On the last day of the month Felix heard the Thomanerchor perform Mozart’s Hymnus in the Paulinerkirche but found the trombones inept, the orchestra out of tune. On Reformation Day a festive gathering of magistrates processed from the Nikolai to the Paulinerkirche; the director of the orchestra conducted the ensemble with a telescope. 19 At the Gewandhaus the next day Felix heard Mozart’s resplendent Jupiter Symphony, a composition with which Felix formed a special relationship. 20 The famous stretto of the finale in five-part invertible counterpoint stimulated his curiosity, and he sent Eduard Rietz his own contrapuntal sketch of the principal motive. 21
In Weimar, Zelter and his companions tarried for two weeks in November. The short distance (seventy-five miles) concealed two dissimilar socioeconomic realms. Leipzig, with its burgeoning middle class, was a vibrant center of commerce. Weimar—for Madame de Staël in 1803 a large château; for George Eliot in 1854 a “huge village rather than a town” 22 —had fewer than ten thousand inhabitants, most of whom supported Duke Carl August, ruler of the small Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. When, in 1775, the eighteen-year-old duke invited Goethe to Weimar, what began as an interview became a residency of nearly sixty years.
Initially attracted to Goethe for his literary distinction—the twenty-six-year-old had already produced the sensational, epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther —the duke soon involved the young celebrity in the affairs of the duchy, such as the administration of its mines, roads, and even its Lilliputian army. Ennobled in 1782, Goethe became a hardened administrator; it was “as if Byron, after publishing Childe Harold , had joined the Civil Service.” 23 For about ten years Goethe served the court faithfully. There were some compensations—his friendship with the critic J. G. Herder, who had stirred the young poet’s enthusiasm for Ossian; an intimate, probably unconsummated relationship with the attractive wife of the chief equerry, Charlotte von Stein; and a deepening interest in the natural sciences (in 1784 Goethe was examining human skulls for vestiges of the intermaxillary bone). But the drudgery of administration took its toll, and one night in September 1786 Goethe fled to Italy to seek renewal in classical art, in completing his tragedies Iphigenie auf Tauris and Egmont , and in the arms of his mistress Faustina, idealized in the mildly lubricious Roman Elegies .
Goethe returned to Weimar in 1788 and produced several lifetimes of work, the tragedy Torquato Tasso , idyll Hermann und Dorothea , novels Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship and Elective Affinities , the Theory of Colors , and, of course, Faust , Part 1 (1808). Weimar was made even more illustrious by the arrival in 1799 of Friedrich Schiller, with whom Goethe raised the Weimar Theater to new eminence. After Schiller’s death in 1805, Goethe managed the theater until an absurd scandal defaced his grand vision in 1817. When the duke ordered a performance of a melodrama with the main role assigned to a poodle, Goethe viewed the canine intrusion an affront to art and resigned his theater post. By the time Zelter and Felix reached Weimar, in November 1821, Goethe had rekindled his inspiration. Bridging occidental and oriental worlds, and drawing on the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, was the West-Eastern Divan (1819), an anthology of sensual lyrics that silently assimilated into its central Suleika section contributions by Goethe’s friend Marianne von Willemer. The sequel Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel (1821), a novel with interpolated short stories and aphorisms, resumed the story of the young actor’s education and development.
