Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Early in 1822, Spohr arrived in Cassel, where he remained for the rest of his career. He strengthened the orchestra (among the first conductors to wield a baton, Spohr presided over fifty-five musicians), founded a Cäcilienverein for choral music, and directed opera at the court theater. In many ways Spohr’s comfortable existence in Cassel mirrored the stability of Felix’s later career in Leipzig: each musician developed a municipal musical culture supported by a literate, art-loving middle class, even though Spohr had the disadvantage of settling in a small, repressive police state, in which, during the Restoration, the Elector Wilhelm II had imposed a rigorous censorship.

  At the time of the Mendelssohns’ visit Spohr was engrossed with his exotic opera Jessonda (1823), set in Malabar and offering choruses of Brahmins and Portuguese soldiers, and a ballet of bayaderes (female votaries). Spohr’s conversations with the Mendelssohns may well have turned to opera, for in May Felix had taken up his fourth libretto from Dr. Casper, Die beiden Neffen . Spohr regaled his guests with a chamber-music party, performing two of his own quartets and participating in one by Felix, presumably the Piano Quartet in D minor. 80

  On July 18 the travelers arrived at the elegant Frankfurt hotel White Swan. The pianist Aloys Schmitt procured a Viennese piano for Felix and Fanny, 81 and they met Schmitt’s prize pupil, ten-year-old Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885), later one of Felix’s closest friends. At Darmstadt, Felix called on the noted organist J. C. H. Rinck (1770–1846), a former pupil of J. C. Kittel and thus second-generation disciple of J. S. Bach. Continuing through Heidelberg and Stuttgart, the party reached Switzerland on the 28th and spent a day contemplating the swirling cataracts near Schaffhausen during a raging thunderstorm, before they continued to Constance. After examining the subtropical flora of the Island of Mainau, the male members of the party sailed across Lake Constance to visit Meersburg; Felix was impressed by the “half tints” and blends of colors in the lake that “no painter would venture.” 82 The reunited travelers then proceeded through St. Gallen, celebrated for its Carolingian monastery. At the southeastern extremity of Lake Constance Lea was surprised to see the Rhine metamorphose into a “chalky, colorless river.” 83 By August 4 her family was resting in Zurich.

  Their next excursion led them to Glarus and Linthal, a wildromantisch area heavily populated but not really suitable for human habitation, 84 where they observed snow-covered mountains from close proximity. Returning to Zurich, Felix met the musician Anton Liste (1772–1832), who agreed to guide the party up the Rigi. While Liste and Heyse ventured by foot “across fields, over hedges and fences, and over cemeteries,” 85 the main procession crossed the Albis and reached Zug. Across its picturesque lake they visited Immisee and Tellskapelle, where the Swiss national hero allegedly had dispatched the tyrant Gessler. The scene, for Felix an “attractive and yet somehow ghastly ravine,” 86 later inspired Franz Liszt to compose the opening piece of the Années de Pèlerinage ; Felix decided to capture the beech-tree-lined gorge in a drawing.

  From Goldau, a village buried in 1806 by a horrific landslide, the travelers plotted their ascent of the Rigi, which began on August 12 with a party of thirty-four, including porters to convey the luggage. Halfway up, the Mendelssohns had to wait out a storm, and when they finally reached the Rigikulm they were fogbound an entire day. On the second evening, Lea reported,

  the fog dispersed, and we enjoyed the most beautiful sunset in this heavenly region; only the southern mountains continued to be veiled. To wake up on the Rigikulm on a lovely morning is striking and highly moving. An hour before sunrise, when the heaven is clear, the Alphorn sounds, rousing all the residents of the house with its sharp, piercing tone. Now amid the darkness stirs the liveliest bustle in the narrow quarters, … and figures worthy of Hogarth’s brush emerge. 87

  At the inn erected on the summit in 1816 Felix took in the magisterial view, the sunrise turning the snow-clad peaks reddish hues, day breaking over the Rigi and, across the serenely aquamarine lake below, the Pilatus. “Dawn can easily be this beautiful on the Rigi,” an old guide opined, “but more beautiful it cannot be.” 88

  After their descent, the Mendelssohns boarded a boat to Lucerne, and next day cruised across the breathtaking span of the Lake of the Four Cantons. On the Urnersee they were beset by a hailstorm but disembarked, pushed on to Altdorf, and continued south along the Reuss River, following a road “worked into the rocks with the aid of gunpowder,” a “grand illustration,” according to Fanny, “of the power of human perseverance, which can even bend the will of Nature.” 89 On the way to the St. Gotthard Pass Fanny felt an intense longing to see Italy and completed a setting of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land.” 90 Near Andermatt, she wrote, “you feel, however, no less powerfully affected by what you do not see than by the visible surroundings.” But Fanny would have to wait until 1839 to satisfy her romantic Reiselust ; lacking supplies, the family turned back to Lucerne.

