Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Among his Scottish acquaintances was the composer John Thomson (1805–1841), later, on Felix’s advice, the first Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh. Thomson gave Felix a song, prompting an acknowledgment in English. In a creatively confused phrase, Felix thanked his friend for “renovating the recollections of the most happy hours” in Edinburgh. 76 But an introduction the following day to Thomson’s countryman, Sir Walter Scott, ended in disappointment. To meet the international celebrity (among Lea’s favorite authors), Felix and Klingemann traveled south to the Borders region along the Tweed River, where, between 1812 and 1818, Scott had committed the royalties of his immensely successful poetry to building Abbotsford, an eclectic, baronial mansion-cum -museum, rather like a review of his literary works, with artifacts from the fourteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Felix and Klingemann found the author about to depart and enjoyed at most a half hour of “superficial conversation.” There was no opportunity for Felix to perform for Scott, who knew Moscheles well and enjoyed flirting with his wife (in 1828 Moscheles had dedicated his Anklänge aus Schottland , a medley of Scottish folk tunes, to the “great wizard of the North”). Though still at the height of fame—Scott’s authorship of the anonymous Waverly novels had been revealed only in 1827—by 1829 he had suffered economic reverses owing to his publisher’s collapse and spent his remaining years repaying debts, “spinning gold from his entrails,” as Thomas Moore observed. Before returning to Edinburgh, Felix and Klingemann stopped at the nearby thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey at Melrose, where Felix sketched the fanciful red sandstone gargoyles.

  They started for the Highlands on August 1 by steaming up the Firth of Forth and traveling by carriage to Perth. Near Dunkeld, Felix sketched the Shakespearean “wood that wanders,” Birnam Wood. From Ossian’s Hall, a folly built by the Duke of Athol, he rendered the Falls of Braan, 77 nearby where, according to legend, the Celtic bard had died in a cave. This was Felix’s first Scottish encounter with Ossianic lore, reinforced, just days later, on the Isle of Staffa. Along Loch Tummel the travelers experienced inclement weather, which Felix captured in his drawings by rubbing in impressionistic clouds and “painting” gray mountains 78 with his pencil, a visual indistinctness that would find its musical counterpart in the Hebrides Overture. By August 6 they had “stumbled upon a bit of culture” on the Western coast, Fort William, though Klingemann recorded that the town had only one street.

  The next morning the two boarded the Maid of Morven and, after cruising down Loch Linnhe, disembarked at Oban. In 1826 the architect Schinkel had found there a community of about one hundred houses, from which one could “see almost all the Ossianic islands and cliffs, picturesque, eerie and awesome in the confused way they are thrown together.” 79 A mile up the coast Felix sketched the remnants of Dunollie Castle, the thirteenth-century stronghold of the MacDougalls, keepers of the Brooch of Lorne. The ruins appear on a promontory in the middleground, encircled by the gnarled foliation of a half-completed tree in the foreground, while in the background loom the distant outlines of two of the Hebrides, Mull and Morven (plate 10 ). Later that day the travelers boarded the steamer Ben Lomond ; navigating between the islands Felix had just drawn, it reached the quaint fishing port of Tobermory, where that evening Felix wrote to Berlin, “In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there.” 80 The “following” was a draft in piano score of the opening of the Hebrides Overture, complete with orchestral cues and dynamics and in nearly final form. Here we find the rising, three-tiered statement of the evocative bass motive, with layered chords above in the violins and winds (“passable,” was Fanny’s reaction; not “in vain” did the violins cling to their sustained F# 81 ). Indulging in romantic tone painting at its purest, he recorded synaesthetic experiences: the images of the Oban drawing became sonorous; the orchestra, a palette of softly mottled hues and shades, to capture the unforgettable Scottish sea- and landscapes.

