,” noted the German press agency DPA.

Mendelssohn drew on a libretto written 50 years earlier by Johann Ludwig Caspar. While its title refers to the American Revolution, its action takes place in Brandenburg, where two young lovers engage in deceits and entanglements to hide their romance from their visiting uncle.

“The usual kind of silliness,” Rilling mused, “but with fantastic music.”

The Uncle From Boston uses a full chorus, orchestra, and seven soloists, though it likely was scaled down for its only previous performance, at the Mendelssohn home in Berlin for the composer’s 15th birthday.

Tickets to the American premiere in Eugene go on sale March 22, 2005.