For two weeks Felix lived in the gabled Goethehaus on the Frauen-plan. Here Goethe had settled with his wife, Christiana, and son, August, whose principal occupation was to organize the poet’s vast collections of scientific specimens (minerals, fossils, and plants) and art objects (medallions, coins, sculptures, prints, porcelain, paintings, and thousands of drawings, including erotica). After Christiana’s death in 1816, Ottilie von Pogwisch married August and assumed the matronly role. In this house Goethe entertained a galaxy of literary celebrities—the Schlegels, Novalis, and Heine, Achim and Bettina von Arnim, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, and the English novelist Thackeray. Musical parties were held in the Junozimmer, dominated by an imposing bust of the Roman goddess and containing a six-octave grand piano from the Viennese firm of Nanette Streicher, newly installed in July 1821. 24 Felix numbered among several virtuosi, including Hummel and Clara Wieck, who performed on this instrument. At least one famous musician, however, was denied the pleasure. In 1825 Carl Maria von Weber was kept waiting in an anteroom and then given only a short audience with Goethe before being summarily dismissed, infuriating the sickly musician. 25
When Zelter, Felix, and Doris arrived on November 2, Goethe was in Jena, so they were received by August, Ottilie, and their two young children. Awaiting the laureate, Felix sketched the houses of Schiller and the Reformation painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. Then, on November 4, the “Sun of Weimar” returned:
He was in the garden, and was just coming around a hedge; isn’t that odd, dear Father, just the way it happened when you met him? He is very friendly, but I don’t think any of his portraits look at all like him. He then inspected his interesting collection of fossils, which his son organized, and kept saying: Hm, Hm, I am quite pleased; afterward I walked around the garden with him and Prof. Zelter for another half hour. Then we sat down to eat. One would think he was fifty years old, not seventy-three. After dinner Fräulein Ulrike, [August] Goethe’s wife’s sister, 26 requested a kiss, and I did likewise. Every morning I receive a kiss from the author of Faust and of Werther , and every afternoon two kisses from Goethe, friend and father. 27
After dinner Felix entertained the household with Bach fugues and improvisations, an art the young pianist only recently had begun to develop in Berlin. 28
Ex. 3.1 : Fanny Mendelssohn, Erster Verlust (1820)
Felix had brought with him some of Fanny’s songs, including her first Goethe setting, Erster Verlust (First Loss , 1820), composed when she was fifteen. 29 A few years before, the eighteen-year-old Franz Schubert had sent his setting to Weimar with other Goethe treasures, including Gretchen am Spinnrade and Erlkönig , only to have the parcel returned unopened. Goethe responded more favorably to Fanny’s Lied, which subtly conveys the poem’s nostalgic sense of loss through a piano figure that oscillates between F major and D minor ( ex. 3.1 ). The yearning for lost love, which frames the poem (“Ah, who brings back those sweet days, Those days of first love?”) is associated with F major, while the central lament (“Lonely I nurture my wound, And with a lament always renewing, I mourn that lost happiness”) turns to D minor. As it happened, Felix would employ a similar musical conceit in his own setting of 1841 (Op. 99 No. 1), which juxtaposes the same keys.
To thank Fanny, Goethe composed a poem for Zelter to deliver to her:
Perhaps from modesty, Fanny never set these verses; perhaps too, she noticed (as did Goethe?) that with minor retouching, her music for Erster Verlust could accommodate the septuagenarian’s tender sentiments, expressed again in trochaic tetrameter.
Among the guests who heard Felix perform were the grand duke and duchess and other Weimar nobility; the writer and painter Johanna Schopenhauer and her daughter Adele Schopenhauer (sister of the philosopher); and the Greek lexicographer F. W. Riemer, of whom Felix later reported, “Dictionary writing suits him well. He is wide, fat, and radiant, like a prelate or a full moon.” 31 There were also several musicians, including Carl Eberwein, J. N. Hummel, and two who left accounts, Ludwig Rellstab and J. C. Lobe. The violinist-composer Eberwein had spent two years in Berlin, where, after the requisite examination in counterpoint, Zelter accepted him as a pupil. 32 In Weimar, Eberwein was recognized for his Lieder and early attempt to set Faust to music.
In 1821 the reigning Weimar musician was Kapellmeister Hummel (1778–1837), whom Felix had met in Berlin earlier that year. A child prodigy, Hummel had read music at age four and played the violin at five and piano at six. Between the ages of seven and nine he lived in Vienna with Mozart, who t
aught him gratis and prepared him for a grand tour of Europe, orchestrated by the boy’s father to imitate Mozart’s own childhood peregrinations. Before settling in Weimar, Hummel served Prince Nikolaus Esterházy for seven years and in Vienna was a well-known pianist second only to Beethoven. Hummel’s Weimar contract granted him annual leaves, time he devoted to lucrative tours and preparing a highly successful piano method (1828).
