Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  The life and career of Eduard Gans (1797–1839), with whom Felix studied legal history and natural law, intersected meaningfully with the Mendelssohns, for the jurist’s career was bound up with the question of Jewish assimilation into the modern Prussian state. The son of a prosperous banker who had died insolvent in 1813, Gans studied with Thibaut and finished a dissertation in 1819 on Roman contract law. By 1820 Gans had returned to Berlin and, in the reactionary environment of the Carlsbad Decrees, established a Union for the Culture and Science of Jews. He also joined the Society of Friends (Gesellschaft der Freunde ), organized in 1792 to counter the “terrible state” (Unwesen ) of Orthodox Judaism, and there met two of its founding members, Joseph and Abraham Mendelssohn.

  For a while Gans pondered establishing a Jewish colony in America, but instead he came to support the assimilation of Jews into the dominant Prussian culture and likened the process to a river flowing into a sea (“neither the Jews will perish nor Judaism dissolve; in the larger movement of the whole they will seem to have disappeared, and yet they will live on as the river lives on in the ocean” 93 ). But when Gans sought a professorship at the university, the king summarily declared Jews ineligible. Gans’s conversion to Christianity in 1825 enabled him to join the faculty, and he became Hegel’s friend and eventually prepared his Philosophy of Law for publication in 1833. In politics Gans adopted increasingly liberal views, and when he commented favorably about the July 1830 Revolution in Paris, his lectures, which drew audiences of over a thousand, came under suspicion from the authorities. Felix’s 1828 lecture notes clarify that Gans viewed the French Revolution as the defining moment of the modern period, when “all other histories paused,” and when the Hegelian dialectical process indelibly affected the ancien regime ; thus, Prussia was no longer an absolute state, but a “guardianship” state. 94 Gans’s fervent desire, well ahead of his time, was to advance a pan-European synthesis. While playing out the unpredictable role of the assimilated Jew in Berlin society, Gans enjoyed social intercourse with the Mendelssohns and became the “commander and protector of the younger ones.” 95 A “mixture of man, child, and savage,” 96 he actively pressed for the hand of Rebecka, with whom he read Plato, but in 1831, as we shall see, lost the prize to a worthy competitor.

  IV

  Between lectures Felix pursued several new compositions. In January 1828, he drafted a sprightly Etude in E minor, later reused in the Rondo capriccioso , Op. 14. 97 By February a considerably larger work was forming in his mind, an orchestral overture on Goethe’s two short poems Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt ). 98 Felix’s musical inspiration was once again Beethoven, for whom a memorial concert, in which Felix performed a piano trio, was given on March 26. 99 Beethoven’s cantata, Op. 112 on the same poems had appeared in 1822, and in 1824 Marx had actually criticized his favorite composer for representing the solitude of a becalmed vessel by a chorus and orchestra. 100 Quite likely Marx encouraged Felix to “set” the poems without text, as part of the theorist’s agendum to test music’s capacity to express substantive ideas. Indeed, in a spirited defense of programmatic music published in May 1828, Über Malerei in der Tonkunst (On Painting in Music ), Marx identified Felix as a “student” of Beethoven who had brought “this idea to perfection, expressing Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage without using Goethe’s words,” 101 as if Marx were already familiar with Felix’s score (the first version was not performed until September).

  Among Felix’s lesser works of the year is a setting of the Marian antiphon Ave maris stella , commissioned in June by the prima donna Anna Milder-Hauptmann, whom Lea described as a “cold princess.” 102 Composed on one day in July, it received its premiere at the Berlin Marienkirche on May 27, 1829. 103 Felix divided the celebrated Vespers hymn into two sections. Mary’s invocations (Ave maris stella, … funda nos in pace , “Hail, star of the sea,” … “disperse us in peace”) are set in a quasi-operatic, Mozartean vein, with florid embellishments tailored for Milder’s voice. A dissonant Allegro in the minor mode forms the center of the work, with energetic supplications for solve vincla reis (“Loosen the chains of evil”), which yield to an abridged return of the opening, lending the work a rounded ternary, ABÁ shape.

