Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  The exuberant Allegro contrasts with the subdued Andante, which establishes at the outset a severe tonal dichotomy between the somber C minor of the lower strings and serene D ♭ major of the violins. This half-step relation imbues the music with an archaic quality, as if Felix intended to invoke the ancient Phrygian church mode. There are other clues as well, such as the prominent descending chromatic tetrachords, a traditional symbol of a lament ( ex. 5.6b ), and the surprise ending in C major, with the raised third (tierce de Picardie ). The movement is stylistically at odds with the tonal grandiosity and modernity of the first movement. The order of movements suggests the Andante refers to the cathedral scene before the Walpurgisnight (before Faust’s capricious ride up the Brocken, Gretchen attends a service where, wracked by guilt and persecuted by the chanting of the Dies irae , she faints).

  Ex. 5.6a: Mendelssohn, Octet, Op. 20 (1825), First Movement

  Ex. 5.6b: Mendelssohn, Octet, Op. 20 (1825), Scherzo

  The brilliant finale completes the Faustian analogy by introducing the fugue as a topic of struggle, by reviving the music of the scherzo in a dramatic, now (contrary to Dorn’s opinion) diabolical vein, and by ultimately resolving the contrapuntal and tonal dissonance. In 1825 Felix would have known only the first part of Faust , so the fugal struggle would be for Gretchen’s soul, in the concluding scene, where, visited in the dungeon by Faust and Mephistopheles, she rebuffs their attempts to free her, commits her soul to the Lord while she awaits execution, and receives heavenly redemption. Over four-hundred measures in length, the movement employs three thematic elements, from which Felix constructs an imposing sonata-rondo edifice (ABACABA, diagram 5. 1 ). The first is the energetic fugal subject of the opening (a ). The second, initially presented in a fortissimo unison passage (mm. 33ff), serves as the second theme in the dominant (b ). The third, anticipated as early as mm. 25ff (c ), emerges fully in the development-like C section, where it appears as a nearly literal quotation of “And He shall reign for ever and ever” from the “Hallelujah” Chorus of Handel’s Messiah . All three undergo contrapuntal manipulations, reaching a critical stage in C, where the music of the scherzo briefly intrudes as a fourth subject (d ), before being symbolically vanquished by the Handelian figure, triumphantly reintroduced over a massive pedal point.

  To interpret the Octet as a youthful reaction to Faust is admittedly speculative, but such a reading helps to explain several distinctive thematic and formal elements of the work: the monumental striving of the first movement, the remote “churchly” style of the Andante, the Walpurisnight music of the scherzo, and its struggle with the Handelian theme in the finale. Ultimately, though, the Octet resists exhaustive interpretations; its myriad instrumental combinations revolve in their own miraculous sphere, exuding the ineffable magic of a sixteen-year-old genius.

  Diagram 5.1 : Mendelssohn, Octet, Op. 20 (1825), Finale, Structural Plan

  III

  Around the time of the Octet, Felix took up another, hardly less challenging task: a German translation of the Andria , Terence’s first comedy. The translation was a surprise gift for Heyse’s birthday, October 15, 1825, the very day Felix completed the Octet. 57 Dutifully impressed, the tutor published the work the next year, 58 identified his student as “F****,” and supplemented the play with a scholarly preface about classical poetry and his own translation of a Horace satire. Heyse observed there were two basic approaches to translating: reclothing the original in modern garb, preserving only the essential content, and adhering to the original meter and versification to produce a faithful imitation. Felix chose the latter; indeed, for him, translating Terence was rather like writing a fugue in the style of Bach. But for Heyse, in contrast to Greek and later Latin poetry, the language of the second-century Carthaginian slave somehow anticipated the accents and quantifications of German folk poetry. The goal of Felix’s translation, therefore, was not to follow Terence slavishly but to imitate the prevailing meters and use shifting accents and caesuras to capture the feeling of the original—and thereby discover a link to the artful stresses of German folk poetry.

