Still, even in English-speaking realms, a good bit of twentieth-century discourse about Mendelssohn reflected distinctly negative judgments. Thus, in 1938 Gerald Abraham de-legitimized Mendelssohn’s oeuvre as a “shady half-brotherhood of romanticism and neoclassicism,” and found the Scottish Symphony to symbolize “only too well the course of its composer’s career: the brief touch of inspired romanticism at the beginning followed by a dreary waste of mere sound-manipulation, relieved only by the oasis of the light-handed scherzo, and ending in a blaze of sham triumph.” 7 Philip Radcliffe’s 1954 biography, on the whole a sympathetic account of the composer, still labored under the encumbered critical reaction against Mendelssohn—thus we read that a theme from the Reformation Symphony is “spoilt by a touch of self-consciousness,” there is little in Ruy Blas “that can be called tragic at all,” the songs are “liable to cloy in too large quantities,” Saul’s rage aria in St. Paul leaves “an impression of rather ineffectual bluster,” and Elijah is only “worthy at least of respect and sometimes of more.” 8 Even Eric Werner’s substantial 1963 biography, a major post–World War II effort to rehabilitate the composer’s image, occasionally repeated the familiar criticisms. For Werner, St. Paul was stylistically so uneven that “probably only parts of it can be rescued for the concert hall or for church music”; the Ruy Blas Overture “scarcely sounds the tragic note”; and the Second Piano Concerto is “hardly worthy of [Mendelssohn’s] name,” but perilously close to the “French salon composers” he despised. 9 It is, as Leon Botstein has noted perceptively, “as if the aesthetic of Wagnerian criticism, shorn of its evident political and racist content, still reigns.” 10 Indeed, George R. Marek’s biography of 1972, geared toward a popular audience, unwittingly perpetuated stereotypes of the composer as one who evinced mansuetude and effeminateness—notions that ultimately may trace their ancestry to Wagner’s notorious 1850 critique—through the title, Gentle Genius: The Story of Felix Mendelssohn .
The unusual trajectory of the Mendelssohn reception—a high plateau reached during his lifetime and reinforced by a cult of hero worship after his early death, then a vertiginous descent, and finally, in the latter twentieth century, rebounding efforts at rehabilitation—could form the subject of a separate monograph. A sketch of its outlines would begin with the demonstrably public outpouring of grief in Germany and abroad at his death in 1847 and the elaborate memorial ceremonies on a scale usually reserved for eminent figures of state, the position of honor accorded Mendelssohn’s music at the concerts of the Crystal Palace 11 and the establishment in England of a Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1856, offering study abroad (especially at the Leipzig Conservatory), the first recipient of which was Arthur Sullivan. The monograph would continue with the remarkable process of idealization that crystallized in the memoirs of the composer’s circle, including the two-volume account compiled from his letters by his nephew Sebastian Hensel, Die Familie Mendelssohn (1879)—still an indispensable basis of research—which remembered the Mendelssohns as an upstanding, fully assimilated, upper middle-class German family of the Vormärz, the post-Napoleonic period of political conservatism before the outbreak of revolution in March 1848.
Other accounts, notably the freely embroidered Erinnerungen (1868) of Elise Polko (née Vogel), who sang for Mendelssohn in Leipzig during the 1840s, moved the genre of Mendelssohn biography into the realm of fiction, a process furthered by the unusually durable roman à clef of Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester (three volumes, 1853), which transformed Mendelssohn into Seraphael, a divinely inspired musician of “unperverted Hebrew ancestry” who dies at an early age and becomes a martyr to the cause of art. 12 English (and American) readers willingly tolerated Sheppard’s “frequently mawkish and febrile” prose, so that Charles Auchester remained in print well into the twentieth century. 13
Three years before its appearance, in a Germany seething with revolutionary ferment, a polemical article appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , the Leipzig journal Robert Schumann had founded in 1834. Attributed to Freigedank (“free thinker”), “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Judaism in Music”) was written by Richard Wagner, who at mid-century hid behind a veil of anonymity to launch a scurrilous anti-Semitic diatribe against the Jewish element in German music. 14 Because of his political activities in Dresden during 1848, Wagner had fled to Switzerland, where the expatriate developed revolutionary essays about the future course of German music. Franz Brendel, the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift , who had replaced Schumann in 1845 and lectured in music history at the Leipzig Conservatory, somehow welcomed “Das Judenthum in der Musik” as consistent with the journal’s new agendum—to promote the politically “liberal,” Neudeutsche “school” of Wagner and Liszt. Mendelssohn’s music, now identified with the old political order, came in for heavy criticism. Brendel himself led the attack, though without overt reference to Mendelssohn’s Jewishness, in an 1845 serial essay that compared him to Robert Schumann; Brendel found their music incongruent with the expectations of the new age—Mendelssohn’s because of its conspicuously retrospective, formalist character. 15
This critique paled in comparison to Wagner’s racist tirade, which opened with an elaboration of why the German people felt an instinctive revulsion to Jews, dismissed by Wagner as a foreign race, lacking its own legitimate language, that could survive only by superficially imitating European art. 16 Midway in the essay “the early departed” Mendelssohn was singled out: as the most visible figure of this process, he had aped the formal complexities of Bach’s music, admittedly in the “most interesting and astonishing” way, but had failed to penetrate the “human” spirit of the most important modern composer, Beethoven. Mendelssohn, Wagner wrote, “has shown us that a Jew can possess the richest measure of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture, the loftiest, most tender sense of honor, without even once through all these advantages being able to bring forth in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect we expect from music.…” Mendelssohn’s music lacked originality and passion; it was, for all purposes, impotent.