  Sometimes traversing only six German miles a day, 91 the tourists proceeded to Thun and on August 22 crossed the Thunersee to Interlaken. En route to Lauterbrunnen, they counted forty waterfalls, and looked with wonder at the Staubbach, with its plummeting cascade turning to spray some 900 feet below. 92 Ascending the Wengern Alp, they viewed the Jungfrau from a “poetic chalet,” a modest cowherd’s hut, before continuing on to Grindelwald. Sketching along the way, Felix recorded striking views in his drawings, supplemented by a meticulous travelogue that would have satisfied Karl Baedecker. Thus, on August 27, the artist executed a drawing of the Grindelwald Glacier (plate 5 ) and described some salient features: the towering Eiger, whose summit resembled the dome of a cathedral; the distant, craggy peaks of the Fiescherhörner; the debriscovered lower glacier, inexorably advancing to the valley below; and the Lütschine River, gushing from caves beneath the glacier’s moraine. 93

  After visiting Bern, the Mendelssohns reached Vevay on Lake Geneva. While Fanny dreamed of the Borromean Islands on the Lago Maggiore , 94 Felix sketched Lake Geneva and the French Alps, and completed the first act of Die beiden Neffen in Lausanne on September 11. Two days later they registered at Secheron, an inn near Geneva, and Felix’s reawakened muse inspired two Lieder and the beginning of the Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 1. 95 The tourists saw Voltaire’s château at Ferney and visited Chamonix to view Mont Blanc before beginning their journey back to Germany, via Neuchâtel and Basel. At the end of September they again lingered in Frankfurt, while Felix completed the first movement of his Piano Quartet.

  Throughout the Swiss sojourn Felix remained an astute observer of local musical culture. He recorded folksongs for use in two of his string symphonies and reported his impressions of yodeling to Zelter. If the ululating intervals nearby sounded “harsh and unpleasant,” their effect was quite beautiful when experienced from afar with “mingling or answering echoes.” But in the Bernese Oberland the folk songs of Swiss girls did not impress Felix: “… everything is spoiled by one voice which they use like a flauto piccolo . For this girl never sings a melody; she produces certain high notes—I believe just at her discretion—and thus, at times, horrible fifths turn up.” 96 And finally, he sent back mixed reports about Swiss organs, including a “grand instrument with fifty-three stops” in the Bern cathedral and a modest instrument in the Canton of Fribourg with a pedal board too short to accommodate Bach’s music.

  Felix visited Switzerland three more times, in 1831, 1842, and a few months before his death in 1847, when, crushed by Fanny’s death, he found solace in re-creating in watercolors their fondest childhood memories. But now, in 1822, his artistic horizons were still expanding—Felix, Fanny observed, could not remain idle for one hour. 97 And so, there was much music making in Frankfurt. Felix performed his piano quartet (either in D minor or the recently completed first movement of Op. 1) and, accompanied by Ferdinand Hiller, sight-read his way, presumably, through a violin sonata by Aloys Schmitt. 98 Eduard Devrient, then completing his musical studies in Frankfurt, witnessed Felix’s precocity before the mus
icians J. A. André and J. N. Schelble. 99 In 1799 André had inherited his father’s music publishing firm, which he expanded by acquiring rights to the new technology of music lithography. He also purchased Mozart’s Nachlaß from the composer’s widow Constanze, and thus laid the groundwork for Köchel’s pioneering catalogue. A stout, garrulous man, André contributed Lieder to the Frankfurt musicale and asked Felix to improvise, whereupon Felix “had a quiet bit of fun,” working into his fantasy a song by André that had just been sung and then, drawing upon “his all-retaining memory,” another song by Devrient.

