Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Whatever the reality of Felix’s life in 1819, there can be little doubt that the Mendelssohns’ high standing in Berlin society partially insulated them from the political tremors. When news of the banning of Jahn’s athletes reached Abraham, he reacted, “I hope the prohibition of gymnastics will not extend to our innocent place.” 140 For the moment, Felix could pursue his education largely sheltered from a changing world; for the moment, Felix’s surroundings, including the conservative musical arena of figured bass and Bach chorales, were secure. In this environment the fledgling wunderkind would take flight.

  Chapter 2

  1820–1821

  Apprenticed Prodigy

  … a genius can curl the bristles of a pig.

  —Zelter 1

  Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, in an explosion of precocity, Felix produced well over a hundred compositions, a quantity no less astonishing than its variety—keyboard and chamber works, symphonies, concerti, Lieder, sacred choruses, and operas. When the first collected edition of Felix’s music appeared during the 1870s, most of these efforts, judged stylistically jejune, were excluded. 2 But the launching of a second edition a century later refocused interest on Felix’s apprenticeship, and several early works, including concerti, the twelve string symphonies, and the Singspiel Die beiden Pädagogen , appeared during the 1960s and 1970s, opening new windows into Felix’s formative years. 3 Still, much of this music awaits publication. To the biographer, it reveals a musical diary of a prodigy comparable to precious few European composers.

  Zelter scrupulously oversaw Felix’s apprenticeship of bursting creativity. Scarcely less industrious was Fanny, who completed her thirty-second fugue by December 1824; the siblings, Zelter reported to Goethe, were like diligent bees gathering nectar. 4 But Fanny’s parents never imagined she would entertain serious musical aspirations, and it fell to Abraham to temper her enthusiasm. From Paris he wrote in July 1820, as Felix was crafting fugues and beginning his third piano sonata:

  Music will perhaps become his profession, while for you it can and must only be an ornament [Zierde ], never the root [Grundbaß ] of your being and doing. We may therefore pardon him some ambition and desire to be acknowledged in a pursuit which appears very important to him,… while it does you credit that you have always shown yourself good and sensible in these matters; … Remain true to these sentiments and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex. 5

  Fanny was thus to hang musical ornaments, not build a foundation (Grundbaß , a pun on Kirnberger’s fundamental bass). While her brother essayed increasingly ambitious compositions, she chose piano pieces and songs—the smaller, intimate genres of domestic music making associated with the feminine. In particular, her songs (seventy-four date from 1820 to 1823) earned parental approval. Pampering Abraham’s Francophilia, Fanny preferred the verses of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–1794), who had specialized in pastorals and fables derived from Cervantes and Aesop. Typically strophic, Fanny’s settings evince a lyrical melodic gift and a certain “lightness and naturalness,” 6 thereby approaching Abraham’s ideal of the feminine musical decoration. In contrast, Felix wrote few songs during this period, and set only one of Fanny’s Florian texts, about Jeanette, who would choose a shepherd over a king. A rapprochement with Fanny’s musical world, Pauvre Jeanette (ca. March 1820 7 ) momentarily bridged the gender gap between the siblings’ musical ambitions, as Felix adopted Fanny’s tuneful, chordal style to produce a simple folksonglike setting that utterly obscured his devotion to Bach’s fugues.

  I

  By December 1819 Felix was preoccupied with chorale harmonizations. The exercise book contains several melodies in Zelter’s unrefined hand for which Felix devised a figured-bass line and filled in the alto and tenor parts (Fanny received similar instruction around this time 8 ). The next step was to decorate the note-against-note exercises with flowing eighth-note embellishments. Zelter included three examples of a more specialized technique, derived from Kirnberger, in which the chorale melody migrated to the alto, tenor, or bass. Finally, Zelter allowed Felix himself to compose and harmonize several melodies to verses of the Leipzig poet C. F. Gellert (1715–1769).