  “You see [Felix] is the fashion,” Fanny wrote to Klingemann; 104 indeed, 1828 brought two commissions—the tercentenary of Albrecht Dürer’s death in April, and an assembly of physicians and scientists in September. Felix hurriedly composed two festive cantatas, which have fallen into obscurity, largely owing to their mediocre texts. Sebastian Hensel described the occasions as “universal festivals,” by which “the Germans tried to forget their want of political union”; 105 the nationalistic subtexts of the cantatas are certainly not difficult to discern.

  On the first occasion (April 18, 1828) the philologist E. H. Tölken extolled Dürer as the founder of German art, and the archaeologist Konrad Levezow celebrated Dürer’s art as a testimonial to Christian piety. 106 Held in the Singakademie before a royal audience, the festival was a lavish affair, with decorations by Johann Gottfried Schadow and Schinkel. Behind the orchestra appeared a wall in the patriotic colors of red and gold, and in the center stood a six-foot statue of Dürer, framed by smaller statues symbolizing four facets of his work—painting, geometry, perspective, and military engineering. Above the statue loomed a painting based upon a Dürer woodcut (The Peace of the World Redeemer in the Lap of the Everlasting Father ). 107 For the overture Felix pressed into service the Trumpet Overture. After Tölken’s address came the cantata, a score of 143 pages lasting one hour and fifteen minutes. At a dinner feast Schadow feted Felix and proclaimed him an honorary member of the Academy of Art.

  From all indications, Felix struggled to find inspiration in Levezow’s insipid verses. Composed in February and March in about six weeks, the cantata included choruses, solo arias, and recitatives (“dry,” i.e., performed at a piano, and “accompanied,” with orchestral support)—in all fifteen numbers divided into two parts, each culminating in a fugue. The choruses and arias are thoroughly Handelian and reflect Zelter’s deepening attraction to that composer, evidenced by Zelter’s performances of Joshua (1827), Judas Maccabaeus , Alexander’s Feast , and Samson (1828), and Messiah (1829; a planned performance of Acis and Galatea in an arrangement by Felix did not materialize). 108 The distinctly Bachian recitatives seem to anticipate Felix’s efforts to commemorate the Thomaskantor the following year by reviving the St. Matthew Passion.

  Ex. 6.10 : Mendelssohn, Dürer Cantata (1828), No. 1

  The cantata opens with an expansive plagal cadence later reworked in the unusual conclusion of the Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture ( ex. 6.10 ). The ensuing orchestral Festmusik presents three strains of a marchlike theme that recurs throughout the cantata as a unifying device; in the first number, this theme leads to a chorus imploring the temple of art to open its gate to an unnamed artist, not identified until the third number, where Felix was unable to elevate musically Levezow’s mundane revelation, “Albrecht Dürer ward er genannt” (“He was called Albrecht Dürer”). There follows a review of the virtuous Dürer, who rises to the heavens, aided by flowery metaphors—he is a rock uplifted to the clouds, an eagle soaring beneath the sun.

  The second part associates Dürer’s divine gifts with Christ the Redeemer. “Gaze upon Dürer’s sacred works,” the amateur poet urges, and the devout will “see the countenance of the Redeemer,” the “radiant light of hope.” Here Felix conceived the most imaginative portion of the score (No. 10), a tenor aria with violin solo (written for Eduard Rietz) and chorus. In the text the burning tears of a penitent find solace in Dürer’s sacred art. The music begins with a questioning recitative for the violin, which then introduces a falling, sighing figure accompanied by string chords ( ex. 6.11a ). A simple chorale-like melody ( ex. 6.11b ) expresses the restorative power of Dürer’s art. These two thematic elements alternate before the movement concludes with more recitative-like flourishes in the solo violin
. The sobering, G-minor tints and brooding tremolos of the aria left their mark on the slow movement of the Reformation Symphony ( ex. 6.11c ), which Felix may have associated with the forceful spirituality of Dürer’s art.