  As Heyse noted, the translator was gifted “in the other Muses” and so worked on the project during leisure hours. As a respite from the intricacies of the Octet, we must imagine Felix, then, finding recreation in parsing Terence; eight-part counterpoint briefly yielded to octonaria , the eight-footed lines in iambic tetrameter prevalent in the play. With an acute ear, Felix fabricated deft German counterparts for Terence’s lithe verses, as in this passage, when the slave Davus reacts to an impending prearranged marriage between the Athenian Pamphlius and a daughter of the gentleman Chremes. Here Felix mirrors Terence’s internal pairing of segnitiae and socordiae with Trägheit and Lässigkeit , all the while maintaining a preponderance of iambs:

  Enim vero, Dave, nil locist segnitiae neque socordiae,

  Jetzt also Davus ist keine Zeit, zu Trägheit oder zu Lässigkeit ,

  Quantum intellexi modo senis sententiam de nuptiis .

  Wenn anders ich des Alten Meinung über die Hochzeit recht verstand .

  (Upon my word, Davus, it’s no time for slackness or stupidity, if I

  took in just now the old boy’s view about the match. 59 )

  At the end of September 1826, Felix sent a copy of this “poor attempt by a poor schoolboy” 60 to Goethe, who entertained his Weimar circle with readings. On October 15 Felix honored Heyse with another translation, this time of Horace’s treatise Ars poetica , 61 celebrated down through the centuries for its simile “poetry is like a painting” (ut pictura poesis ) and its condemnation of “purple” prose. Felix’s manuscript, nearly five hundred acatalectic German lines in meticulous calligraphy, remains unpublished.

  The year 1825 had closed for Felix with considerable intellectual and artistic ferment, capped by his classical pursuits and the Octet. There had been other stimulations as well. On November 2 Felix appeared on a concert of the violinist Ludwig Maurer as the soloist in the Beethoven Choral Fantasia, Op. 80; Felix also conducted “with fire” his own Symphony in C minor, Op. 11, though whether he used a baton or led from a piano is not clear. 62 Then, for Fanny’s twentieth birthday, Klingemann gave her a copy of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, with a mock letter from the “master,” who directed Fanny to play the sprawling composition only when time allowed, for he “had much to say” in the sonata. 63 In December 1825 Carl Maria von Weber returned to Berlin to produce his “grand, heroic, romantic” opera Euryanthe ; Felix attended the rehearsals and was astonished at “what the man did with a strange orchestra.” 64 And finally, he was confirmed as a Protestant. In response to his avowal of faith, his pastor, F. P. Wilmsen, cited Luke—much was expected of him to whom much was given 65 —and prayed that art, uplifted and sanctified by religion, would make Felix’s soul strong and free, noble and great.

  Late in 1825, the Mendelssohns moved from the Gartensaal to celebrate their first Christmas in the mansion of Leipzigerstrasse No. 3. At first Lea complained the “palace-like residence” was too splendid, and not bourgeois enough. 66 She declined Hensel’s offer to ship Bartholdy’s frescoes to Berlin, because “a plain citizen’s house” was not the place for costly adornments. 67 But she spared little expense on the gardens, where new lawns and a hundred rose stocks were planted. The family entertained themselves with musicales, charades, and word games; one object of delectation was the word Philister (Philistine), variously rendered as viel ißt er (“he eats much”), viel liest er (“he reads much”), and viel ist er (“he is much”). 68 For Lea’s birthday in March 1826 the children designed a masquerade with commedia dell’arte figures and depictions of the months of the year. Two children represented Titania and Oberon, whose magic horn was intoned (an image Felix rediscovered later that year). Felix himself appeared as a Tyrolese peasant reciting newly written verses, including a poem about critics. 69 If a composer were too serious or happy, Felix mused, he put his listener to sleep or was commonplace; if he were longwinded or brief, his listener
was exhausted or could not warm up to the music; if he wrote clearly or profoundly, he was a poor rogue or rattled his listener’s head. However he wrote suited no one, so he should create as he wished and could.