  There was more serious music making at the Cäcilienverein, a choral society founded in 1818 by the actor, singer, and pedagogue J. N. Schelble (1789–1837) and specializing in Catholic sacred music and Handel’s oratorios. 100 According to Devrient, Felix’s improvisations on Bach motets won Schelble’s lifelong friendship. 101 Their meeting inspired Felix to compose a short a cappella setting, finished in October not long after his return to Berlin and then dispatched to Schelble in November. Jube Domine , for two four-part choirs, was Felix’s first work for the Catholic liturgy. 102 The Compline text entreats the Lord to grant a quiet, perfect ending to the day and includes a reading from 1 Peter (5:8): “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” Despite his Bachian predilections, Felix avoided imitative counterpoint and relied instead on descriptive word paintings and antiphonal exchanges between the two choirs in block harmonies. Thus, the devil lurks in dissonant chords, with the interval of the tritone—the traditional diabolus in musica —prominently displayed in the outer voices (A ♭ –D, ex. 3.9 ) on the exact word diabolus .

  Ex. 3.9 : Mendelssohn, Jube Domine (1822)

  While in Frankfurt, Abraham and Lea converted to the Protestant creed, filling a family breach opened by their children’s baptisms in 1816 but dissolving their family’s ties to Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophy of enlightened rationalism. In a strikingly symbolic gesture, Abraham Moses Mendelssohn now became Abraham Ernst Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 103 and Lea, adopting her sons’ names, Lea Felicia Pauline Mendelssohn Bartholdy. 104 The clandestine ceremony occurred on October 4, 1822, and the family soon left the city to resume their journey. Further details are not known, but in 1925 C. H. Müller, archivist of the Cäcilienverein, claimed that the celebrant for the baptism was Pastor Jeanrenaud of the French Reformed Church, 105 father of Cécile Jeanrenaud, whom Felix would marry in 1837. But Auguste Jeanrenaud, a “vigorous pioneer of the Protestant faith,” had died of consumption in 1819, two years after Cécile’s birth. Almost certainly the Mendelssohns had no contact with the surviving members of the Jeanrenaud family in 1822, for Felix later dated his introduction to Cécile precisely to May 4, 1836. 106

  For the moment, Abraham and Lea kept their new faith a well-guarded secret and probably chose not to discuss it with Goethe, whom the family again visited in Weimar on October 7. 107 Instead, the poet spoke for hours with Abraham about Felix and enjoyed the sophisticated pianism of Fanny, who performed Bach and her Goethe Lieder. Felix again obligingly entertained the poet, who likened the young man to the Old Testament psalmist: “You are my David, and if I am ever ill and sad, you must banish my bad dreams by your playing; I shall never throw my spear at you, as Saul did.” 108

  IV

  By the middle of the month, Felix had returned to Berlin. His appearance was considerably changed: “the pretty brown curls were cut short to the neck, the child’s dress had given place to the boy’s suit,—an open jacket over a waistcoat.” 109 According to Fanny, prone to idealizing him, Felix “had grown much taller and stronger, … His lovely child’s face had disappeared, and his figure already showed a manliness very becoming to him.” 110 The youth shared his drawings with Rösel, who gave two of his own sketches to his pupil. 111 Meanwhile, on October 18 Felix completed the Piano Quartet in C minor and by November had advanced well into the second act of Die beiden Neffen . The same month he began work on his eighth string symphony. Fanny and Felix now resumed their activities as pianists: at Zelter’s on October 22 she performed the Piano Concerto in A minor, 112 which Felix played on December 5 at a public concert of Anna Milder-Hauptmann, prima donna assoluta of the Berlin opera, 113 for whom Beethoven had created the role of Fidelio.

  When Fanny celebrated her birthday on November 14, Wilhelm Hensel, now an active suitor, presented a drawing of Fanny as the patron saint of music and thus linked the object of his affection, Fanny Caecilia, with Cecilia, whose feast day fell eight days later. Seated, the robed, barefooted Fanny holds a scroll of music, her hair adorned with a floral wreath, as three haloed angels peer over her shoulders (plate 6 ). Wilhelm also drew portraits of other family members, including Felix, 114 and their close friends, and thus assumed “mentally his place in the circle to which he wished to belong.” 115 Only one month later, Wilhelm pressed his case more directly. On Christmas Eve he gave Fanny a volume of poetry by his friend Wilhelm Müller, the recently published 77 Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Traveling Waldhorn Player , which, of course, contained Die schöne Müllerin , the Liederspiel Müller and his friends had performed in Berlin in 1816 (Hensel had played the role of the hunter). If Müller had filled his lyrics with thinly disguised fantasies about Hensel’s sister, Luise, Wilhelm now appropriated the poems to symbolize his longing for Fanny. To this end, he prepared a new title page for the volume, with Müller’s portrait and a dedicatory poem to Fanny, “signed” below with Wilhelm’s own portrait.

  But the vigilant Lea intercepted the volume, and took exception to Wilhelm’s amorous quatrains, addressed to her daughter with the intimate du :

  On Christmas Day, Lea returned the present to the “sensitive, reverent ladies’ knight,” because she found Hensel’s portrait, regardless of the form it took, inappropriate for a maiden; but were he to remove the offending title page, there would be no violation of social propriety, and Fanny could accept the volume. 117

  While Wilhelm was wooing Fanny, she was making her first foray into chamber music. On November 23 she dated the finale of a Piano Quartet in A ♭ major, a work begun in May with Zelter’s assistance 118 and then set aside during the Swiss sojourn. It was her first essay in a large form. Was Fanny attempting to rival Felix, who had already performed a piano quartet for Goethe? Did Fanny’s effort in turn spur her brother to write his Piano Quartet in C minor, begun in Geneva in September and then finished less than a month later in Berlin? Whatever the case, the publication history of these two quartets delineates the gulf separating the siblings’ musical worlds. Felix’s second piano quartet, published as Op. 1 with a dedication to Prince Radziwill in 1823, marked Felix’s debut as a professional composer, while Fanny’s quartet lay dormant until its premiere and first edition late in the twentieth century. 119 Fanny never intended to publish her composition; it belonged to her private musical realm, in contrast to the increasingly public arena in which her brother appeared. Indeed, as Rainer Cadenbach suggests, Fanny’s work evinces a tentative quality. Dominating the composition is its piano passagework, which overshadows the modest demands of the string parts. The application of sonata form in the first movement is unsure, the trio of the minuet is a piano solo with a bass line in the cello, and the concluding Presto, joined to the minuet, leaves the listener “somewhat helpless, since it is too weighty for a coda, but too compact for a finale and of too little importance.” 120

  In contrast, during the closing months of 1822 Felix seems to have acted upon Goethe’s pronouncement heralding him as a second Mozart. Comparisons between the two prodigies gained currency. Thus, Heinrich Heine admitted that “according to the judgment of all musicians,” Felix “is a musical miracle, and can become a second Mozart….” 121 Expectations in Berlin society ran high, and for Felix, testing his musical mettle meant producing compositions that would invite comparisons with his illustrious predecessor. In the case of the piano quartet, a genre with relatively few examples, Felix was familiar with Mo
zart’s two (K. 478 and 493) and had absorbed the wealth of instrumental combinations exploited therein—the piano as a virtuoso soloist set against the strings, the marshaling of all four instruments in unison, the use of the strings alone, and the like. But for the C-minor Piano Quartet Felix found inspiration in another work of Mozart, the Piano Sonata in C minor K. 457 (1784). Thus, the quartet begins with a rising triadic gesture in the cello and viola that replicates the opening of the sonata ( ex. 3.10a , b ). Felix arranges his theme into symmetrical antecedent and consequent phrases, a Mozartean feature that attracted critical attention in 1824. 122 The ties between the two works are even more explicit in the finale, which begins with a theme adapted from the opening of Mozart’s finale ( ex. 3.11a, b ). Felix’s slow movement, an Adagio in A ♭ major, offers a graceful theme that could be by Mozart, but with the Scherzo in C minor we find a more original contribution: a fleet-footed Presto in duple meter that contains the seeds of Felix’s mature scherzo idiom. Elsewhere, too, we glimpse a more modern style, as in the lush second theme of the first movement, set in the dark registers of the cello and viola and reminiscent of Carl Maria von Weber. Felix’s opus primum impresses as a composition that acknowledges its Mozartean parentage while searching for its own identity.