ABSTRACT
Three great composers, almost exactly contemporaneous with each other, wrote most of their short piano pieces during the height of the piano's popularity in the 1830s and 1840s: Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. This chapter examines some of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, and some of Chopin's shorter pieces. The depth of Mendelssohn's commitment to the older style of song writing is revealed in his letter—written in 1847, the year of his death—to a daughter of the composer J. F. Reichardt. Mendelssohn had taken part in a concert that included two Reichardt songs, including the duet "Das Veilchen." The most original of Mendelssohn's rhythmic practices in the Songs without Words is a technique, used most often in compound meters, in which two different patterns of the same meter are placed in conflict with each other.