  For one of the soloists, Eduard Devrient, the cantata did not reflect Felix’s genius. 109 Nor was Devrient convinced by Felix’s cantata for Alexander von Humboldt, who in 1827 had returned to Berlin as the Prussian monarch’s scientific and cultural advisor. Initially, the world-traveled scientist faced an uncertain repatriation, since some nobility regarded him as a Francophile, but he allayed this concern in November, by lecturing on geography at the university. These lectures, which ran through April 1828, later formed the basis of his masterpiece, Cosmos , a two-thousand-page “sketch of a physical description of the universe.” Their success encouraged Humboldt to offer at the Singakademie additional lectures, open to the public; here, in a forum most unusual for the time, royalty, aristocrats, commoners, and women attended, among them, Fanny (“Gentlemen may laugh as much as they like,” she wrote, “but it is delightful that we too have the opportunity given us of listening to clever men” 110 ).

  Ex. 6.11a: Mendelssohn, Dürer Cantata (1828), No. 10

  Ex. 6.11b: Mendelssohn, Dürer Cantata (1828), No. 10

  Ex. 6.11c: Mendelssohn, Reformation Symphony, Op. 107 (1830), Andante

  Humboldt endeavored to counteract the influence of the “nature philosophers,” including Hegel, who wished to “comprehend nature a priori by means of intuitive processes … without using scientific methodology.” 111 A new opportunity to promote Humboldt’s agendum came in September, when the state allowed him to convene an international convention of naturalists and physicians. Six hundred scientists converged upon Berlin, including the Englishman Charles Babbage, who in 1833 would design a prototypical calculator, and the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss, who piqued Humboldt’s interest in terrestrial magnetism. From Warsaw came Professor Jarocki, traveling with an introverted, eighteen-year-old musician, Frédéric Chopin, who saw Felix but was too insecure to approach him. 112 At the opening session in the Singakademie (September 18, 1828), Felix directed his cantata, and Humboldt gave an address on the social utility of science.

  The text of the cantata, by Ludwig Rellstab, charts the progress of the natural world from chaos to unity. Midway in the work a voice of reason interrupts the earth’s struggle against the raging elements, and the light of truth countervails the strife. Now the competing forces collaborate to create the “glorious world,” and the Lord is asked to “bless the strivings of the united force” ( ex. 6.12 ). Writing to Klingemann, Fanny commented on Felix’s unusual scoring—male choir, clarinets, horns, trumpets, timpani, cellos, and double basses: “As the naturalists follow the rule of Mahomet and exclude women from their paradise, the choir consists only of the best male voices of the capital.” 113 Felix chose a male choir to invoke the sound and traditions of male singing societies in Berlin, including Zelter’s Liedertafel , founded in 1809 during the French occupation. Thus, Felix’s music, apportioned into seven choruses, solo numbers, and recitatives, relies less on the Handelian and Bachian models of the Dürer Cantata than on the male choruses of Weber’s Der Freischütz , which evoke a brand of German patriotism associated not so much with the court as with the educated middle class.

  Ex. 6.12 : Mendelssohn, Humboldt Cantata (1828)

  As an occasional piece the Humboldt Cantata was quickly forgotten, though it later had a strange political afterlife: in 1959, the centenary of the scientist’s death, Felix’s score was revived by the German Democratic Republic. An article appeared in the East German journal Musik und Gesellschaft , where quotations from Rellstab’s text were retouched to conform to the needs of a secular state. Thus, in the final chorus, “Ja, segne Herr was wir bereiten” (“Yes, bless, O Lord, what we prepare”) became “Ja, schützet nun, was wir bereiten” (“Yes, now protect what we prepare”). 114 Alexander von Humboldt’s reaction to the 1828 premiere is not known, although the conference did bring him closer to the Mendelssohns. At Gauss’s urging he renewed his interest in magnetic observations and constructed a copper hut in the garden of Leipzigerstrasse No. 3. Here, while Felix rehearsed the St. Matthew Passion in the Gartensaal , Humboldt and his colleagues recorded changes in the magnetic declination, measurements also taken concurrently in Paris and at the bottom of a mine in Freiberg. Within a few years, what had begun in the Mendelssohns’ garden as a modest laboratory became part of a “chain of geomagnetic observation stations” that stretched around the world, an early instance of international scientific exchange. 115

  Felix’s most significant accomplishment of 1828 was the orchestral overture on Goethe’s Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt . In 1787, returning from Sicily to Italy on a French merchantman, the poet had been becalmed within sight of Capri. A resurgent wind averted disaster when the ship began to drift toward the Faraglioni Rocks, and in 1795 Goethe compressed his experiences—including the “deathly stillness” and “monstrous” breadth of the ocean—into the two poems. Now, in 1828, Felix, having seen the ocean only once (at Bad Doberan in 1824) and never having sailed, endeavored to translate Goethe’s metaphors of stasis and kinesis into orchestral images, as an example of Marxian programmatic music.

