Lead: This is an exploratory article about music, art and English. It is a personal learning process and experience for your reference.

I read an anecdote about how Mendelssohn revived Bach's music by visiting a pork shop.

Johann sebastian bach, now known as "the father of European music", was a very successful court musician before his death, but after his death, he remained unknown and almost forgotten in the long river of history. It was not until nearly 80 years later that another famous German musician, Felix Mendelssohn, made Bach a celebrity.

The beginning of the story is full of the taste of eating goods:

After this incident, a very famous "Bach Renaissance" appeared in the history of music, the revival of Bach's music art. The beginning of the revival was that Mendelssohn conducted and played Matthew Passion and St. Matthew Passion, which he found in 1829' s butcher shop.

The above story can be summarized as follows: Mendelssohn bought pork and priceless art treasures. Just after watching the meeting, I felt: Wow, artists are good at discovering the beauty in life, which is amazing.

However, although Mendelssohn conducted the performance of The Passion of Matthew at 1829, it is an ironclad fact. Praising him for leading the trend of Bach's revival is of course beyond reproach.

But this story of buying pork, carefully scrutinized, seems to be full of loopholes:

There are too many coincidences in the world-when Mendelssohn went to the pork shop, it happened that the wrapping paper was Bach's manuscript. Later, I asked my boss that I could buy all the wrapping paper just to make up Matthew's passion. Is it another package that the boss has been using before? Waiting for Mendelssohn to arrive? No other guests have bought the same set meal? Isn't there a page missing from it? Why can Mendelssohn collect complete music by himself?

Since there is a problem, you have to check the information.

The first book I found was written by Jim Whiting, a writer who specializes in Bach: The Life and Times of johann sebastian bach. It mentioned:

A butcher shop, a butcher shop.

We can see from here that Bach's works are indeed lost, and some of them may have gone to the pork shop and been used as wrapping paper by the boss-but the loss of the manuscript is true, but it is not necessarily the boss holding the meat stalk, but it can only be regarded as "anecdotal". Strict authors dare to use only one newspaper here, that is, the manuscript is said to be used as wrapping paper.

Someone will say: no, no, how can you draw a conclusion based on a writer's words? Maybe this is just Jim Whiting's personal writing style.

All right, let's keep digging.

Next, the research results of Bach Institute in turek and Bach Institute in turek (note the broken sentence: Bach Institute in turek, although it is Turekba).

I found an academic paper named Bach's World Outlook on the website of this institute, which was written by Rosalyn Tureck of Boston University's Archives Research Center.

In his article, he pointed out that Bach was actually a famous court musician before his death and could only be regarded as a performer. No one thinks that he is a great composer. In addition, in the eyes of people at that time, Bach paid too much attention to the form and structure of music, and even his son said that Bach was a "completely outdated musician" and an old-fashioned "outdated musician".

So Bach was really forgotten by the world for a long time after his death in 1750.

Most of Bach's works have never been officially published, and his manuscripts are scattered around by his sons who don't like his works.

Copper plate, at that time, was still printed with copper plate, which was the copper plate for printing Bach's music.

However, there was a turning point. After all, we all know that "gold always shines". How can such a great musician be completely buried?

No, Mozart and Beethoven, two famous music gods, both loved Bach deeply, and their music works were also influenced by Bach. Unfortunately, these two great men did not let the world notice Bach's talent.

At this moment, another important figure appeared, Carl Friedrich Zelter, a famous German conductor, Sehrt. For the convenience of everyone's memory, let's call him Teacher Cai for the time being.

1820 or so, he is a teacher at the new institute in Berlin. People may not be familiar with his name, but Chilter brought out a famous student-Mendelssohn, the protagonist of today's story.

During school, Teacher Cai often takes her children to learn to sing Bach's songs. Mendelssohn's interest in Bach was cultivated as early as this time.

So Mendelssohn knew Bach's name when he was a teenager and has been learning to sing Bach's songs with his teacher.

From this point of view, when he was twenty years old, he was able to conduct and play The Passion of Matthew, which was a blockbuster, thanks to long-term accumulation, not inspiration from heaven-he found a tune hidden in the wrapping paper in a pork shop and played it as soon as he was interested? Come on, the full version of Matthew's Passion is three and a half hours. Who wants to fix this on a whim?

It's not that I don't believe in prodigies, and I don't object to the beauty and legend in the story, but I prefer to believe in the simple truth of "accumulating wealth and making little money".

But it must be admitted that Mendelssohn's performance is really good. What Mozart and Beethoven failed to do, he did, and he was only 20 years old at that time.