  Leipzigerstrasse No. 3 drew a steady stream of visitors. During the spring of 1826 a young Swedish musician stayed at the Mendelssohn residence. Adolf Fredrik Lindblad (1801–1878) had arrived in Berlin to study with Zelter and Berger and became a close friend of Felix. 70 Motivated to revive Scandinavian folksong, Lindblad arranged twelve ballades, dedicated to Felix and published as Der Norden-Saal (1826), the first collection of Swedish folk music to reach an international audience. In July 1826 Felix met the young ballade composer and Stettin music director, Carl Loewe (1796–1869), whose Op. 1, including a dramatic setting of Goethe’s Erlkönig , had appeared in 1824. A talented pianist, Loewe accompanied his own performances of his Lieder. Felix shared his newer piano pieces 71 and, early in 1827, visited Pomerania to attend Loewe’s premiere of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. Late in 1826 the Mendelssohns again welcomed Moscheles, who arrived on November 11. Moscheles celebrated Fanny’s birthday, gave two public concerts, and heard Felix’s Sonata in E major, Op. 6 and other piano works, the Trumpet Overture Op. 101, and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, presented as a piano duet by the siblings and then with a full orchestra, “which for the first time brought to light its richness of coloring.” 72 Felix composed for him the Perpetuum mobile in C major (Op. 119, published posthumously in 1873), a thinly disguised reworking of the finale of Weber’s Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 24. 73 At the time, Karl Möser was preparing the Berlin premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Moscheles attended the rehearsals. At one (November 12) Felix reduced the complex score at the piano, while at the performance (November 27), he joined the orchestra, probably as a violinist. 74

  In 1826 Felix’s productivity continued unabated; as in 1825, the annual harvest culminated in a seminal masterpiece, the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. Impressed by Felix’s “gigantic strides,” Moscheles nevertheless observed that few, other than Zelter and Berger, truly recognized the youth’s genius. One musical authority who steadfastly opposed Felix’s progress was Spontini. On June 14, 1826, Hermann Franck published in Marx’s journal a damning review of Spontini’s opera Fernand Kortez ; Felix was implicated by his association with Franck and Marx. 75 For Franck, the Italian’s gaudy spectacles—the mutiny of Cortez’s army, a cavalry charge with live horses, the burning of the Spanish fleet, and an Aztec temple with sacrificial victims—magnified rather than relieved the monotony of the vapid music. Franck’s comments completed the rupture between Marx and Spontini, who now “led the whole opposition against Mendelssohn.” Thus, when Felix visited Spontini on July 6 to discuss the premiere of Die Hochzeit des Camacho , 76 the royal Kapellmeister refused to commit to a date, and the opera did not reach the stage until April 1827.

  Ex. 5.7a: Mendelssohn, Fugue in E ♭ major (1826)

  Ex. 5.7b: J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion (1729), No. 15

  The compositions of 1826 alternately project old and new stylistic personae , as if Felix, having broken through to the mature, modern idiom of the Octet, gauged its originality by reverting in other works to older styles. Thus, we encounter an etude-like Vivace in C minor that studiously treats its principal theme in mirror inversion, and two Bachian piano fugues, one, in a severe C# minor, a virtuoso double fugue, 77 the other, in E ♭ major, seemingly modeled on the recitative from the St. Matthew Passion in which Jesus prophesies his betrayal ( ex. 5.7a, b ). 78 Looming over these historicist curiosities is the impressive Te Deum , for eight-part choir and continuo, conceived for the Singakademie, where, in a late extension of baroque continuo practice, Zelter habitually supported his ensemble from the piano. Finished on December 5, the Te Deum was rehearsed in February 1827 and performed two years later, with Felix presiding at the piano. 79

  Its twelve movements contain an eclectic mixture of eighteenth- and even seventeenth-century styles. Its inspiration was Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum (1743), which Felix arranged in 1828; Felix’s Te Deum begins by paraphrasing Handel’s final chorus ( ex. 5.8 a, b ), with the traditional D-major melody intoned over a “walking” bass line. Handelian textures abound too in the brisk double fugue of Tu rex gloriae (No. 7), 80 and in Per singulos dies (No. 10), for double four-part choirs, with sprightly, high-pitched figures in the sopranos that imitate the clarino register of Handel’s trumpets. On the other hand, the graceful Te ergo quaesumus (No. 8), for four soloists, is redolent of Mozart. The most exotic section of the work is the Sanctus in the Tibi cherubim (No. 4), in which Felix imitates seventeenth-century Italian polychoral music, as if transplanting us from Berlin to Venice to ponder the antiphonal mysteries of Gabrieli and Willaert in St. Mark’s ( ex. 5.9 ). No less moving is the Miserere of the penultimate Dignare Domine (No. 11); here Felix weaves a dense web of sixteen-part counterpoint, scored for two double choirs (each with four soloists) and based on an expressive figure spanning a ninth. The most original section of the composition, it yields to a Handelian finale, which revives the baroque textures of the opening.

