Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Felix’s letters project an increasingly despondent tone about Berlin. Shortly after his return, he retraced Eduard Rietz’s final days and on July 3 found the emptiness of the Singakademie overwhelming; Zelter’s death had undermined the foundation, exposing its very flaws. 8 To Horsley, Felix lamented Berliners’ “tendency to criticism” and found music unimproved since 1830. 9 To Charlotte Moscheles he compared Berlin society to an “awful monster,” and to Thomas Attwood decried Berlin philistinism at a Mozart commemoration, where an inebriated amateur played insipid gallopades and waltzes. 10 As an antidote, Felix offered the Englishman a short Kyrie eleison in a severe, fugal style. 11

  Now entering a fallow period, Felix lived like an asparagus, “very comfortable doing nothing.” 12 He decided not to compose music for Immermann’s libretto, since the playwright had not adequately distinguished between the lyric, dramatic, and recitative; like Devrient, Felix found the action “even more dispersed than in the original.” 13 A performance of Handel’s Solomon at the Singakademie, for which Felix intended to rescore some numbers and recruited Klingemann to translate the text into German, fell through in December, and Felix’s own compositional muse threatened to stagnate. Apart from two minor songs and a piano fugue, 14 the closing months of 1832 produced only the first Anglican setting for Novello, a Te Deum for chorus and organ finished in August. In five sections (Andante, Adagio, Andante, Allegro moderato, and Andante), this contribution to the Morning Service betrays the anthems of William Croft and William Boyce Felix had examined in Attwood’s library. Much of the score alternates between chordal and imitative styles; in the climactic “Make them to be number’d with thy Saints in glory everlasting,” Felix unfurls an erudite double canon. The concluding Andante recalls the characteristic figure of Ave Maria , Op. 23 No. 2; the earlier invocation to the Virgin now broadens to a supplication for the Lord’s mercy to “lighten upon us” ( ex. 8.7, p. 234, and ex. 9.1 ).

  Ex. 9.1 : Mendelssohn, Te Deum (1832)

  Among Felix’s private diversions from this time are two Konzertstücke in F and D minor for clarinet, basset horn, and piano, composed at the end of 1832 and beginning of 1833, and published posthumously as Op. 113 and 114. Written for two virtuosi, Heinrich Baermann and his son Carl, each has three compact movements, connected by transitions and exhibiting the telescoped forms of Carl Maria von Weber, who had produced several works for Baermann senior. Not surprisingly, Felix’s music mimics Weber’s dramatic gestures, and even approaches parody: the autograph of Op. 113 bears the saporific title The Battle of Prague: A Great Duet for Noodles or Cream Pastry, Clarinet, and Basset Horn . 15 The music exploits the full range of the two instruments. There are impetuous opening movements with wide leaps, tender, duetting slow movements, and vivacious finales with zesty bravura passagework. The use of basset horn, a kind of alto clarinet favored by Mozart but obsolete by the mid-nineteenth century, condemned these pieces to obscurity, though in the 1830s the instrument’s deep, mellow tone was still in vogue, and Felix took the trouble to arrange Op. 113 with orchestral accompaniment. 16

  I

  In Berlin he began to ruminate on an oratorio about St. Paul and rejoiced in securing the collaboration of A. B. Marx. For years the theorist had yearned to compose an oratorio about Moses, and during the summer of 1832 the two friends agreed to an exchange: Felix would draft the libretto for Mose and Marx that for Paulus , so that each could compose unencumbered by the task of selecting texts. 17 Sadly enough, this commendable act of friendship led ultimately to estrangement and the irremediable breakdown of their relationship in 1839. But in 1832 Felix avidly took up the task and on August 21 finished his assignment, 18 organized into three sections: “In the first part, the oppression of Israel up to Moses’ conversation with God in the burning bush. In the second, Moses before Pharaoh, the plagues, exodus, the miracle at the Red Sea up to Miriam’s Song of Triumph. In the third, the desert, the rebellions, the Golden Calf, the wrath of the Lord, finally the Ten Commandments.” 19 Relying upon Exodus, Felix also drew from Numbers, the Psalms, Jeremiah, Job, Deuteronomy, and the Prophets, showing a thorough knowledge of scripture. Musically, Felix took as his models Bach’s Passions and Handel’s Israel in Egypt , and apportioned texts among choruses, arias, and a narrator, to whom he assigned a prominent number of recitatives.

  Marx had fervently supported the revival of the St. Matthew Passion, but by 1832 his conception of oratorio had evolved—he now aspired to create a work conceived dramatically. Thus, as he recast Felix’s libretto, Marx opted for chains of dramatic scenes instead of the narrator, which had lent the story of Moses and the exodus a certain objective, epic quality. In the end, Marx was unable to use Felix’s offering:

  He had created the text as so many had before us, and as the great masters had adopted uncritically. The mixture of narrative, lyrical outpouring, and dramatic moments was the conventional procedure of Handel and Bach; our favorite work, the St. Matthew Passion, displayed the same plan. So Mendelssohn was totally beyond reproach. If one were at fault, it was I. Why had I neglected or was unable to show him clearly the new form I deemed necessary? 20

  Marx’s comments are silent about another conflict between the two. Felix’s selection of texts, as Jeffrey Sposato has argued, emphasized a Christological reading of Moses, who in nineteenth-century Protestant theology was understood to represent a kind of Old Testament Johannine Christ. Like Felix, Marx had embraced the Protestant faith but against the will of his “textbook rationalist” father, Moses Marx, who had turned to Voltaire’s deistic philosophy. If Felix was a devout Protestant obediently promoting Abraham’s agenda of assimilation (and turning away from the rationalist Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn), A. B. Marx “never attempted to disassociate himself from his Jewish heritage”; 21 thus, he wished to imbue his oratorio with a distinctly Old Testament coloring. However impossible it is to penetrate the shadowy world of Felix’s intentions, there is one valuable clue about his spiritual mindset in 1832: he concluded Mose by quoting the New Testament, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3), thereby linking the Ten Commandments to the New Covenant and building a bridge between the two faiths. Marx suppressed the quotation when he assembled the libretto.

