Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Much of the Scherzo, launched by a mischievous five-voice fugato, is in a staccato, pianissimo style, and the movement concludes with a delicately rising arpeggiation in the first violin, reaffirming its kinship with the scherzo of the Octet. For the Trio of the Minuet, 88 Felix crafted an austere double canon, in which the first viola mediates between the two canonic strands, by participating now in one, now the other. The purpose of this erudition becomes clear in the finale, a sonata-rondo complex in the middle of which the second canonic subject returns in a fugato. As in the Octet, a contrapuntal struggle thus energizes the development of the finale, and the soaring second theme of the finale, assigned to the first violin and supported by lush tremolos, completes the allusion by reviving the opening texture of the Octet. As we shall see, when Felix published the Quintet in 1833, he recast the work and jettisoned the Minuet in favor of a pensive Intermezzo in memory of the deceased Rietz. But in 1826 Felix still basked in the glow of the Octet and delighted in its Faustian apparitions and riddles.

  Also wrapped in the same airy gauze of the Octet’s third movement is Felix’s masterpiece of 1826, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Here the scherzo encouraged creative association: Goethe’s golden anniversary of Oberon and Titania in the Walpurgisnachtstraum stimulated the short leap to Shakespeare’s “dream.” But before undertaking this veritably Mendelssohnian work, Felix created another orchestral work, the Trumpet Overture in C major, Op. 101, completed on March 4, 1826. 89 With its use of a recurring motto, third-related harmonies, and colorful approach to orchestration, Op. 101 impresses as an unjustly neglected Vorstudie for its more famous sibling. Thus the robust trumpet fanfares (according to Devrient, later redeployed in the Hebrides Overture) introduce the overture, figure near the end of the development and beginning of the reprise, and reappear in the final cadence. Continually reharmonized, they function as a unifying motto. Spanning the interval of a third, they promote mediant relationships (e.g., C major versus E major or A major, a third above and below), further explored in the development, where Felix juxtaposes shifting wind colors against a neutral harmonic wash in the strings. Many of these techniques resurface in more sophisticated ways in the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, though, Devrient assures us, the “Trumpet” Overture remained Abraham’s favorite composition of his son.

  On July 7, 1826 Felix wrote to Fanny of his desire to undertake an “immense boldness”—to dream the “midsummernightsdream.” 90 That summer his creative center shifted to the garden, where he played games with his friends; there, it appears, he conceived the immortal music. The work cost him immense effort: when he shared a draft with Marx, his friend approved the four introductory chords and elfin dance but could perceive “no Midsummer Night’s Dream ” in the rest. At Marx’s prodding, Felix recast the work, filled it with a spectrum of characteristic motives, added material for Bottom and the Mechanicals, 91 and dated the completed score August 6. In one month, Felix thus produced a seminal work of German musical romanticism and transferred the spirit of Shakespeare’s comedy into the realm of pure instrumental music. But there is striking evidence another composition had a role in shaping the overture. On July 17, Felix participated as a violinist in a performance of the Overture to Weber’s final opera, Oberon ; writing to his father and Fanny, Felix outlined several of its motives, including those associated with the magical horn, the elves, and the Turkish march, 92 all prominent in the opera’s libretto, based on C. M. Wieland’s epic poem Oberon (1780). In composing the Shakespearean overture, then, Felix conceived a kind of operatic overture with recurring motives that “weave like delicate threads throughout the whole.” 93 Of course, the early audiences that heard the work at the Mendelssohn residence depended utterly upon their knowledge of the comedy to understand the overture. Still, Felix’s music was entrancing enough to provoke one “highly unmusical Frenchman,” unversed in Shakespeare, to react, after hearing Felix and Fanny play it as a duet, c’est comme un songe (“it’s like a dream”). 94

  Between 1797 and 1810 A. W. Schlegel had translated seventeen Shakespeare plays, all reissued in 1825, when Felix presumably became intimately acquainted with Ein Sommernachtstraum . For Schlegel, Shakespeare occupied a central place in the Western canon, prompting the critic during the 1790s to review each play in a Viennese lecture series. Praising Shakespeare’s “organic” unity, Schlegel defended the bard’s liberties with the Aristotelian unities, declaring him “more systematic than any other author,” through “those antitheses which contrast individuals, masses, and even worlds in picturesque groups….” 95 Here Schlegel may have had in mind the fanciful interactions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream between distinct groups—the elves, lovers, Athenian court, and bumptious tradesmen. Like Shakespeare, Felix delineated these characters through sharp contrasts, generating a network of “characteristic” motives nevertheless interrelated and susceptible to subtle manipulations.