The importance of this performance is mentioned twice in this paper:

Forget, forget.

Look at the effect of this performance, Mendelssohn is simply the savior of Comrade Bach, saving Bach from annihilation. It was because of this sensational performance that Bach returned to the public's sight.

Mendelssohn's "The Passion of Matthew" is like dropping a blockbuster on the world, and its influence can be seen.

About the pork shop, the newspaper did mention:

Another kind of "reporting" can only be "saying".

Moreover, the final collection of complete manuscripts of Bach's works is the result of many scholars' hard search in Europe for many years, but Mendelssohn does not buy pork alone. The manuscript of Matthew's Passion may indeed be scattered in the pork shop, but it takes some effort to collect all the wrapping paper.

Here I want to talk about an episode.

As we mentioned earlier, both Mozart and Beethoven appreciate Bach very much. In fact, Beethoven collected the manuscripts left by Bach while composing the famous Mass "Solemn Mass".

A reporter from the Guardian's classical music column interviewed Roger Norrington, a very famous British conductor. He said:

In b minor, Bach's mass in b minor.

Beethoven, as well as another famous Austrian musician Haydn, got the score of this mass, but none of them collected Matthew's passion.

But this matter has little to do with our theme today, just for fun, so let's share it with you.

Let's look back at this pork stalk.

In the entry of "Early Music Revival" in English Wikipedia, only Mendelssohn's The Passion of Matthew was mentioned about Bach's music revival, but nothing was mentioned about the wrapping paper of pork.

Similarly, in the journal of Bach's oratorio choir, an article entitled "Mendelssohn and Bach's Renaissance" devoted to Bach only mentioned Mendelssohn's conducting performance, but found no story about the pork shop's collection of music scores.

The article also mentioned Berlin Singakademie, who studied music in Mendelssohn, and Berlin Singing Institute (yes, the school where Teacher Cai taught Mendelssohn to sing). Berlin Singing Academy began to teach students Bach's music in the early 1920s from 19, several years earlier than Mendelssohn's large-scale performance from 1829.

In terms of time, it proves once again that Mendelssohn was influenced by Bach for a long time, instead of accidentally discovering Bach's manuscript and then improvising to conduct the Passion of Matthew.

The paper also emphasizes the important role played by Zierdt in Bach's revival:

If it weren't for Childe, Mendelssohn might not have had a chance to contact Bach. Even the performance using music score conducted by Mendelssohn later was prepared with the help of Teacher Cai Erte.

The paper also gives an important historical evidence: Eduard Devrient, a good friend who prepared the performance with Mendelssohn, wrote in his memoirs that he and Mendelssohn had asked the teacher for help in the process of planning the performance.

Unfortunately, Mendelssohn took all the credit later, because Teacher Cai actually opposed the performance.

In Cai's view, these two students are newborn calves and are not afraid of tigers. "The Passion of Matthew" is so religious that a performance takes three or four hours. No one will be interested at all, and it will not succeed.

It seems that the teacher's advice is not necessarily right. The two children insisted on their own opinions and succeeded in one fell swoop, making Bach, a court musician forgotten by the general public for decades, a great god in the music industry.

Research to study, the pork shop incident can not be confirmed, nor can it be falsified. After all, no one has followed Mendelssohn's life for 24 hours, and no one knows whether he has been to a pork shop or whether he has really found the music hidden on the wrapping paper.

But we can be sure of one thing: a large number of scholars and musicians participated in the collection of Bach's manuscripts. Maybe some of these scholars found some manuscripts in a pork shop. As for whether Mendelssohn was one of them and played a key role, we don't know and can't be sure.

But personally, I think a successful performance is definitely not an accident. Mendelssohn must have worked hard and must be a little fan who loves Bach deeply. In the story, it is a bit too dramatic to accompany his wife to buy pork-people know that it is an anecdote circulating in the street and it is impossible to "load it into the official history".

In this article about a pork shop, the author added at the end:

Interestingly, when the author said "first", there was no "then". It seems that a family background alone is not enough to convince us. But this angle is not unreasonable: children of rich people are unlikely to buy their own pork.

On the other hand, whether it is true or not, the legend in the story seems to be more reminiscent of Mendelssohn's significance to Bach's revival. After all, we want to thank this young man for turning Bach from a "niche male god" in the music industry into a "father of music" recognized by everyone.

The reason why we spend so much time exploring and studying is purely out of personal interest, not "counterfeiting". The above views are for your reference only.

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