Mendelssohn and Moscheles: Two Composers, Two Pianos, Two Scores, One Concerto

Abstract

On 22 June 1860, some twelve and a half years after Felix Mendelssohn's death, Ignaz Moscheles attended an informal evening of music at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music, where he was a professor of piano. During this performance, two of his students, a Fraulein Schilling and a Fraulein Schwalbe, played the Mendelssohn Concerto in E Major for Two Pianos and Orchestra.1 Moscheles noted the event in his diary and in an inscription he scribbled on the cover of a manuscript copy of the concerto that he himself had written out some years earlier, which his students used for this performance.2 (See Fig. 1, the first page of the autograph of this Mendelssohn concerto,3 and Figs. 2 and 3, the cover and first page of Moscheles's copy of the concerto). It would be nearly a century before another performance of the E-Major Concerto occurred. Like most of Mendelssohn's other juvenile works, it escaped the Breitkopf & Hartel collected edition4 and remained unpublished until Karl-Heinz K6hler edited a heavily revised