  The inspiration for the overture thus predated August 8, when the Ben Lomond conveyed Felix and Klingemann to Fingal’s Cave on Staffa, six miles off the western coast of Mull. The seas were calm enough for them to land, though Felix again succumbed to queasiness, and deferred to Klingemann’s prose:

  Staffa, with its strange basalt pillars and caverns, is in all the picture books. We were put out in boats and lifted by the hissing sea up the pillar stumps to the famous Fingal’s Cave. A greener roar of waves never rushed into a stranger cavern—its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide gray sea within and without. 82

  In 1772, the botanist Joseph Banks had published a notice of the singular geological formation, with its plicated, polygonal columns that enticed a train of notable tourists, among them Samuel Johnson, Schinkel, Sir Walter Scott, Keats, Turner, Wordsworth, Queen Victoria, Jules Verne, Tennyson, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

  From Staffa Felix and Klingemann proceeded to the nearly desolate island of Iona, six miles to the south, where in 563 the Irish monk Columba had founded the stronghold of the early Celtic Christian Church, and where Scottish kings were interred. Once again Felix recorded no verbal impressions, though after visiting the ruins of the abbey, his companion commented: “Iona, one of the Hebrides-sisters—there is truly a very Ossianic and sweetly sad sound about that name—when in some future time … the wish arises to retire into the loneliest loneliness, I shall think of Iona, with its ruins of a once magnificent cathedral, the remains of a convent, the graves of ancient Scotch kings and still more ancient northern pirate-princes—with their ships rudely carved on many a monumental stone.” 83

  From Oban the travelers used several conveyances to reach Glasgow—horse-drawn open carts, a steam ferry at Inveraray to cross Loch Fyne, and a Clyde paddle-steamer; they even considered trying a new technological curiosity, a steam-coach, but the apparatus “stood idly by the roadside, … looking very ridiculous with a high funnel and a rudder.” 84 In Glasgow there was more stark evidence of the Industrial Revolution, a cotton mill with hundreds of sallow girls who toiled “there from their earliest days.” The Trossachs, which Klingemann thought “ought to published and packed up as supplements to Sir Walter Scott’s complete works,” provided an escape from civilization, though a storm nearly capsized their boat on Loch Lomond. Having returned to Glasgow, Felix authorized Fanny to choose the contents of his second volume of Lieder, Op. 9, 85 and then departed south with Klingemann on a mail coach.

  In Liverpool they separated on August 19, but not before boarding an American steamer from New York, the Napoleon , where Felix found a mahogany Broadwood piano. According to Klingemann, he played parts of Fanny’s Easter Sonata, a mysterious composition that has eluded scholarly inquiry. Roger Fiske believed it was synonymous with Felix’s Scottish Sonata, Op. 28, but both Fanny and Klingemann referred to it as her composition. 86 Compounding the confusion, in 1973 a recording of an “Easter” Sonata attributed to Felix appeared, but the authenticity of the manuscript, sequestered in private possession, remains unverified. 87 After Klingemann’s departure, Felix had one more Liverpudlian adventure: exploring a new railroad tunnel, he rode a car down a one-mile incline to the docks; when the wind extinguished its lights midway, for the first time in his life he saw nothing. 88

  While Klingemann returned to London, Felix continued to northern Wales, where he visited the Taylor family on their rented country residence, Coed Du (Black Wood), near Rhydymwyn in Flintshire. Through a letter from Benjamin Mendelssohn in Bonn, Felix had met Sarah Austin, whose brother, John Taylor, owned mines in Wales and England and a fashionable residence on Bedford Row in London. 89 With Taylor’s nephew Felix traveled to Bangor and Anglesey but, wary of inclement weather, thought the better of crossing from Holyhead to Dublin and returned to Coed Du. Playing the gentleman, he read Scott’s Guy Mannering , hunted with Mr. Taylor’s son, and visited his host’s lead mines (in one, at a
depth of five hundred feet, Felix contemplated the ending of his Reformation Symphony). He also sketched the opening of a festive recessional for Fanny’s wedding, scheduled for October 3 (events conspired against the timely completion of the piece, and Felix later incorporated it into the opening of the Organ Sonata Op. 65 No. 3 in A major 90 ). Much of his time he spent drawing and flirting with Mr. Taylor’s three daughters, for whom Felix composed the three Fantaisies , Op. 16, in which he transformed Welsh impressions into piano character pieces. No. 1, in a pensive A minor that yields to a lithesome Vivace in the major, depicted a bouquet of Anne’s carnations and roses, with rising arpeggiations to suggest the wafting scent. No. 2, for Honora, represented a creeping vine with trumpetlike flowers in her garden. Here Felix’s imagination unleashed a capricious scherzo in E minor, with fanfares and light, detached chords ( ex. 7.2 ; in 1939, this fantasy would serve another purpose, to accompany Toto’s escape from the Witch of the West in the American cultural icon, The Wizard of Oz ). No. 3 in E major, for the “prettiest” daughter, Susan, was titled The Rivulet , and lazily traced a meandering stream by which Felix and his hostesses had sketched.