  Ex. 5.8a: Handel, Dettingen Te Deum (1743), Final Chorus

  Ex. 5.8b: Mendelssohn, Te Deum (1826), Opening Chorus

  The juxtaposition of old and new styles rises to a compositional dialectic in the Sieben Charakterstücke , Op. 7, dedicated to Ludwig Berger and published by February 1827. 81 Between 1824 and 1826 Felix wrote seven piano miniatures and shaped them into a cycle fitted with expressive German headings. Wolfgang Dinglinger has demonstrated how they alternate between disparate historical styles, 82 including, in one group, a Bachian invention and sarabande (Nos. 1 and 6) and Handelian fugue (No. 3), and, in the other, three “modern” sonata-form movements (Nos. 2, 4, and 7). No. 5 bridges the two groups. It is an erudite fugue crammed with augmentation, diminution, and mirror inversion, as “though the composer officially wished to demonstrate how diligently he had studied and mastered his subject through counterpoint.” 83 Not surprisingly, some scholars have detected here Bachian echoes, though another inspiration was Beethoven, for Felix designed his composition as an acceleration fugue, a device he would have examined in the finale of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A ♭ major, Op. 110 (1822).

  Ex. 5.9 : Mendelssohn, Te Deum (1826), No. 4

  The “older” pieces of Op. 7 convey serious affects—thus, Nos. 1 and 6, both in E minor, are marked sanft, mit Empfindung (gently, with expression) and sehnsüchtig (yearningly)—while the “newer” pieces are in distinctly lighter moods. The cycle concludes with a nimble Presto in E major, which impressed Robert Schumann as adumbrating the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. 84 Felix transports us to fairyland with scurrying, pianissimo staccato figures; at the end, all vanishes in a turn to the minor, with arpeggiations rising over low lying bass chords—as Hermann Franck noted, reenacting the conclusion of the scherzo from the Octet: “All flies past hastily, without rest, gathering together in colorful throngs, and then scattering in a puff.” 85

  Felix reemployed the same key to celebrate the “modern” in the only piano sonata he saw through the press, Op. 6, completed in March 1826 and released later that year by the Berlin firm of Friedrich Laue. According to Schumann, here Felix touched “Beethoven with his right hand, while looking up to him as to a saint, and being guided at the other by Carl Maria von Weber (with whom it would be more possible to be on a human footing).” 86 If Weber’s influence is evident in the vivacious virtuosity of the finale, elsewhere Felix’s music is steeped in the late piano sonatas of Beethoven. Points of contact include the singing lyricism of the first movement, pairings of keys separated by a step, special pedal effects, expanded registers and broadly spaced chords, the cyclic use of thematic material (thus, the conclusion of the first movement returns at the end of the finale), and the incorporation of a free, unmeasured recitative into the slow movement.

  The influence of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 101 (1817), is especially
evident. Both sonatas open with Allegretti in meter; though Beethoven’s movement is in A major, it begins “out-of-key” in E major, the tonic of Felix’s composition. The second movements of the sonatas offer a march and minuet, and continue with expressive Adagios linked, via thematic recalls from the first movements, to Allegro finales. Like Beethoven, Felix inaugurates his Adagio with an E-major chord (in first inversion) and turning motive. While Beethoven treats his motive in two-part imitative counterpoint, Felix builds up a denser counterpoint of four descending imitative entries. Marked senza tempo , his Adagio begins with an unmetered recitative alternating with a hymnlike Andante, as if searching for a theme, a quest ultimately answered by the extroverted finale (and seemingly related to a similar process in the concluding movements of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A ♭ , Op. 110).

  Ex. 5.10 : Mendelssohn, String Quintet in A major, Op. 18 (1826), First Movement

  In the spring of 1826 the Octet cast its lengthening shadow over a remarkable chamber work, the String Quintet in A major, Op. 18. Finished at the end of May, the original version comprised an Allegro, Scherzo, Minuet and Trio, and Allegro vivace . 87 As in the Octet, Felix here painted with a broad brush. In the exposition of the first movement, the opening graceful, Mozartean theme yields to accommodate a second thematic group in the dominant, and a third, closing group in the submediant F# minor, an unexpected intrusion of a distinctive, now familiar style ( ex. 5.10 )—pianissimo , with staccato and pizzicato articulations, and playful cross rhythms disrupting the meter—as if an otherwise conventional sonata form momentarily fell under the spell of an elfin world.