When the dog barks (Emptying the Desk Drawer #7)

In my last post exploring the connection between a Chopin nocturne and Richard Rodgers' Cinderella, I promised another Rodgers & Hammerstein tune connection. It looks like I first wrote about this on Twitter in August of 2013 (just a few months after the May '13 Cinderella-Chopin connection), although I think I'd felt this one for years before that. It should be pretty obvious how these two tunes are related.

One is a transition theme from Mendelssohn's transcendent Piano Trio in D Minor. The other is....well, hear it for yourself. You'll first have to listen to about 25 seconds of pure Mendelssohn as the wonderful opening cello tune is belted out fully, explored sequentially, and then leads right into that transitional theme. I would say it's one of my favorite things in this trio except just about every page has something exceptional. 

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Again, I can't help but wonder if this music had any influence on Richard Rodgers when he was thinking about frightening barks and bees. Although this melodic figure first drops by 7ths in the violin, when the piano takes it up next, the intervals are almost exactly the same as what Fräulein Maria sings to calm the children. With "My Favorite Things" transposed into the Mendelssohn key here, even the 7th scale degree which isn't immediately raised to G-sharp in Mendelssohn is by the end of its phrase. Here's a quick demo:

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Otherwise, the distinctive rhythmic and melodic motives, treated sequentially in both cases (though with an extra sequential extension in Rodgers), are unmistakably similar.

I'll add two little extensions to this blog post. For one, if we're really emptying all the silliness from the "things I do on social media" desk drawer, might as well pull out this very silly mashup of the finale to Mendelssohn's 5th Symphony "Reformation" with the ABBA song "Mamma Mia." I don't even remember exactly why I made this, and you don't get any fun visuals this time. Just sit back and enjoy the short ride.

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Finally, as a sort of penance for what I've just done, I'm also releasing into the wild my own family performance of the first two movements of Mendelssohn's trio (the very performance to which Maria was added above!). My psychiatrist-cellist wife, then 14-year old violinist daughter (now working on a Chemistry Ph.D.) and I were styling ourselves as Montrieau (which plays on my last name and my wife's French-Canadian last name), though sadly we haven't had that many more chances to perform this way since. We had performed the complete Dvořák "Dumky" trio the year before, but  had much less prep time for my faculty recital in 2013, so we did something I've written about before: we closed the program with only half of the Mendelssohn trio, reversing the order of movements 1 & 2 to make a dramatically satisfying ending.

At the time, I was more concerned about notes that got away (there are a lot of notes), but with the passing of time, I actually find the performances pretty satisfying, if not perfect in balance or execution. So that's Mendelssohn, from the ridiculous to the absurd to the sublime.

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More in this quirky series below:

• The Two Gustavs: Emptying the Desk Drawer #1
• Riding the Railing: Emptying the Desk Drawer #2
• Haydnween: Emptying the Desk Drawer #3
• Bracing Bruckner (Emptying the Desk Drawer #4)
• Carousel Memories (Emptying the Desk Drawer #5)
• Cinderella Chopin (Emptying the Desk Drawer #6)

See also these playlists:

• MMplaying
• MMmusing Recital (9/22/13)
• Classical Mashups