While Wagner was planting the seeds of a virulent strain of Mendelssohn reception, the British continued to celebrate the life and music of a composer who had visited London ten times between 1829 and 1847, and placed an indelible stamp on Victorian musical culture. In 1858 a state event occurred that legitimized his adoption as a Victorian. On January 25, the Princess Royal, Vicky, married Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Place, to the strains of the Wedding March from the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Composed in 1843 to celebrate the nuptials of Shakespeare’s Theseus and Hippolyta, Mendelssohn’s music now honored an English-German royal alliance and inaugurated a custom that would touch the lives of untold millions. Mendelssohn’s delicate projection of musical fairyland in the other movements of his incidental music—his elevation of the “fanciful” as an aesthetic category—may well have helped stimulate the vogue of Victorian fairy paintings and illustrations that began to take hold in the 1840s and endured until the early twentieth century, when Edwardian manners challenged the need for folklore and belief in the supernatural. A significant proportion of Victorian fairy images treated subjects drawn from or related to Shakespeare’s play, given new resonance by the English premiere of Mendelssohn’s music in 1844. 17
When, between 1879 and 1889, the first edition of Sir George Grove’s landmark Dictionary of Music and Musicians appeared, Mendelssohn’s place in English music history seemed secure. In addition to writing the entries for Beethoven and Schubert, Grove lavished on Mendelssohn a major article painstakingly researched in Berlin and Leipzig, where Grove interviewed family members and the composer’s friends, and examined the autographs meticulously bound in the more than forty green volumes of what became the Mendelssohn Nachlass in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. Grove’s work set an unusually high standard for the musical scholarship of the time, and provided a firm foundation for Mendelssohn r
esearch. There is little doubt that in Grove’s conception of the European canon Mendelssohn occupied an honored position; yet Grove closed his article with this defense of the man, intended, it seems, for detractors who would accuse him of superficiality: “It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow.” 18
Nevertheless, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century increasingly disparaging English voices were being heard. Early in 1889, the new music critic of the London Star , George Bernard Shaw, later Wagner’s apologist in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), likened Mendelssohn to the musical Tennyson of the century and denied the composer greatness of the first magnitude: “We now see plainly enough that Mendelssohn, though he expressed himself in music with touching tenderness and refinement, and sometimes with a nobility and pure fire that makes us forget all his kid glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering, was not in the foremost rank of great composers. He was more intelligent than Schumann, as Tennyson is more intelligent than Browning: he is, indeed, the great composer of the century for all those to whom Tennyson is the great poet of the century.” 19 Shaw revived Wagner’s (and Brendel’s) earlier line of attack, that Mendelssohn was a pedantic formalist (“The fugue form is as dead as the sonata form; and the sonata form is as dead as Beethoven himself. Their deadliness kills Mendelssohn’s St. Paul and the ‘regular’ movements in his symphonies and chamber music”). Shaw reinforced a view of Mendelssohn as effeminate, which gained currency as the century came to a close, perhaps no more vividly than in Aubrey Beardsley’s dainty caricature published in The Savoy in December 1896, in which the dandified composer appears with feminized curled hair and delicate shoes, and brandishes a plumed pen. 20
Apart from Wagner’s venomous prose, probably nothing harmed Mendelssohn’s posthumous reputation more than the early twentieth-century critique of Victorianism. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), which mercilessly discredited four late Victorians (Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, General Gordon of Khartoum, and Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby), is often viewed as firing the opening salvos of this reaction. But, as Michael Mason has suggested, an “increasingly explicit distaste for the 1830s and 1840s was certainly a preparatory step, in the first decade or so of [the twentieth] century, towards fullfledged anti-Victorianism. . . .” 21 Samuel Butler’s trenchant indictment of Victorian society, The Way of All Flesh (written between 1873 and 1885 but published posthumously in 1903) provoked a reexamination and rejection of earlier Victorian values—Butler targeted Mendelssohn in two chapters, including the final one, where Ernest Pontifex, professing not to like “modern” music, converses with Miss Skinner, whom he imagines says, “as though it were an epitaph: STAY /I MAY PRESENTLY TAKE /A SIMPLE CHORD OF BEETHOVEN /OR A SMALL SEMIQUAVER /FROM ONE OF MENDELSSOHN’S SONGS WITHOUT WORDS .” It was an easy step to associate Mendelssohn with those Victorian attributes from which the new century tried to distance itself—shallowness, hypocrisy, prudishness, and all the rest. And so, by 1911, for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , Donald F. Tovey felt compelled to update the reprinted, eulogizing Mendelssohn article from the tenth edition by W. S. Rockstro, a student of the composer in Leipzig during the 1840s, by noting that “Mendelssohn’s reputation, except as the composer of a few inexplicably beautiful and original orchestral pieces, has vanished.…” 22