  Ex. 7.2 : Mendelssohn, Fantasy in E minor, Op. 16 No. 2 (1829)

  V

  On September 6 Felix was once again in London. During the Scottish holiday he had begun to envision with Klingemann an “idyll” for his parents’ silver wedding anniversary, and now the idea materialized into a libretto for the Liederspiel Heimkehr aus der Fremde . The return to London also brought renewed composition. On September 14 Felix drafted for Sophia Louisa Dance (daughter of William Dance, treasurer of the Philharmonic Society) the piano “Song” in A major, released in 1832 as Op. 19b No. 4. 91 And the same day he completed the major work of the summer, the String Quartet in E ♭ , Op. 12. Like Op. 13, Op. 12 suggests engagement with Beethoven’s quartets; indeed, the Adagio introduction to the first movement recalls the opening of Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74, in the same key. But much of Felix’s composition impresses as fresh and original—the infectious Canzonetta in G minor, the middle of which becomes a fleet-footed scherzo; the expressive slow movement in B ♭ major that introduces the finale; and the formal elasticity of the whole. Thus, in the first movement the development commences with a feigned repeat of the exposition but then takes up a fresh theme. Much of the agitated finale, in the compound meter of , is centered on C minor; only in the coda, which recycles material from the first movement, does the music swerve to the true tonic, E ♭ . Finally, there is the secret dedication to Betty Pistor, whose initials, “B.P.,” appear at the head of the autograph. 92 Felix may have impressed Betty’s name into the Allegro of the first movement: its first theme begins with the prominent rising fourth, B ♭ –E ♭ , in German nomenclature B–Es, the three musical letters extractable from Betty’s name ( ex 7.3 ). Echolike, the first and fourth movements end with the same interval. But Felix’s feelings for Betty remained unreciprocated. In 1830 he learned of her engagement to the jurist Adolf Rudorff. By then the score had passed to Ferdinand David, who, on Felix’s instruction, altered the dedication to “B.R.,” by a deft stroke of the pen. 93 Felix never shared the dedication with Betty, fondly remembered as a “musical soul,” and she learned of it only some thirty years later. 94

  Three days after dating his quartet, Felix was seriously injured when he fell from a cabriolet that overturned and pinned his leg. He had intended to join Abraham in Holland and return to Berlin in time for Fanny’s wedding, but the recuperation took more than two months. Klingemann and other solicitous friends tended to him, and his physician, Dr. L. W. Kind, prescribed a jalapic purgative to promote digestion. 95 Meanwhile, Fanny’s wedding banns were read in Berlin, and she composed an organ processional in F major for the ceremony, 96 her first work for the instrument. On October 1 the betrothed couple signed a wedding contract with Abraham and Lea. Fanny’s fortune, calculated at nearly 19,000 thalers, earned interest of five percent as long as the principal remained under Abraham’s control; in addition, he agreed to supplement the sum with an annual income of 1500 thalers. 97 There was merriment on the eve of the wedding (Polterabend ), though at nine o’clock Fanny was still hastily composing an organ recessional in G major, 98 since Felix’s contribution had not arrived. On the morning of October 3 Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy penned a last, emotional letter to her brother and gazed adoringly at his portrait, without “doing Hensel an injustice.” 99 The ceremony was in the afternoon; Wilmsen, officiant for Felix’s confirmation, presided, and Zelter’s assistant A. E. Grell played the organ. The couple moved into a wing of the Gartensaal at Leipzigerstrasse No. 3, where Hensel established his atelier.