  Marx’s treatise Über Malerei in der Tonkunst had allied “modern” music with the visual arts to reorient the Horatian simile linking poetry and painting, to explore ties between painting and music. Felix’s musical inspiration was Beethoven’s cantata—among other similarities, the two works share their key, D major, display broadly spaced sonorities, and are bipartite, with linking transitions 116 —yet there is compelling evidence Felix approached his score as a tone painting. Thus, he “wanted to avoid an overture with [a slow] introduction”; rather, the work comprised “two separate tableaux.” 117 What is more, Lea reported that around this time Felix began to paint, 118 an activity that found its counterpart in Felix’s manipulation of instrumental colors and timbres. To expand the orchestral palette and extremes of its registers, he added a piccolo, contrabassoon, and serpent (a now obsolete bass instrument related to the cornet family), and, in the coda, a third trumpet. And he experimented with subtle instrumental mixtures, as in the opening harmony, a symmetrical string sonority, the middle of which is inflected by clarinets and bassoons ( ex. 6.13a ). Calm Sea projects static pedal points in the neutral strings, with occasional touches of woodwinds, and, at the end, a fluttering figure in the flute, the first suggestion of a breeze. In contrast, Prosperous Voyage begins with a transition energized by woodwind and brass chords, as, in Goethe’s classical allusion, Aeolus releases his winds.

  Ex. 6.13a: Mendelssohn, Calm Sea (1828)

  Ex. 6.13b: Mendelssohn, Prosperous Voyage (1828)

  Ex. 6.13c: Mendelssohn, Prosperous Voyage (1828)

  The thematic material of the overture derives from a murky motive, initially submerged in the contrabass, that outlines the tonic D-major triad in its unstable first-inversion, descending from the root D through A to F#. This motive washes over much of Calm Sea , as in bars 36–40, where five statements appear in the first and second violins, clarinet, cellos, and double bass, and underscore the impenetrable, static quality of Goethe’s verse. But in Prosperous Voyage , the motive undergoes metamorphosis. Its characteristic dotted rhythm reemerges in the windswept first theme, while the lyrical second theme, which later served as a musical greeting between Felix and Droysen, outlines the motive in ascending form ( ex. 6.13b, c ). The tonal stasis of Calm Sea , primarily associated with a D major destabilized by non-root-position chords, gives way in Prosperous Voyage to a tonal voyage in sonata form that eventually finds haven in the port. The coda depicts the triumphant ending of the journey, a scene conceived by Felix (Goethe’s poem ends with just the sighting of land): the dropping of anchor, cannonades from the shore greeting the vessel, and joyous fanfares performed by three trumpets, which secure the tonic triad in root position. But the surprise ending, with its pi
anissimo plagal cadence (D major–G-major–D-major), brings us full circle to the beginning, where the inaugural harmonic progression moves to the subdominant G major. As in the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, the end thus refers to the beginning, and Felix emerges as a romantic tone poet, whose vivid score not only depicts images in Goethe’s poetry but also extrapolates from its verses new interpretations.

  After Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage was premiered privately on September 7, 1828, 119 the concertmaster of the king’s orchestra, Leopold Ganz, offered to present it publicly. But Felix declined for two reasons. 120 In effect, he himself had become becalmed in his compositions; the public was tired of his work, and he had “gently slipped into forgetfulness,” where he wished to remain until his own return from travels abroad. Felix was still recovering from the failure of Camacho and the intense scrutiny of the public eye. There was, however, another cause for concern: “It was a great grief to me to hear that the King’s band has refused to be led by me in public; but I cannot feel hurt, for I am too young and too little thought of.” The exact nature of this contretemps—perhaps it was an anti-Semitic incident—remains a mystery, but the hurt was sufficient to convince Felix to withdraw. Not until 1832 was the overture heard publicly in Berlin; meanwhile, he repeated it at his residence, including at least one performance with Fanny as a piano duet, with lights dimmed to create the appropriate mood. 121