Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Moses Mendelssohn’s youngest daughter was Henriette. Small in stature and deformed, she resembled her father. 92 Henriette followed Abraham to Paris, where she directed a boarding school for young girls. Highly cultured, she counted among her acquaintances Helmina von Chézy (a librettist for Schubert and Weber, and with whom Felix later considered collaborating); Gaspare Spontini, smugly triumphant from his opera La Vestale (1807); Madame de Staël, expelled from France in 1810 for her book about German manners, De l’Allemagne ; and the statesman/novelist Benjamin Constant, who also managed to arouse Napoleon’s displeasure. 93

  Initially offended by her sister Brendel’s conversion to Catholicism, Henriette herself became a devout Catholic in 1812, and assumed the name Maria Henriette, without, Sebastian Hensel reassures us, adapting “any of the disagreeable qualities often seen in converts.” 94 Around this time she met one of Napoleon’s generals, Horace-François Sebastiani, 95 and became the governess of his daughter Fanny. Hensel describes her service in this household until 1824 as a “brilliant misery.” 96 A rich heiress, Fanny Sebastiani was by nature indolent and untalented—and unresponsive to Henriette’s fastidious grooming. The spinsterish governess now lived in opulence and occupied a suite of rooms staffed by servants in an hôtel in the Faubourg St. Honoré, with a view of the Champs Elysées. Here she remained during Napoleon’s regime, penned discreet letters to her Berlin relatives during the early years of the Empire, and reported in July 1815, as the allies advanced for the second time on Paris, “Europe is once more in France.” 97 After Louis XVIII made an inglorious return to Paris “in the baggage of the allies,” Sebastiani arranged an opportunistic match between his daughter and the young Duke de Praslin, “neither rich, agreeable, nor clever,” Henriette noticed, “but … a duke of ancient descent.” 98 After performing her final service, arranging Fanny’s trousseau, in 1825 Henriette returned, escorted by Abraham and Felix, to Berlin. 99 Her misgivings about Fanny’s fiancé proved clairvoyant, for in 1847 the duke became hopelessly smitten by an English governess and murdered his wife. Then, during his trial before the Peers, he committed suicide by taking arsenic and inadvertently helped precipitate the crisis that undermined the reign of Louis-Philippe, the “citizen king.”

  V

  The respectable lives of the Mendelssohn siblings considered thus far contrasted utterly with Brendel’s notorious relationship with Friedrich Schlegel. The eldest child of Moses, she received, like Joseph, an excellent education, and was well versed in literature, drawing, and music. According to one contemporary, she was “trained to a masculine independence of thought and character”; 100 in Sebastian Hensel’s more genteel estimation, her mind “developed to a higher degree than usually falls to the lot of her sex.” 101 But the father’s care in raising her proved a “dangerous gift.” Observing the Jewish custom of the time—for Hensel, an “oriental view of woman as merely a chattel” 102 —Moses selected her husband. At age eighteen, she entered into a loveless marriage with Simon Veit (1754–1819), an irreproachable but dull banker. Brendel fulfilled her needs in the salons of Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin, 103 and organized a weekly Jewish Lecture Society at the Veit home. For sixteen years Brendel endured the marriage and bore two children, the painters Jonas (1790–1854) and Philipp Veit (1793–1877), who later joined the Christian brotherhood of the German Nazarenes in Rome (Philipp was one of four artists commissioned by Jacob Bartholdy to execute the frescoes for the Casa Bartholdy).

  In July 1797 Brendel’s life changed irreversibly when a brilliant, nearly destitute young literary critic arrived in Berlin. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) had half-heartedly studied law before becoming a freelance writer. In his first efforts he committed himself to classicism and decried modern poetry as a chaotic mixture of conflicting impulses. But, Schlegel believed, a new literary age was about to dawn, and he stood ready to develop a radically different theory of poetics. What emerged near the turn to the new century as a dramatic volte -face —Schlegel’s vision of romantic poetry as a “progressive, universal poetry”—was largely elaborated in Berlin, where Schlegel shared a room with Schleiermacher and associated with Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Wackenroder, authors of Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar , 1796), which stimulated a romantic revival of Dürer. At the Berlin salons, the twenty-five-year-old fell madly in love with Brendel Veit, seven years his senior.