  Largely neglected today, Gellert was a widely read figure of the German Enlightenment who produced fables, sentimental comedies, and the devotional Geistliche Oden und Lieder (Sacred Odes and Songs , 1757), designed, while sung to popular chorales, to elevate awareness of the religious sublime. 9 Moses Mendelssohn held Gellert in high regard, and Haydn reportedly favored him above all other authors. Several composers—J. F. Doles and Quantz in the eighteenth century, and J. F. W. Kühnau and M. G. Fischer in the nineteenth—created new tunes for these poems, while others set them as a cappella canons (Haydn) or solo Lieder (C. P. E. Bach and Beethoven). Felix’s assignment proved challenging: more often than not, his chorale phrases are melodically stale (some he recycled from earlier exercises), and his cadences are not always harmonically compelling. But the childhood efforts later bore fruit: several of Felix’s mature works contain free chorales, which thus evolved from the modest Gellert chorales to become a compositional device. 10

  Late in March 1820 Zelter began to initiate Felix, barely eleven years old, into strict counterpoint, for centuries the domain of learned musicians. The first topic was double counterpoint at the octave, which Kirnberger had explicated in the conclusion of Die Kunst des reinen Satzes . Felix mastered the technique by writing two-part inventions à la Bach, in which the parts are periodically exchanged. Next Felix took up two-part canon, including the esoteric diminution and augmentation canons, in which one voice replicates the other at twice or half the speed. These musical conundrums reflected Zelter’s own training under Fasch. Probably by the end of May 1820, Felix was analyzing fugal subjects and negotiating the thicket of rules governing “real” (literally transposed) and “tonal” (adjusted) answers in fugal expositions. Since Kirnberger’s massive tome omitted canon and fugue, Zelter now drew upon Marpurg’s Die Abhandlung von der Fuge (Essay on the Fugue ), which in 1754 had unraveled Bach’s most cerebral contrapuntal techniques. By the latter part of 1820, Felix was progressing from two- to three-part fugue and canon, over which he labored through the early months of 1821. All told, he recorded about thirty fugues in his exercise book, 11 the last of which, a three-part fugue in C minor, dates from late January 1821. Here the eleven-year-old emerges as a Bach devoté by writing a fugal gigue, recalling the Thomascantor’s fondness for combining that stylized baroque dance with artful contrapuntal displays (as in the finale of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto). Thus did Felix, as Marpurg quipped of Bach, shake “paper intricacies out of his sleeve.” 12

  Felix attacked four-part fugue by March 24, 1821, when he notated the first of twelve fugues for string quartet, the last of which probably dates from May. 13 Here again, Bach was the model, inspiring Felix to explore fugal artifices such as stretto, diminution, and augmentation. The fifth quartet fugue (April 11) marked yet another stage—Felix’s first double fugue, using two subjects, presented in separate expositions and then combined. Several of his double fugues cite chorales and form a subgroup of specialized (for 1821, old-fashioned) chorale fugues. The eighth quartet fugue (April 27, 1821), based on the Good Friday chorale O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden , offers an example. It begins with two expositions on subjects derived from the chorale ( ex. 2.1 ), one moving largely in eighth notes, the other, in sixteenths. Later, Felix inserts phrases from the chorale in slower half and quarter notes, before recalling the two fugal subjects. We might dismiss all this display as reflecting Zelter’s pedantry, but once again, Felix’s study of chorale fugue positively influenced his mature music. Thus, this arcane form would reappear in the Overture to St. Paul (1836), Felix’s most popular composition during his lifetime, and then in the Third Organ Sonata of Op. 65 (1845). 14

  Ex. 2.1 : Mendelssohn, Chorale Fugue on O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (1821), subjects

  In 1
821 the chorale fugue led Felix to sacred vocal music, the climax of his studies during the summer of 1821. The exercise on O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden may reflect his familiarity with C. H. Graun’s Passion cantata, Der Tod Jesu (1755), which employed the chorale and was often performed on Good Friday (in 1821, the Singakademie gave it on April 15, not quite two weeks before Felix finished his chorale fugue 15 ). In October 1820 Felix and Fanny had joined the institution, and on October 10 Felix sang for the first time as an alto; in the choir register Zelter dryly labeled his voice brauchbar (usable). 16 At the Singakademie Felix was exposed to a distinctly eighteenth-century repertoire—in addition to Graun’s cantata, the polychoral motets of Fasch, oratorios of Handel, and motets of J. S. Bach—all supporting Zelter’s musical diet of austere counterpoint.