The dual critiques of Wagner and the anti-Victorian reaction, which generated stereotypes about the composer that have proven difficult to dislodge, account for much of Mendelssohn’s precipitous fall from grace. And yet, each critique readily betrays its flaws. In Wagner’s case, the anti-Semitic bias is clear enough. If, for the sake of argument, we set aside his vituperative agendum—admittedly impossible, owing to his inextricable weaving of racist arguments into the criticism of Mendelssohn’s music—what separated the two composers were two distinctly opposed worldviews. Wagner identified musical “progress” with the “absolute” revolutionary “triumph” of 1848 over the past and its obsolete political order, of course an event Mendelssohn did not live to see. In contrast, during the Vormärz, Mendelssohn developed what Leon Botstein has termed “an aesthetic of creative restoration; a search for historic models; a backward glance tempered by a modern taste for the subjective, emotional, poetic voice of romanticism.” 23 For Wagner the future of German music lay in the music drama, closely bound up with German nationalism and aspirations toward unification. He saw Mendelssohn, a member of an elite Jewish family, as belonging to the “antirevolutionary defenders and beneficiaries of the pre-March social order who . . . sought to falsify the past . . . and prettify their surroundings and thereby deny the deeper political and social realities and national possibilities.” 24 In reality, despite his family’s wealth, Mendelssohn was no blind supporter of Frederick William IV’s absolute monarchy but a liberal sympathetic to middle-of-the-road policies. There is little doubt that, like many of his countrymen, Mendelssohn yearned for reforms leading to a constitutional monarchy, even though his political views were doubtless not radical enough for Wagner. To invalidate Mendelssohn’s music through a kind of political litmus test, to consign his music summarily to the dust heap of the pre-revolutionary German order, is prima facie problematic.
In a similar way, the idea of Mendelssohn as a superficial, effeminate Victorian cannot stand. In recent decades, our construction of the Victorians has been fundamentally challenged by fresh interpretations, including Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud , and probing readings by Michael Mason (The Making of Victorian Sexuality , 1995) and, most recently, Matthew Sweet (Inventing the Victorians , 2001), who has thrown down a veritable cultural gauntlet: “Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong. That, in the century which has elapsed since 1901, we have misread their culture, their history, their lives—perhaps deliberately, in order to satisfy our sense of ourselves as liberated Moderns.” 25 In a systematic exposé, Sweet debunks the familiar stereotypes about the Victorians that accumulated in the twentieth century. We can profitably extend his corrective to our forming, postmodern views of Mendelssohn. The tenacious idea of Mendelssohn as an overly sentimental composer probably has more to do with layers of interpretations that accrued to his music and biography after his death than any intrinsic quality of his music. Thus, the piano miniatures that became celebrated in middle-class parlors as the “Songs without Words,” the vast majority of which Mendelssohn published without specific titles, acquired from their publishers in the second half of the nineteenth century all manner of insipid titles—“Consolation,” “May Breezes,” and the like—titles that Mendelssohn never would have authorized but that ultimately reinforced the view of him as a purveyor of maudlin piano music.
The persistent idea of Mendelssohn as a genteel lightweight, whose refined music buckled beneath the dramatic cogency of Beethoven’s or elephantine mass of Wagner’s scores, also requires reassessment. We may yet realize that imposing a Beethovenian or Wagnerian yardstick on Mendelssohn does an injustice to his music. The essentially dramatic model of the Fifth Symphony and Wagner’s revolutionary theories about music drama do not fit Mendelssohn’s music, but not because of its intrinsic inferiority. It is not that Mendelssohn could not write dramatic music—stretches of St. Paul, Elijah , and the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht prove otherwise. Rather, Mendelssohn’s aesthetic was broad enough to admit other models as viable avenues of exploration. Several of his scores—the Hebrides and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overtures, the Italian and Scottish Symphonies, for example—seem inspired more by a synaesthetic blending of the visual and musical, and by highlighting the painterly attributes of music than by elucidating a dramatic narrative. Mendelssohn excelle
d in understatement, chiaroscuro, and nuance, and in subtle, coloristic orchestration that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. And as for Mendelssohn’s “excessive” reliance on history, his music concerns exploring the continuity of the European musical tradition more than celebrating its rupture. As a result, Mendelssohn’s music constantly mediates between the past and present: his revival of Bach and Handel—and his attempt to reconcile the classic-romantic dichotomy by overlaying onto richly expressive music the classical attributes of poise, balance, and clarity—has much to do with restoring and preserving, in an age Schumann decried for its philistinism, timeless values drawn from the exemplars of the past.
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 2