  Thus, after the wind chords ( ex. 5.11 a ), Felix conjured up the elves with pianissimo staccati in the violins, divided a 4 ( ex. 5.11 b ). The first forte passage for full orchestra, with its majestic descending scale, connotes the court of Athens ( ex. 5.11 c ), while the yearning second theme, again given to the violins but performed legato, in deliberate rhythmic values, suggests the pairs of lovers ( ex. 5.11 d ). The closing section of the exposition introduces the tradesmen with rustic drones and a braying figure for Bottom ( ex. 5.11 e ). 96 And the horn fanfares that close the exposition symbolize the royal hunting party of Theseus and Hippolyta ( ex. 5.11 f ).

  All these motives impress us vividly in different ways, yet they all spring from the magical wind chords that, like a motto, frame the overture and mark the recapitulation. Thus, embedded in the chords is a descending tetrachord (E–D#–C♮E;–B), which transforms itself into the natural minor version of the elves (E–D♮E;–C♮–B) and major version of Theseus’ court (E–D♯–C♯–B). In a further metamorphosis, the lovers’ motive, now in the dominant B major, compresses the fourth of the tetrachord to the interval of a third (B–A♯–A♮–G♯). But these subtle shifts account only partly for the chords’ special properties. Bearing fermatas, they are suspended outside the brisk Allegro di molto tempo of the composition. They evoke a timeless quality and assist the audience in suspending belief and accepting the ensuing illusions. Along with the threefold statement of the chords, Felix masterfully inserts individual, prolonged wind chords at several points into the composition, temporal dislocations that disperse their potent charm throughout the motivic network.

  Ex. 5.11 : Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Op. 21 (1826), motives

  The motto chords are harmonically unconventional, ambiguous, and dreamlike. Felix begins with the ambivalent third E–G♯, which could mean either E major (the actual tonic of the work) or C♯ minor. We are on more secure ground with the second chord, the dominant B major, but are then seduced by an unusual turn to the subdominant A in its minor form—the first of many modal shifts between major and minor—before the fourth chord defines the tonic. And finally, there is the distinctive scoring of the chords, with their blended colors: flutes alone, and then flutes coupled with clarinets, bassoons, and horns. The exposed, evanescent flutes, which almost inevitably begin slightly out of tune, lend the music an almost unreal affect (and recall Cherubini’s bon mot that two flutes were “worse” than one 97 ). Containing the seeds of change, the chords thus represent the nectar of the “love-in-idleness” flower, through which Puck transforms the mortals. It is as if Puck leaps from the stage to befuddle our senses as the overture begins. The agent that transports us to fairyland, the chords are ultimately “no more yielding than a dream.”

  The idea of metamorphosis also inspired Felix to adapt the conventions of sonata form. At the most obvious level, the wind chords interrupt the mechanical unfolding of the sonata principle, which now becomes a dynamic, flexible process bending to the caprice of the play. Thus the exposition, expanded to introduce the colorful drama
tis personae , presents the essential “argument.” The dampened development, emerging seamlessly in an undertone from the bright forte chords of the exposition, transfers us to the play’s central acts in the forest, where the lovers’ affections are crossed, and where Titania falls in love with Bottom, whose head is transformed into that of an ass. The lovers’ and Mechanicals’ wanderings and echoing horn calls of the hunt are magically captured in a series of tonal deviations, all suffused by a softly lit orchestration, with pointillistic dabs of wind colors set against the pianissimo revelries of the elves. Only at the end of the development does the elves’ energy momentarily abate, as the lovers fall asleep through a protracted ritardando , gently dovetailed with the motto chords to mark the recapitulation. In the final section, we return to the Athenian court, but when the overture appears to draw to a regal conclusion, Felix springs one more surprise and reintroduces the elves’ music as a coda, for Puck’s charming epilogue. As the elves bless Theseus’s house, Felix transforms his motive into a serene, descending gesture, an apparent quotation of the Mermaid’s Song from Act 2 of Weber’s Oberon ( ex. 5.12a, b ), and perhaps alluding to Act 2, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play, where Oberon recalls having “heard a mermaid, on a dolphin’s back,/Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,/That the rude sea grew civil at her song,/and certain stars shot madly from their spheres,/To hear the sea maid’s music.” Then the overture concludes with the timeless wind chords, and we are released from Puck’s spell.