  Felix’s engagement with sacred music produced motet-like exercises, mostly fugal settings of psalm verses on wooden, academic subjects, but also an ambitious, cantata-like rendition of Psalm 19. All these pieces follow the string-quartet fugues in the second volume of Felix’s Berlin Nachlass ; in addition, surviving in Oxford are two choral fugues on verses from Psalm 119. 17 The chronology of these manuscripts has proven refractory: only one exercise, the double fugue Die Himmel erzählen , bears a date—curiously enough, June 16, 1820. Almost certainly, “1820” was a slip for 1821, a misattribution occasionally found in Felix’s early manuscripts. 18 Other evidence (the autographs of two movements for Psalm 19 appear before a piano sonata finished in August) permits us to place the choral fugues around June–August 1821.

  For this stage of instruction Zelter again drew upon Marpurg, who had treated the motet (Singfuge ) in detail. By 1820 this genre, for centuries associated with sacred, polyphonic music, was well beyond its prime; still, Zelter performed motets and used them as didactic tools. Motets were sectional, a cappella compositions organized according to textual breaks, with each line of text assigned its own portion of imitative counterpoint. Essentially the composer generated a series of kleine Fugen , 19 and then combined the various subjects in a culminating display. This is how Zelter instructed Felix, by assigning first double fugues à 4 , and then challenging him with triple fugues à 5 .

  All but one of Felix’s choral fugues were conceived separately. But the five-part double fugue Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes (“The heavens declare the glory of God”) introduced a larger scale setting of Psalm 19, bringing the exercises into the realm of free composition. 20 Three other movements have survived, including a duet for soprano, alto, and continuo (“Ein Tag sagt es dem andern,” “Day unto day uttereth speech”), with a keyboard part alternating between florid solo writing and an unrealized figured-bass line, for 1821 a distinctly outmoded approach rooted in the eighteenth century. Whether Felix set the entire psalm is unclear, but we do know that on September 18, 1821, Zelter read part, if not all, of the work at the Singakademie and found Felix talented but somewhat voluble and lacking in composure. 21

  The surviving torso (verses 1, 2, 4, and 7) reveals Felix planned a work in several movements, blending homophonic and polyphonic choruses with smaller ensembles and solo settings along the lines of C. F. C. Fasch’s psalms from the 1790s. These youthful studies foreshadowed Felix’s later efforts in setting psalms, for during the 1830s and 1840s he would compose several cantata-like sacred works with prominent imitative counterpoint. Zelter’s instruction thus again cast a long shadow upon the mature composer. For yet another reason the early psalm exercises merit reconsideration: some use Moses Mendelssohn’s German translation of the psalms (Berlin, 1782). Was Felix merely following Fasch’s precedent in relying on the philosopher’s work? 22 Two of Felix’s double fugues, “Deine Rede präge ich meinem Herzen ein” (“Thy word have I hid in mine heart”) and “Ich weiche nicht von deinen Rechten” (“I have not departed from thy judgments”), draw on Moses’ rendition of Psalm 119. Whatever Felix’s motivation, these neglected exercises from 1821 provided an audible reminder of his distinguished paternal ancestry.

  II

  By the sheer quantity of music he produced, 1820 and 1821 rank as anni mirabili in Felix’s accelerated development. In particular, the first two bound autograph volumes of the Berlin Nachlass chronicle his remarkable ability to work simultaneously on unrelated compositions. Freely intermingled are piano, organ, and chamber works, solo Lieder and part-songs, sacred choral works, small dramatic scenes, and, of course, fugues. The distribution of compositions is revealing. Thus, the first movement of the Piano Sonata in F minor (December 1820) fills the closing pages of Mendelssohn Nachlass (MN ) 1, though its second and third movements appear only some twenty pages into MN 2. Filling the gap are fugues, a minuet for violin and piano, organ prelude, piano etude, male part-song, and arrangement of the overture to Felix’s first opera, Die Soldatenliebschaft —a compelling display of a prodigy’s multiple compositional urges.