Hummel’s piano music displays a purling elegance reminiscent of Mozart. But Hummel was not immune to Beethoven’s influence, and the larger piano works show signs of stylistic dissatisfaction, as if Hummel too were engaged in an epic struggle to transcend Viennese classicism. Thus the Fantasy in E ♭ major, Op. 18 (ca. 1805), which Felix performed during his almost daily meetings with Hummel, contains some striking harmonic progressions lifted from the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. To Felix’s delight, Hummel judged that the youth’s playing had advanced considerably since their last meeting; still, he recommended Felix pay greater attention to his posture, 33 a criticism Felix evidently took to heart. When the grand duchess invited the two to play, the temperamental youth declined to appear after Hummel. 34
Various entertainments and the Weimar ladies diverted Felix. He visited the theater, 35 and played an end-rhyme game (bouts-rimés ) with Zelter, Ottilie, and her sister Ulrike. Devising verses for lists of rhyming words, the contestants often appealed to Goethe to adjudicate their trials. 36 Meanwhile, Adele Schopenhauer fabricated a delicate silhouette on the subject of Jacob’s Ladder for Jacob Ludwig Felix; the ladder comprised two musical staves above Jacob resting on a cloud, with angels representing notes borne heavenward (a second silhouette, “Psyche’s Hobby-Horse,” followed in January 1822). 37 There were drawings to finish, the new opera, and the fourth book of Caesar’s Gallic War .
The highlights of the visit were two parties at Goethe’s house on November 8 and 11. At the first were the grand duke and Princesses Luise and Maria Pavlovna (sister of the Russian tsar), Zelter, Riemer, Eberwein, and Ludwig Rellstab, who left a detailed report. 38 In 1816 Rellstab had studied with Ludwig Berger, through whom he may have met Felix. Rellstab later established a reputation as an acerbic music critic with a bias for German opera, and his unflattering views of Spontini twice led to an incarceration. As a poet, Rellstab considered writing a libretto for Beethoven, but his principal fame came in 1828, when the terminally ill Schubert set several Rellstab poems, seven of which appeared in the pseudocycle Schwanengesang . Rellstab is also credited with comparing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 27 No. 2, to a moonlit scene on Lake Lucerne, thereby securing immortality for what the composer had dismissed as a prosaic composition.
When Rellstab arrived at Goethe’s house on November 8, he found Felix flirting with ladies. Zelter appeared first in ceremonial, outmoded dress—black silk breeches, silk stockings, and shoes with silver buckles, like a scene from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck , in which the eighteenth-century opera composer rematerializes in nineteenth-century Berlin. Only after the entire audience had assembled did Goethe enter, conversing briefly with his Duzbruder Zelter before explaining the purpose of the gathering. There was to be a test of the prodigy’s abilities to stimulate comparisons with Mozart, whom Goethe had witnessed in 1763 playing a harpsichord with his hands covered by a baize cloth and identifying the pitches of clocks and glasses.
The first trial measured Felix’s prowess at improvisation. Zelter chose a short song, “Ich träumte einst von Hannchen,” and with arthritic fingers played the tune to an accompaniment of triplets. Displaying perfect pitch, Felix repeated the melody, and dabbled briefly with the triplets before launching into the “wildest Allegro.” From the gentle melody flared up a contrapuntal fantasy, a “turbulent, lustrous parliament of tones” reminiscent not so much of dreams of Hannchen as of Hummel’s better improvisations. Concluding with an energetic chord, Felix resumed a tranquil state, leaving the astonished audience silent. First to speak was Zelter, chary of praise: “What hobgoblins and dragons have you been dreaming about, to drive you along in that helter-skelter fashion!” 39
Ex. 3.2 : J. S. Bach, Fugue in F# minor, Well-Tempered Clavier I, 1722
Next, Zelter selected a Bach fugue, which Felix confidently dispatched, but the subject of the fugue contained a trill that disappeared in subsequent entries. Once again Zelter carped, bidding Felix not to omit the trill. But due to the complexity of the passagework, he could not physically add all the trills. Assuming the fugue was drawn from the Well-Tempered Clavier , we can narrow it to a handful of fugues with trills in their subjects. In particular, the Fugue in F# major from the first volume is an attractive candidate, for Bach indeed omitted the trill in several entries of the subject, owing to the limitation of the hand ( ex. 3.2 ).