  During the summer of 1826, Felix thus led a “fantastic, dreamlike life.” 98 In the family gardens he did gymnastics exercises, and established a swim club, for which he set Klingemann’s verses to humorous songs. 99 An accomplished equestrian, Felix made excursions with Schubring to the Schönhauser Gardens near the village of Pankow. Resting on a shady lawn after one energetic ride, Felix listened attentively to a passing fly and later applied musical onomatopoeia to incorporate its buzzing into the overture. 100

  Ex. 5.12a: Weber, Oberon (1826), Act II, Mermaid’s Song

  Ex. 5.12b: Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Op. 21 (1826), Coda

  In many ways, Felix’s life thus imitated art. If Shakespeare remained his passion, with Klingemann’s encouragement he now became a devoté of Jean Paul Richter, whose quirky novels, teeming with digressions and intrusions of the narrator, offered meteor-like visions of humanity that captivated a generation of German youth coming of age. And Felix’s own poetic musings found an outlet in the Gartenzeitung (Garden-Times ), a mock literary journal “founded” in August 1826, just weeks after the completion of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. Launched on August 21 under the putative editorship of the first-century Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos (i.e., Klingemann), the paper comprised fanciful contributions from Felix’s circle, including his father’s friends such as Zelter and the Humboldts, 101 in the form of aphorisms, short essays, poems, and drawings. 102 Felix himself contributed a “puzzle” canon, two sketches of the garden house and gardens, and dithyrambic and Sapphic poems. 103 In one game the friends crafted poems based on the “theme,” “If loving nature,/If the spirit gave you wings,/follow my light traces,/Up, to the rosy hills!” 104 One of Felix’s intimates wove these lines into forty verses titled Der alte Ariel (The Old Ariel ), revealing that The Tempest also inspired Shakespearean reveries that summer. Felix recorded his own effort in a “Dithyrambic Non-Gloss.” We might read its opening quatrain—“If loving nature/gave you strength’s pleasure,/Create freely and merrily!/Only youth may dare it.” 105 —as Felix’s motto for the summer of 1826, when his voice gave full expression, as Devrient noted, to “the Mendelssohn we possess and cherish.” 106

  Chapter 6

  1827–1829

  In the Public Eye

  The old, antiquated phoenix is only waiting for his funeral pile, and will not be long finding it, for the time is at hand, and we shall live to see great things. 1

  —Fanny to Klingemann, April 14, 1828

  Early on June 30, 1825, Zelter and the young builder C. T. Ottmer, escorted by bricklayers, carpenters, and the Singakademie management, assembled off Unter den Linden to lay the cornerstone of a new musical temple. Wielding a hammer, Zelter consecrated the first stone in the name of old Fasch. 2 Designed by K. F. Schinkel, architect of Berlin neoclassicism, the new Singakademie became a living musical museum, its construction linked to Zelter, master mason and guardian of the Prussian musical heritage: on July 11 he secreted official documents inside the cornerstone and on December 11, his birthday, observed the capping-off ceremony. 3 Work continued for about a year before Zelter held his first rehearsal in the new building; the public dedication followed on April 8, 1827, with a performance, appropriately, of Fasch’s monumental sixteen-voice Mass. Felix’s response was to compose his festive Te Deum for the new hall, which could accommodate 250 singers and an orchestra of 50, arranged in an amphitheatric arch within an oblong hall 84 by 42 feet. 4 Zelter no doubt approved of the historicist composition, with its baroque, polychoral formations and ornate counterpoint, all furthering his agendum of glorifying past musical monuments. But by 1827, as Abraham realized, Felix had matured to the point that “his genius was now self-existent, and that further teaching would only fetter him.” 5

