Contrasts

Tickets will be for general seating.

Out of respect for our guests, our performance is a scent-free environment.

The String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 12, was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1829, completed in London September 14 (though begun in Berlin) and possibly dedicated to Betty Pistor, a neighbor and the daughter of a Berlin astronomer.

By this point, Mendelssohn was already twenty years old, which in today’s society, looking at most twenty-year-olds, seems young and quite wet behind the ears, but remember: Young Felix had an early start. By the time he was twenty, he’d written a dozen string symphonies, his first full symphony, piano quartets, songs for voice and piano, and an opera. In fact, the op. 12 comes right after the first symphony, which is op. 11.

(2023 fugueforthought)

Like so many of his contemporaries, in addition to his professional work as a composer, teacher, administrator and musicologist, Robert Müller-Hartmann (1884-1950) had a broad range of intellectual interests. He enjoyed considerable success in Germany with major conductors like Richard Strauss, Fritz Busch, and Otto Klemperer performing his works. Fired from his post at Hamburg University in 1933, he taught at a Jewish girls’ school before fleeing to England in 1937.

(Simon Wynberg)

In the summer of 1960 Shostakovich's work on the score of a Soviet-East German film took him to Dresden, the German city that had been destroyed in 1945 by an Allied firebombing which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There, in a span of three days, Shostakovich composed a quartet inscribed “In memory of victims of fascism and war.”

Although Shostakovich maintained that he could never hear the Eighth Quartet without breaking into tears, the work is not self-pitying. Rather its genius is that it transcends individual pain to address all human despair. It is this which explains its profundity. The torment that it voices is the tragic, human agony of all those who have experienced grievous loss whether it be due to fascism, war, or personal bereavement. Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet resonates with this bitter universal experience; it is truly 'music written with the heart's blood'; that is why it is a masterpiece of the twentieth century.

(Howard Posner; Stephen Harris)

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Trinity-St. Paul's United Church and Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts, 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada