Mendelssohn: A Life in Music
Page 22
Felix found the private salons and public concerts ennuyant . The endless potpourris and romances were superficial; the esteemed soprano Giuditta Pasta, far from conjuring up Stendhal’s “visions of celestial beauty,” 34 sang Rossini out of tune; the orchestra of the Théâtre-Italien had mediocre winds, and that of the Opéra was only good. Conspicuously absent in Paris was Beethoven’s music. Since the late eighteenth century, French mélomanes had embraced Haydn’s symphonies as de rigueur in orchestral concerts; only owing to François-Antoine Habeneck, conductor of the Opéra, did audiences gradually become familiar with Beethoven’s symphonies. In 1825 Felix attended a performance of a “nouvelle Sinfonie de Beethoven,” but the novelty was only the Second Symphony (premiered in Vienna in 1803); not until the closing years of the decade did Habeneck venture beyond the Eroica , and not until 1831 did he attempt the Ninth Symphony. Felix was unconvinced by the conducting of Habeneck, who led the ensemble with a violin bow, clutching his instrument in the other hand and reading the music from a violin part instead of the full score. 35
For Felix this state of affairs paled in comparison to French opera. At the Théâtre Feydeau, specializing in opéras-comiques , the orchestra and spacious hall did impress him. Nevertheless, Auber’s Léocadie , based upon Cervantes’ novella La fuerta del sangre , inspired a withering rebuke. The opera alternated between feeble reminiscences of Cherubini and Rossini, all presented with a monochromatic orchestration:
Fancy that among the numerous music-pieces of the opera there are perhaps three in which the piccolo does not play the principal part! The overture begins with a tremulando on the stringed instruments, and then the piccolo instantly begins on the roof and the bassoon in the cellar, and blow away at a melody; in the theme of the allegro the stringed instruments play the Spanish accompaniment, and the flute again drawls out a melody. Léocadie’s first melancholy air, “Pauvre Léocadie, il vaudrait mieux mourir,” is again appropriately accompanied by the piccolo. This little instrument serves to illustrate the fury of the brother, the pain of the lover, the joy of the peasant girl; in short, the whole opera might be transcribed for two flutes and a Jew’s harp ad libitum . 36
Léocadie probably caught Felix’s attention because just then he was engrossed with his own Cervantes opera, Die Hochzeit des Camacho , based on an episode from Don Quixote .
Felix endured as well a performance at the Théâtre de l’Odéon of Robin des bois , an unauthorized version of Weber’s Der Freischütz perpetrated by that “species of theatrical tomb-robber,” 37 F. H. J. Blaze. Known as Castil-Blaze, this impresario-composer-arranger concocted garbled French versions of Mozart, Weber, and Rossini, a lucrative enough venture, though the results scarcely resembled their models. Thus, the locale of Der Freischütz shifted to Yorkshire during the time of Robin Hood; the Wolf Glen to the ruins of St. Dunstan’s, somehow losing in the process four of Samiel’s seven magic bullets. Among other castilblazades , as these mutilations were dubbed, were the insertion of a duet from Weber’s Euryanthe and the doubling of flutes an octave above Agathe’s devout aria, “Leise, leise, fromme Weise,” an offense scarcely less serious than Auber’s perennial piccolos: “What a miserable, vile, infamous, lousy, boring quodlibet, in all my life I have never dreamed of such a scandal.” 38
Felix’s Parisian experiences exacerbated his sense of the divide between German and French musical life, and reinforced his identity as a German musician. His unrelenting criticism—Fanny chastised him for ignoring nonmusical experiences—anticipate the views of Robert Schumann, who about a decade later seized upon Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots and Felix’s oratorio St. Paul as representing a widening schism in European music, the one leading to the base and crass, the other to the sublime and noble. Try as Felix might (and admittedly he spent little effort), in 1825 he could not reconcile French tastes with his German upbringing: to the French, J. S. Bach was a wig stuffed with learning; 39 the Parisians were largely ignorant of Beethoven’s music; and Weber’s nobly Teutonic operas were corrupted by all manner of vulgar licenses. And so, as Felix left France, he concurred with Pierre Rode’s terse estimation of Paris as the locus of musical decadence (“C’est ici une dégringolade musicale ”). 40
II
During the return trip, the Mendelssohns paused in Frankfurt, where Schelble was rehearsing Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus . Felix extracted themes from the oratorio and dexterously wove them into an improvisation, “thoroughly Handelian” yet with “no pretension to display.” 41 When Felix visited the publisher André in neighboring Offenbach, Ferdinand Hiller was struck by the “precocious positiveness” of Felix’s speech and manners. A confirmed Mozartean, André dared criticize Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Felix’s response was to render the symphony at the keyboard so powerfully that André ceased his carping—not the last occasion when Felix found music more precise than the ambiguities of words.
In Weimar Felix astonished everyone on May 20 with the Piano Quartet in B minor. Lea had already requested permission to dedicate the work to Goethe 42 and sent an exemplar of the newly published composition from Berlin. Ironically enough, the same day the copy arrived (June 16), Goethe also received from Vienna three of his settings by Schubert. The poet promptly sent what Zelter termed a “love letter” to Felix, praising the quartet as the “graceful embodiment of that beautiful, rich, energetic soul which so astonished me when you first made me acquainted with it.” 43 But he posted no acknowledgment to Vienna.
The B-minor Piano Quartet heralds Felix’s mature style; indeed, the leap from the Quartet to the high plateau of the Octet, finished in October, is not great. The Quartet impresses with its Beethovenian length, compelling themes, and formal novelties. In the first movement, Felix eschews the classical repeat of the exposition (observed in Opp. 1 and 2) and instead dramatically expands its closing section. The development exploits an unusual conceit: the tempo abruptly shifts to Più Allegro , and a fresh thematic gesture, nervously rising in the piano, appears like a digression within the sonata form. After the reprise, the new subject returns in an elongated coda, with tonal meanderings reminiscent of the development. Felix thus reconfigures ternary sonata form into a four-part Beethovenian scheme, with the exposition balanced by the recapitulation; the development, by the coda.
The other endpoint of the Quartet is a massive finale of nearly five hundred measures, an amalgam of sonata and rondo forms animated by string tremolos and brilliant piano writing. Here again, Felix rejuvenates the development to form a culminating coda. In marked contrast are the lyrical, monothematic Andante in E major and gossamer-like third movement in F# minor, originally labeled Intermezzo, a prototype of the mature Mendelssohnian scherzo. The diminutive piano arabesques impress as a dizzying Spinnerlied , though examination reveals their origins figure in the turning motive with which the first movement commences ( ex. 5.3a, b ). Not by accident Felix recalls this Ur -motif in the closing bars of the finale four times in the strings, reinforcing the thematic unity of the entire composition.
Safely returned to Berlin, Felix resumed work on Die Hochzeit des Camacho and in August put the final touches on the opera. With the scherzo of Op. 3 still in his ears, he finished on July 23 a virtuoso piano piece, the Capriccio Op. 5 in F# minor. Here he again explored those light, filigree textures for which he became celebrated, with whimsical leaps (the composition reminded Rossini of Domenico Scarlatti’s zesty sonatas 44 ) and a measure of counterpoint in the middle section, where Felix treated a fresh subject in mirror inversion. During this period he found companionship in two new friends. At Easter the young theologian Julius Schubring (1806–1889) arrived to study with Schleiermacher at the university and through Wilhelm Müller gained entrance to the Mendelssohn household, where he received far more than he could offer “so brilliant an intellectual circle.” 45 In June Felix met ein recht guter Baßsänger 46 (“a pretty good bass singer”) from Cassel, Franz Hauser (1794–1870). A kindred Bach enthusiast, Hauser sang an aria from the B-minor Ma
ss for Zelter 47 and copied Lieder by Fanny and Felix, including Felix’s still unpublished setting of sentimental verses by Friederike Robert, “Mitleidsworte, Trostesgründe” (June 7, 1825). 48 Hauser was conceivably the beneficiary of another unpublished composition, an aria for baritone and piano completed on September 5. 49 Felix’s first setting of an Italian text, Ch’io t’abbandono draws its heroic if maudlin verses from Metastasio’s Achille in Sciro , a popular eighteenth-century libretto but already outmoded by 1825. (In a fanciful reworking of Greek mythology, Achilles’s mother secretes her son on the island of Scyros, where he dons female attire to avoid military service. But Ulysses craftily uncovers the disguise, and the two depart for Troy.) Felix cobbled together verses of the young hero from two different parts of the libretto and set them as a continuous scene falling into an introductory recitative, a slow aria (see ex. 5.4 ), and concluding Allegro, a formula familiar in nineteenth-century Italian opera, which often paired an arialike cavatina with a concluding, energetic cabaletta. Felix’s score contains imaginative harmonic twists and calls out for orchestration. But there is no evidence he pursued the project further; it fell onto the refuse pile of his lifelong quest for a suitable opera libretto.
Ex. 5.3a: Mendelssohn, Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor, Op. 3 (1825), Scherzo
Ex. 5.3b: Mendelssohn, Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor, Op. 3 (1825), First Movement
Ex. 5.4 : Mendelssohn, Chi’io t’abbandono (1825)
In October the Mendelssohns entertained Sir George Smart (1776–1867), who recorded some impressions of Felix and Fanny. Smart was a founding member of the Philharmonic Society and served as organist of the Chapel Royal. He directed the English premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in March 1825 and later that year consulted the composer about the proper tempi. Returning from Vienna, Smart visited Weber in Dresden to discuss the forthcoming London premiere of Oberon 50 and then proceeded to Berlin, where he arrived on October 11.
A punctilious man, Smart habitually measured the pitch and tempi of musical ensembles he encountered in his travels. During two weeks in Berlin, he attended a Singakademie concert, conversed in English with Lea at her new residence, and toured the adjacent royal porcelain factory, where he examined a dinner service for the Duke of Wellington. He played Mozart duets with Felix and Fanny and heard several of Felix’s compositions, including the Kyrie for Cherubini, a “quite modern and good” piano quartet, and “clever” piano works “rather in the old school,” 51 performed on an English Broadwood grand Abraham had purchased in Paris. Finally, Felix played organ works of J. S. Bach, apparently on a small chamber instrument, while Fanny executed the pedal part on the piano.
Curiously, Smart failed to mention one “clever” composition completed on October 15, 1825—the Octet, Op. 20, which catapulted Felix into the Western canon of “great” composers. The prodigy’s sixteen-year-old creative voice now reached full maturity in an irrepressibly masterful, ebullient composition. No work of Mozart from a comparable age matches the consummate skill of the Octet; indeed, the search for models is largely a frustrating one. Still, some have occasionally assumed the Octet was inspired by Louis Spohr’s Double Quartet in D minor, Op. 65 (1823), the first of four chamber works exploring question-and-answer effects between two string quartets. (The bipartite division of an ensemble also motivated Spohr to score his Seventh Symphony for two orchestras representing the earthly and divine attributes of human life.) Drawing upon his experience with polychoral music, Spohr observed that the two quartets were like two choirs, now singing in alternation, now together. 52 But Spohr carefully distinguished his experiments from Felix’s Octet, in which “the two quartets do not concert and alternate in double choral style, but in which all eight instruments collaborate.” 53 Actually, the Octet does contain examples of antiphonal effects, as in bars 21ff. of the first movement and the opening of the slow movement, where the ensemble divides according to register, with the four lower strings answered by the four violins. But Spohr’s ideal of Doppelchörigkeit was not the primary motivation for Felix’s composition, which exploits the rich textural resources of the ensemble, ranging from minimalist unison passages (first movement, bars 211ff., and conclusion of the scherzo) to resplendent eight-part counterpoint (the fugal opening of the finale) and encompassing a multitude of instrumental divisions and subdivisions as well.
The Octet exhibits a tensile, symphonic strength; when it appeared in 1832, Felix appended a note insisting it “be played by all the instruments in the style of a symphony.” If we judge by the finale, with its dramatic infusion of fugal elements into a sonata-rondo design, Felix must have had in mind the crowning conclusion of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, the inspiration for the intricate fugal finale of the eighth string sinfonia in 1822. Yet another symphonic influence was Beethoven, manifest in the Octet’s striving for monumentality, the broad proportions of its outer movements, and also the recall of the scherzo in the finale, again revealing Felix’s debt to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Despite the Octet’s magnitude, there is vexingly scant documentation about its conception. But Fanny provided a vital clue; in the scherzo, her brother
set to music the stanza from the Walpurgis-night Dream in “Faust” [Part 1]:—“The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist/Are lighted from above./A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds,/And all has vanished.” … To me alone he told this idea: the whole piece is to be played staccato and pianissimo, the tremulandos coming in now and then, the trills passing away with the quickness of lightning; everything new and strange, and at the same time most insinuating and pleasing, one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession. At the end the first violin takes a flight with a feather-like lightness, and—all has vanished. 54
The “Walpurgis Night’s Dream, or the Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,” is an intermezzo-like dream sequence in which an amateur cast performs on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains a masquerade in doggerel. Here Goethe offers a satire about the cultural values of his time and caricatures dilettantes and snobs, critics, philosophers, and the religious orthodox. The phantasmagoric train of players includes mythical figures, an idealist, dogmatist, realist, supernaturalist, and members of the witches’ Sabbath, all supervised by Puck and Ariel, who have come to celebrate the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the elves. Providing the music for the entertainment is a Kapellmeister and miniscule orchestra of flies, mosquitoes, frogs, and crickets, and a bagpipe blowing soap bubbles. At dawn, the parade is over, and all vanish, captured by the feathery flight of the first violin at the end of Felix’s scherzo ( ex. 5.5a ).
Though Fanny specified the closing quatrain of the scene, little imagination is needed to read Felix’s scherzo as a fanciful representation of the orchestral backdrop to the dream sequence, through which Goethe interspersed references to the Kapellmeister, his musicians, and the magical bagpipe, powerful enough to mesmerize animals, like Orpheus’s lyre. Felix’s finely nuanced, delicate string writing thus suggests the orchestral personnel, with leaping figures at the opening for the crickets and frogs, buzzing trills for the flies ( ex. 5.5b ), and brisk spiccati for the stinging mosquitoes. Even the drone of the Dudelsack is present, with open fifths and octaves against a scurrying figure in the violas ( ex. 5.5c ). The whole fits into a miniature sonata form as the ensemble evolves through a kaleidoscope of textures, beginning with a string quartet and attaining imitative writing in seven parts in the development (a charming fore-taste of the eight-part fugato in the finale), before dissolving into the ethereal unison conclusion.
Ex. 5.5a: Mendelssohn, Octet, Op. 20 (1825), Scherzo
Ex. 5.5b: Mendelssohn, Octet, Op. 20 (1825), Scherzo
Ex. 5.5c: Mendelssohn, Octet, Op. 20 (1825), Scherzo
The extramusical stimulus for the scherzo raises the intriguing possibility that the other movements of the Octet are related to Faust as well. How are we to unde
rstand, for example, the propulsive opening theme of the first movement, which emerges in the first violin from quivering tremulos and ascends nearly three octaves ( ex. 5.6a )? As we know, Felix composed the Octet for Eduard Rietz, whose birthday fell on October 17. Clearly the florid first violin part was intended for Rietz, but did Felix also have in mind a certain Faustian quality, evidenced by the soaring, grandiose lines and exploitation of the instrument’s full register? (According to Heinrich Dorn, “when the two friends were together, the idea was always suggested to me of Faust and Mephistopheles, though there was certainly little enough of the diabolic in either of them.”) 55 There is, too, the protracted length of the first movement, originally notated with rhythmic values twice as long as those of the printed version, yielding initially a movement exceeding six hundred measures. 56