  By November 1798 Schlegel was confiding his situation to his schoolmate Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), about to write the early romantic novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801). Brendel had “gradually” become Schlegel’s wife, though in a “civil sense” she was still married to another man 104 (nearly all marriages, Schlegel opined in his thirty-fourth Athenäum Fragment , were but provisional approximations of a true marriage). Within weeks Brendel left Veit and her two sons and moved to the outskirts of Berlin, where she enjoyed assignations with Schlegel. Her family and most acquaintances ostracized her; the novelist Jean Paul Richter dismissed her as a concubine. For support, she relied on Schlegel and a few steadfast friends, including Schleiermacher and Henriette Herz, who defied her husband’s express command to shun Brendel. Remarkably, early in 1799 this social outcast won a divorce and custody of her younger son, Philipp, on the conditions she neither remarry nor change her faith. But an even more extraordinary event transpired that year, when Schlegel published his novel Lucinde , soon recognized as an allegorical account of his illicit relationship with Brendel. Here, veiled as Julius and Lucinde, they preside like a priest and priestess over a religion of idealized spiritual, physical, and emotional love. No continuous narrative thread runs through this (for the time) salacious work, perhaps prompting Wilhelm Dilthey to dismiss it in 1870 as, “aesthetically considered, a little monster.” 105 Among its thirteen parts is a central narrative, flanked by free, arabesque-like passages. Schlegel blends letters, straight narrative, allegory, and literary criticism to create an autobiographical novel that also encompasses the “theory of the allegorical novel.” 106

  In 1799 Friedrich and Brendel moved to Jena, a small university town not far from Weimar, that briefly became the epicenter of early German romanticism. Here they joined Friedrich’s brother, A. W. Schlegel, then completing his German translations of Shakespeare (one later inspired Felix’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture). Other members of the circle included Tieck, Novalis, the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, and A. W. Schlegel’s wife Karoline, who left him to marry Schelling. To support the insolvent Friedrich, Brendel took up writing and published her own novel, Florentin (1801). Suppressing her authorship, Friedrich identified himself on the title page as the editor (Brendel made the compunctious comment that in her prose “the devil too often governed where the dative or accusative should have done”). 107 Like Lucinde , Florentin mixes various genres to create Schlegelian “romantic confusion.” Unlike the unpredictable turns of Lucinde , however, Florentin adheres to a plot that rarely strays from the development of its principal characters, the young, wandering artist Florentin, the fifteen-year-old Juliane, and her mysterious aunt Clementina, a thoroughly musical figure likened to Cecilia, patron saint of music. Before Florentin appeared in print, Brendel began its autobiographical sequel, Camilla , of which a few fragments survive. 108 In contrast to the anti-Catholic sentiments of Florentin , the sequel portrays Camilla as a devout Catholic and reflects Brendel’s deepening attraction to the faith. She abandoned work on it by 1808, when three significant events—her baptism, marriage to Friedrich, and conversion to Catholicism—altered her life yet again.

  Discouraged by his bleak prospects in Jena, Friedrich had moved with Brendel and Philipp in 1802 to Paris. There he studied Persian and Sanskrit, and launched a new periodical, to which she contributed unsigned articles. The couple solicited support from Brendel’s siblings by circulating the rumor that she intended to separate from Friedrich. The ruse failed and further damaged the tenuous relationship with her family. Her brothers, it
seems, were intent upon resisting claims Brendel had on an inheritance from Moses Mendelssohn’s estate. 109 To Schleiermacher she confided: “My brother Abraham is a barbarian without feeling, and is not one hair better than any young Berlin Jew; he only wears finer linen, and possesses a coarser arrogance.” 110 As for Joseph, “my oldest brother is the richest but also the most mean.” 111 Estranged from her family, she decided to convert and on April 6, 1804, became a Protestant. Taking the name Dorothea, she married Friedrich and—as Dorothea Schlegel—finally legitimized her infamous relationship.

  The Schlegels now left France to pursue a peripatetic existence that led them to Cologne. Increasingly drawn to Catholicism, they secretly converted on April 16, 1808. For Friedrich, Protestantism had come to represent the rationalist Enlightenment; by embracing Catholicism, he sought to rediscover the emotional roots of Christianity and reaffirm his intellectual separation from the Enlightenment. For Dorothea, conversion symbolized a further emancipation from her eighteenth-century upbringing and her father’s values.