  The Octet and Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture had indeed unlocked for Felix musical romanticism, worlds removed from the eighteenth century finery of the Singakademie. The overture impressed Zelter variously as a meteor, airy phenomenon, and colliding mosquitoes descending to the earth. 6 But Felix’s testing of the power of instrumental music to express ideas external to music—an experiment encouraged by Zelter’s nemesis, A. B. Marx—may have strained the limits of the elder musician’s aesthetics. By early 1827 Felix’s formal lessons with Zelter were discontinued, to the irritation of the aging musician, who, as Devrient relates, maintained the adolescent had “not yet outgrown his leadership.” 7

  Furthering Felix’s new artistic independence were the growing performances of his music outside Berlin. Early in February, the Symphony in C minor, Op. 11, received praise in Leipzig for its youthful energy. 8 The same month, Felix departed for Stettin (Szczecin) in the Prussian province of Pomerania, where, on February 20, he performed the double Piano Concerto in A ♭ major with Loewe, who premiered the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and directed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Weber’s Konzertstück (Felix took up a violin part in the symphony and was the soloist in the Konzertstück , performed—unusual for the time—from memory). The overture did not fail to impress, despite its juxtaposition with Beethoven’s colossal score. A reviewer likened the ribald intrusions of the bassoon and English bass horn to a pair of ass’s ears in genteel company, and an artistic lady compared the fluttering, divided strings to swarms of mosquitoes. 9 During his visit, Felix also appeared in private soirées, where he dispatched from memory sonatas of Weber and Hummel, and Beethoven’s Hammerklavier , the culminating, “almost unplayable” fugue of which Felix “conquered” with a “roaring tempo.”

  I

  Having returned to Berlin, Felix corrected proofs for the piano-vocal score of Weber’s Oberon , brought out by Schlesinger in March. 10 Over-shadowing this editorial work were preparations for the premiere of Die Hochzeit des Camacho , finally scheduled for April at the Schauspielhaus. On finishing his opera in August 1825, Felix had submitted it to Count C. F. von Brühl, Intendant of the royal theater, who passed it on to Kapell-meister Spontini, holder of a near veto power. Playing the uncooperative bureaucrat, Spontini procrastinated before summoning Felix in July 1826. Ironically enough, Spontini resided in the same building on Markgrafenstrasse where Felix’s family had lived years before. But Spontini had transformed his quarters into a narcissistic gallery, with busts, medals, and sonnets in his praise, and a dais from which he received visitors. 11 Here Spontini deprecated Felix’s score and commented, while pointing through a window to the dome of the French Church, “Mon ami, il vous faut des idées grandes, grandes comme cette c
oupole ” (“My friend, you must have grand ideas, grand like that dome”). 12 Spontini demanded enough revisions to provoke Abraham into an angry exchange, forcing Brühl to intervene early in 1827. And there were other impediments. No sooner had stage rehearsals begun, early in April, 13 before Heinrich Blume (Don Quixote) contracted jaundice, so that the premiere was delayed until April 29.

  Despite late twentieth-century attempts to revive the opera, 14 Camacho has always occupied an uncomfortable position in Felix’s oeuvre. The librettist, variously identified as the Regisseur Baron Karl von Lichtenstein, Karl Klingemann, or the elder August Klingemann, remains unknown, although Rudolf Elvers has demonstrated that the Hanover writer Friedrich Voigts actively participated in at least the first act and probably the second as well. 15 The subject of the opera derives from Cervantes’ Don Quixote , the source for over one hundred operas. But few composers selected the episode of Camacho’s wedding from the second part of the novel (ch. 20–21), and of these only J. B. Schenk’s Der Dorfbarbier (The Village Barber , 1796) enjoyed some success.