An Unfinished Piano Concerto by Mendelssohn

Abstract

AS a composer of concertos, Mendelssohn is remembered today for his Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64, of 1844, two piano concertos, Opera 25 and 40 from 1831 and 1837, and a few shorter concert pieces for piano and orchestra. The appearance of the first few volumes of the new Leipzig Mendelssohn edition has focused renewed attention on four early concertos from the 1820s, two in D minor for violin, and violin and piano, and two in A flat and E major for two pianos.' Quite unknown in the Mendelssohn literature, however, is an incomplete piano concerto in E minor, which survives in a bound volume of Mendelssohn autograph miscellany in the Margaret Deneke Mendelssohn Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Bearing the shelfmark b. 5, fols. 88-100, the concerto comprises six loose bifolios and one separate folio measuring roughly 9 x 12. On these are recorded thirteen pages of piano score for the first and second movements and nine pages of incomplete orchestral score for the first movement. Though unsigned and undated, the manuscript bears in the upper right corner of the first page the letters H.D.m., an abbreviation for Hilf Du mir, which Mendelssohn habitually inscribed when beginning a new composition (see Plate I). The handwriting is without doubt that of Mendelssohn, as a cursory comparison with signed autographs quickly attests.2