Deformed Beauty?

Abstract

The last of Felix Mendelssohn’s series of popular and influential concert overtures, the Overture to the Tale of the Fair Melusina of 1835 remains the least familiar of these works. It is also the most unusual with regard to formal design in its purposeful confounding of introduction and sonata-form elements alongside the dialogic relation of clearly gendered thematic materials. Such calculated ‘deformation’ of classic and early Romantic sonata form has been understood as a means of generating a kind of musical-narrative content, though the precise relation of formal experiment to such narrative content has remained elusive. This chapter reconsiders the problematic relation of experimental formal procedure to the narrative dimension and the role this may have played in the composer’s subsequent abandonment of the quasi-programmatic concert overture genre, despite his unparalleled artistic success in the field.