When Goethe asked Felix to play a minuet, Felix offered the “most beautiful in the world,” from Don Giovanni . But when, testing the child’s ability to render a complex orchestral score from memory, Goethe requested the overture, Felix balked, arguing that the piano could not adequately accommodate Mozart’s music; instead, he performed the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro . Again, Rellstab’s judgment: Felix “began with a lightness of the hand, an assurance, roundness and clarity in the passagework as I have never again heard. At the same time he reproduced the orchestral effects so splendidly, made evident so many of the nuances of the orchestration by adding or clearly bringing out voices, that the effect was thrilling, and I might almost maintain that I experienced greater pleasure with his version for piano than with any orchestral performance.” 40
Withdrawing into his study, Goethe returned a few minutes later with two manuscripts. The first was a fragment of a Mozart sonata for violin and piano the poet had acquired in 1812. 41 Mozart’s hand was reasonably clear, and the movement was an Adagio, even though it contained thirty-second-note passages. Felix sight-read it as though he had “known it from memory for a year.” But the second manuscript, “be-spattered with ink and smudged all over,” 42 gave him pause. Zelter immediately recognized the handwriting of Beethoven, who “wrote as if he used a broomstick, and then wiped his sleeve over the wet ink.” 43 The autograph, now in the Goethe und Schiller Archiv in Weimar, was the first draft of the Lied Op. 83 No. 1, a setting of Goethe’s poem “Wonne der Wehmuth” (“Rapture of Melancholy”). Felix’s task was to find his way through the tortuous labyrinth of a Beethoven sketch. Understandably, Felix stumbled in this effort but eventually deciphered the shorthandlike scrawls to perform the song flawlessly. During a later visit to Weimar, he prepared a clean copy of the song for Goethe.
On November 11 another musical gathering convened, this time to verify Felix’s compositional talents. Among the participants were three Weimar court musicians; one was the violist J. C. Lobe, who had produced an opera two years before. Some twenty years later, Lobe would move to Leipzig, where he enjoyed close contacts with Felix and became the editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung . 44 In the Junozimmer in 1821, Lobe found among Felix’s manuscripts a piano quartet, which he and his companions now read. Like a sergeant-at-arms, Zelter comported himself with military bearing and bid the musicians to temper their praise, preferably in a “moderate tempo, scored not too noisily, and in C major, the most neutral tonality.” 45 After the performance, Felix was excused while his elders deliberated. Lobe did not identify the work, but almost certainly it was the Piano Quartet in D minor, Felix’s most substantial chamber work. 46 Comparisons with Mozart now flowed freely. “Musical prodigies,” Goethe began,
“as far as mere technical execution goes, are probably no longer so rare: but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight, borders on the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.” “And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?” said Zelter. “Yes,” answered Goethe; “at that time I myself had only just reached my twelfth year, and was certainly, like all the rest of the world, immensely astonished at his extraordinary execution; but wh
at your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time, that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person does to the prattle of a child.” 47
The three musicians agreed, and detected in Felix’s quartet “many more independent thoughts” than in Mozart’s music from the same age. For his part, Zelter confirmed Felix had composed the quartet without any assistance. The company thus came to a stunning conclusion: Felix was an improved version of the young Mozart.
II
Buoyed by the “pole star” of German poets, Felix departed Weimar on November 19 and returned to Berlin. Scarcely had his father thanked Goethe for “ennobling” Felix’s youth 48 before he finished Die wandernden Komödianten . By December 9 the Overture was ready, one day after Abraham severed ties to his banking firm. 49 Exactly what prompted this decision is unclear, though its cause may have been a fraternal dispute; perhaps the two disagreed about the management of their business, or perhaps Joseph disapproved of Abraham’s temptation to convert to Protestantism. Without shedding much light on the matter, Joseph’s wife Henriette wrote in January 1822, “the separation of the brothers grieves me very much; however, they are both men, and, therefore, must have it their different ways. I hope that neither of them will regret that he’s stuck to his own will so obstinately.” 50
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