  Pursued by scandal, Schlegel—revolutionary critic, author of Lucinde , companion of a Jewish divorcée , husband of the Protestant and Catholic Dorothea, and a religious convert—now committed another volte-face : he took up the role of a conservative diplomat. In 1808 the couple moved to Vienna, where Friedrich joined the civil service. Later, and in declining health, he succumbed to visions of grandeur. Assuming a pretense of nobility, he presented himself as Friedrich von Schlegel and with Dorothea pursued the modish quackery of mesmerism (animal magnetism); he even fancied himself a faith healer. Schlegel’s creativity finally exhausted itself in the revision of his collected works, ten volumes of which appeared before he died, insolvent, in 1829.

  Through all these intellectual and spiritual sea changes Dorothea remained faithful to Friedrich. She devoted herself equally to the spiritual well-being of her sons, whom she encouraged to convert to Catholicism in 1810 and thereby delivered another blow to their father, Simon Veit. 112 In 1818 and 1819 Dorothea sojourned in Rome, where she reaffirmed her faith and visited her sons and their artistic brethren, the Nazarenes. 113 After Friedrich’s death, she moved to Frankfurt and lived with Philipp, who became the director of the art institute there. In 1830, after a separation of twenty-six years, she was finally reunited with her sister Henriette and reconciled with her brothers Abraham and Joseph, who supported Dorothea in her later years. 114 Her nephew Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy could not tolerate the Nazarenes’ fanaticism, but he did correspond regularly with Philipp Veit 115 and was especially fond of Dorothea. In a curious twist, when the Lutheran Felix arrived in Frankfurt in 1837 to marry the daughter of a French Huguenot minister, the Catholic Dorothea Schlegel was the only Mendelssohn to attend.

  Part 1

  Precocious Deeds

  Chapter 1

  1809–1819

  In Nebel und Nacht : Hamburg to Berlin

  Maxima debetur puero reverentia .

  The greatest reverence is owed the child.

  —Juvenal, Satires xiv, 47

  When bankers Joseph and Abraham Mendelssohn established Gebrüder Mendelssohn & Co. in 1805, Hamburg was a thriving center of commerce and shipbuilding with a population of some one hundred thousand. It had belonged to the old Hanseatic League and, as a “free city,” was relatively immune to the affairs of neighboring regions. A few decades before the brothers opened their firm, Salomon Heine was pursuing the same profession in Hamburg. At his death in 1844 he left a vast fortune of some forty-one million francs; his silver holdings prompted Heinrich Heine to cavil about “that magically powerful metal of which the uncle often has too much and the nephew too little.” 1

  Though Joseph and Abraham moved in the same social circle as Salomon, who described Abraham as his “best friend,” 2 their business operated for only about six years before the French annexation of the city forced them to return to Berlin. The bank was located on Große Michaelisstraße (No. 71a); their winter residence (No. 14), just behind the Michaeliskirche, was Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s birthplace, a three-story edifice where Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn lived with Joseph, his wife Henriette, and their sons Benjamin and Alexander. 3 Neither building is still extant, though in the nineteenth century the residence inspired the preservation-minded “Swedish nightingale,” Jenny Lind. Distraught when the composer died in 1847, the soprano ceased performing her friend’s music for several years; in 1869 she and her husband, Otto Goldschmidt, placed a commemorative marble tablet above the entrance to No. 14, 4 where it remained until the Nazis removed it in 1936.