  Ex. 7.3 : Mendelssohn, String Quartet in E ♭ major, Op. 12 (1829), First Movement

  For several weeks, Felix rested impatiently in his lodging (now at 35 Bury Street, St. James’s, near Haydn’s residence in 1794), like a prisoner from Beethoven’s Fidelio . 100 Through the custodian of the King’s Music Library, G. F. Anderson, Felix was able to copy Handel’s Dixit Dominus for Zelter. 101 On October 27 Dr. Kind allowed him to change the position of his leg, and on November 6 his incarceration finally ended when he took his first drive through the city. Thinking a change of venue might hasten the recovery, he visited Attwood on Beulah Hill, Norwood (November 13–18), 102 and there began to take regular exercise. In the elderly musician’s library, Felix perused Weber’s Euryanthe and gratefully gave Attwood a copy of Tu es Petrus . 103 Felix also composed for Attwood and his daughter a curiosity for harp and piano, The Evening Bell , filled with imitations of a gate-bell at the Englishman’s residence. 104 Preparations for the homeward journey now preoccupied Felix, but there was still time to visit Horsley at Kensington and to see Kemble in Romeo and Juliet . And two days before Felix departed for Dover, he dispatched Cramer’s commission for a piano-duet arrangement of the Symphony in C minor, finished on November 26. 105

  At the end of the month Felix endured a three-hour crossing to Calais, as the Philharmonic Society prepared to elect him an honorary member. Traveling by diligence, he hastened to Lille, Brussels, and Maastricht (December 2), composing in as many days the first three numbers of his Heimkehr . But in Arnsberg, between Cologne and Cassel, he suffered a frostbitten foot and again had to consult a physician. 106 Finally, around midnight on December 7, he embraced his family in Berlin. Within a day he immersed himself in preparations for the silver anniversary, and assembled his co-conspirators in Hensel’s atelier to read through the Liederspiel. The tone-deaf painter, for whom Felix fashioned a small part on a single, repeated pitch, played an elderly mayor, and Fanny took the part of his wife. Rebecka sang the role of their virtuous ward, Lisbeth, while Devrient took the buffo part of the traveling vagabond Kauz. Felix was to play the mayor’s son, Hermann, who, returning incognito from soldiering abroad, outwits the scheming Kauz to win Lisbeth’s hand. But Felix’s injured foot forced him to recruit the young tenor Eduard Mantius, so that, as Rebecka punned, Herr Mantius impersonated Hermann. 107

  On December 19 Felix finished the score, 108 and rehearsals began the following day. With Devrient’s assistance he oversaw the construction of a theater in the main residence, but his efforts nearly came to naught when the king ordered a performance of Faust for December 27, preempting Devrient’s services. Undeterred, Felix advanced the performance one day, though other difficulties remained. Fanny had not yet written her contribution, a Festspiel on a text by Hensel, so Felix motivated the newlyweds to draft the text in a day and compose the music in a week. Scored for orchestra and six soloists, it celebrated the virtues of matrimony: three heralds introduced Therese Devrient, Rebecka, and Fanny in allegories of the first, silver, and future golden wedding anniversaries. 109 When Therese balked at singing her solo, which ascended to an exposed high B ♭ , Felix again intervened; his upraised baton, she later reminisced, became her balancing pole. The Festspiel was Fanny’s first orchestral essay, and Felix relieved her trepidations by assisting with its orchestration. 110
In 1848 the work enjoyed something of an afterlife when Hensel presented the three solos to Frederick William IV and Queen Elisabeth, in honor of their silver anniversary. 111

  The festivities at Leipzigerstrasse No. 3 actually began on the evening of Christmas Day, when relatives and friends surprised Abraham and Lea zu Hause . The preparatory celebration included poems, a chorus from Cherubini’s Les deux journées , and a play by Gans, with a movement from Felix’s second toy symphony for its overture. 112 Among the spectators were the young Henrik Munktell, son of a wealthy Swedish businessman, and his compatriot, the composer Franz Berwald (1796–1868), struggling in Berlin since June to compose an opera. Munktell was frustrated in engaging Felix in conversation, for he found the “most genial musician of our time” smothered by his mother’s skirts. 113 But on request Felix improvised and then, with consummate musicianship that dumbfounded Munktell, offered two Beethoven sonatas and the Op. 12 string quartet. Felix, for his part, found Berwald arrogant (the Swede dared to criticize Fidelio ), his harmonies overly “stuffed,” and his melodies reminiscent of Lindblad’s folksong anthology. 114 Berwald does not seem to have developed much of a relationship with Felix, though the Swede remained in Berlin for several years and eventually founded a successful orthopedic institute.