  During these two years Felix composed no fewer than eight sonatas, including six for solo piano, and one each for two pianos, and violin and piano. 23 Of these, only three are published, 24 and one, a sonatina for Fanny, was until recently virtually unknown in the literature. 25 Stylistically the sonatas are largely beholden to the eighteenth century. Thus, we find in the Sonata in A minor the old-fashioned Trommel (drum) bass, and, in the Largo of the Sonata in C minor dotted rhythms and sweeping scales, like a superannuated French overture, in which Felix momentarily dons a baroque wig. Generally thematic contrast yields to monothematic treatments of sonata form, another conservative feature. The passagework does not yet exceed the limits of eighteenth-century piano technique; Felix seems oblivious to the music of virtuosi such as Hummel, Kalkbrenner, or Weber, all of whom were appearing in Berlin during the 1820s.

  Instead, Felix took to heart Zelter’s injunction to model his compositions after Mozart and Haydn. 26 Thus, the Duo Sonata in G minor, of which only one movement survives, introduces a sighing treble melody over a pulsating accompaniment designed to revive the mood of Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, K. 550, while the scampering finale of the Violin Sonata in F major recalls the Allegro vivace of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102. Felix’s sonatas are never far removed from his counterpoint exercises; for example, within a few bars the minuet of the Sonata in A minor lapses into a strict canon.

  Two sonatas exhibit more modern stylistic traits. The Sonata in E minor commences with a slow Introduzione , replete with dissonances and dotted rhythms signifying the heightened pathos of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata (1799) and Ludwig Berger’s own Sonata-Pathétique in C minor, Op. 7 (ca. 1804). In the Piano Sonata in G minor, Op. 105, two conventional, monothematic outer movements frame a romantic Adagio that breathes a different atmosphere. The movement begins with an expressive leap exceeding two octaves, a breach filled with dissonant chords that delay the full tonic chord for several measures. Felix then introduces mottled, fluid arpeggiations, and through the liberal use of the damper pedal generates adventurous dissonant blurs ( ex. 2.2 ). By 1821 he was cognizant of the “open-pedal” technique—raising the dampers to permit discordant sonorities to well together. Haydn, Dussek, and others had tested this license during the 1780s and 1790s, before Beethoven revolutionized the technique in his piano works, including the last movement of the “Waldstein” Sonata (1805).

  Ex. 2.2 : Mendelssohn, Piano Sonata in G minor, Op. 105 (1821), Second Movement

  The piano etude also allowed Felix to distance himself from classical models. MN 1 and 2 contain about a dozen etudes, many provided with metronome marks to underscore their practical function. Felix’s interest in the etude reflects the instruction of Ludwig Berger, who contributed several didactic works for the piano, and of Berger’s teacher Clementi, whose piano compendium, Gradus ad Parnassum , began to appear in 1817 and 1819. Felix numbered six etudes, as if he contemplated a cycle treating various technical difficulties, e.g., arpeggiations, hand crossings, wide leaps, and parallel sixths and thirds. But at least one etude had a special purpose, as Abraham revealed to Fanny: “Mother wrote to me
the other day that you had complained of a want of pieces for the exercise of the third and fourth finger, 27 and that Felix had thereupon directly composed one for you.” 28 Fanny’s etude has repetitive patterns to strengthen both hands, and a design possibly inspired by J. B. Cramer’s Studio per il pianoforte (1810, ex. 2.3 ).

  Ex. 2.3a: Mendelssohn, Etude in E minor (1820)

  Ex. 2.3b: J. B. Cramer, Studio per il pianoforte (1810)