  An undated letter from Lea described the newlyweds’ cramped domicile—presumably the two families shared the second and third floors—as lacking in “comfort in the Berlin style” and announced their interest in a country cottage “with a balcony!!! situated on the Elbe close to … Neumühlen.” 5 Known as Martens’ Mill after its former occupant, Daniel Martens, the cottage became the couple’s summer residence in 1805. At the time, Neumühlen was part of Altona, an adjacent Danish community where merchants sold duty-free wares, and where French Huguenots, Dutch Mennonites, and Spanish, Portuguese, and German Jews found tolerance for their faiths. Jews could worship publicly in Altona, in contrast to Hamburg, where owing to a lack of synagogues they observed their faith privately. 6 Abraham’s mother, Fromet, spent her last years in Altona and may have encouraged her sons to move to Hamburg in 1805. 7

  For the next several years, Abraham and Lea divided their domicile between Hamburg and Altona, imitating, albeit modestly, the luxuriant lifestyle of Salomon Heine, who possessed a stately summer house in Altona. 8 Three of their four children were born in Hamburg: Fanny on November 14, 1805, Felix on February 3, 1809, and Rebecka on April 11, 1811. No. 14 Große Michaelisstraße was also the birthplace on June 19, 1810, of Ferdinand David, later Felix Mendelssohn’s concertmaster at the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. The earliest surviving document about any of the children is Abraham’s letter to his mother-in-law of November 15, 1805, announcing Fanny’s arrival and recording Lea’s observation that the matriclinous daughter had “Bach fugal fingers.” 9

  On the day of Fanny’s birth Napoleon entered Vienna, after decisively defeating the Austrians at Ulm. Prussia observed neutrality in the conflict, and Hamburg maintained her independence, so that the port’s merchants were more or less able to pursue unrestricted trading opportunities. But the delicate political equation changed dramatically in July 1806, when Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, sixteen forcibly allied German kingdoms, principalities, and grand duchies. German soil now accommodated a French garrison, provoking the usually lethargic Frederick William III to order a mobilization and demand the dissolution of the Confederation. Instead, on October 14, Napoleon outflanked and routed the ill-prepared Prussian army at Jena, while Marshal Louis Davout decimated a second, numerically superior Prussian force near Auerstädt. Within weeks the emperor established the Continental System, a bid to interdict English trade with the Continent. Henceforth, English subjects and property in French realms were declared prisoners of war and contraband. Though the French lacked the naval supremacy to enforce a blockade, these measures had an immediate impact upon German territories; for Hamburg, the result was devastating. There fortunes had been made from free trade; there fortunes were suddenly lost.

  The sovereignty of Hamburg now yielded to a succession of French regimes, culminating with the arrival in 1811 of Marshal Davout, the dreaded Duke of Auerstädt, who offered to dispatch his own brother on the emperor’s command. In 1810 Napoleon imposed the French Civil Code upon Hamburg and began conscripting citizens into the French navy. Finally, on January 1, 1811, he formally annexed the city as a French territory. Henceforth, Davout proclaimed, the well-being of Hamburg was linked to Napoleon’s fortunes.

  The annexation effectively transformed the city into a smugglers’ den. Blockade-runners practiced a brisk trade, under the corruptible eyes of French officials. How Gebrüder Mendelssohn & Co. far
ed during the early years of the French occupation remains unclear. Among the firm’s Parisian clients was Alexander von Humboldt, who, monitored by the French secret police, was nearly bankrupt after his epic five-year expedition to South and Central America; in 1809, the celebrated geographer received lines of credit from the Mendelssohns to prop up his finances. Abraham and Joseph also participated in the precarious business of insuring goods. Meanwhile, the Berlin branch continued to expand: its international clients of 1806 represented Amsterdam, London, Lyon, Paris, Riga, Warsaw, and Vienna. 10 The brothers’ Parisian banking connections and Berlin family ties strengthened their business (as a member of the Itzig family, Lea Mendelssohn maintained an account producing the considerable yearly income of nearly 7000 thalers). 11

  When Felix was born, the direst effects of the French occupation—including the expulsion of 25,000 Hamburgers before the Russian siege of the city in 1813—were yet to be felt. Nevertheless, according to Jules Benedict, the infant Felix “indicated his strong dislike to the sound of brass instruments and military music, while he listened with fixed attention to anything of a softer and more refined character.” 12 The earliest reference to Felix occurs in a letter of May 2, 1809 from Lea to her cousin Henriette von Pereira Arnstein in Vienna: “Tomorrow my little son will be three-months old; he is a nice little lad and promises to be more pretty than Fanny”—an allusion to a slight orthopedic deformity of Fanny, a trait inherited from her grandfather. 13 As for Fanny, Lea reported that at age three-and-a-half, she was reading her letters plainly and constructing phrases correctly, with purpose and clarity. 14