  While Felix fulfilled his part of the oratorio exchange, Marx initially balked at reciprocating. Several months before, Felix had enlisted Devrient’s assistance and approached the Orientalist Julius Fürst. 22 Paulus was to be in three parts: the stoning of Stephen, the conversion of Saul, and “the Christian life and preaching,” to include either Paul’s departure from Ephesus or his martyrdom. But Marx tried to dissuade Felix from the plan: “… what should the musician do with the words ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks’ [Acts 9:5]?” For Marx, Paul was the rationalist Protestant: “The thinker, the painter, perhaps the poet can base their work on Paul; but the musician, whose creation belongs most immediately to the sphere of the inner life and emotions?” 23 Failing to convince Felix that St. Peter was a more suitable topic, Marx to his credit finished a libretto for Paulus on March 15, 1833. 24 But the collaboration ran aground, for when Felix insisted on replicating the style of the St. Matthew Passion by inserting chorales, Marx detected an anachronism (“Chorales in Paul’s time?” he reportedly challenged.) The theorist abandoned the project, and Felix turned to Julius Schubring for advice.

  II

  Despite the tedium of Berlin life, Felix maintained a high profile in concert life. On October 7, 1832, Moscheles arrived for two weeks, and though Felix admitted to bouts of depression, he entertained his friend sumptuously, loaned him an Erard piano that had just arrived, and hosted fêtes in his honor. The two improvised, darting around the keyboard “quick as lightning” on “each other’s harmonies,” in a kind of “musical blindman’s buff.” 25 When Moscheles departed on October 19, Felix gave him a special present, the Beethoven “Wittgenstein” sketchbook Felix had received from Aloys Fuchs in 1830. 26

  At concerts of A
nna Milder-Hauptmann, Karl Möser, and Ferdinand Ries, Felix crafted cadenzas to Mozart’s minor-keyed piano concerti (K. 466 and K. 491) and also played Beethoven’s Violin Sonata, Op. 30 No. 2, and Triple Concerto, Op. 56. 27 But overshadowing these performances were three concerts for the widows of the royal orchestra. In quick succession, Felix presented at the Singakademie the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Piano Concerto No. 1, and premiere of the Reformation Symphony (November 15); Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt and the Capriccio brillant (December 1); and the Hebrides Overture and premiere of Die erste Walpurgisnacht (January 10, 1833). As a pianist he rendered Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata on the first concert, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and J. S. Bach’s Concerto in D minor on the second, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 and Weber’s Grand Duo concertant (with Heinrich Baermann) on the third. Setting great stock in these concerts, which displayed his trifurcated talents as composer, pianist, and conductor, Felix believed the series would determine if he would live and work in Berlin. 28 An attempt to solidify his candidacy at the Singakademie, this effort nevertheless raised suspicions, and impressed some Berliners as a marketing campaign. Felix was offended when the widows’ charity grudgingly accepted the proceeds from the first concert, 29 but the king supported the concerts, 30 and they were sold out. Felix was quite à la mode, even if regarded an “arrogant eccentric.” 31 The royal Intendant, Count von Redern, offered to procure an opera libretto for Felix from the French dramatist Eugène Scribe, and the music critic Ludwig Rellstab solicited a biographical article for a lexicon. (Felix replied that other than his birth on February 3, nothing remarkable had transpired in his life. 32 )

  Press reports of the concerts were largely positive, though Rellstab challenged the program of the Reformation Symphony as extraneous and suggested Marx’s aesthetics had led the composer astray. 33 Die erste Walpurgisnacht fared somewhat better; here Rellstab discovered “fantastic passages and bold combinations.” A reporter from the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung found the score original, the choruses “frightening, bizarre, and energetic.” 34 The path to the premiere of Die erste Walpurgisnacht had been especially arduous. After Felix’s final visit to Weimar in 1830, the cantata gestated under Italian skies but was not “finished” until 1832 in Paris. In fact, years later it underwent thorough revision before its release in 1844 as Op. 60 35 and thus experienced the protracted process of re-composition visited upon so many of Felix’s major works.

  Goethe’s ballad (1799, not to be confused with the witches’ Sabbath in the Walpurgisnacht scene of Faust ) concerns early medieval pagan rites in the Harz Mountains on May Eve. In Goethe’s reading, the revelries originated as a defense against Christian zealotry. Attempting to scare off dumpfe Pfaffenchristen (“dimwitted Christian priests”), the Druids masqueraded as satanic figures to rout their oppressors by conjuring up the Christians’ own, “fabricated” devil. Goethe’s poem symbolized a recurring historical process—how something “old, established, tested, and reassuring” is repeatedly disarranged and displaced by innovation. 36 Though Felix excerpted Goethe’s comment on the verso of the title page of the score published in 1844, Felix never disclosed his own interpretation of the ballade. Instead, twentieth-century scholars have advanced various readings. For Eric Werner, the poem was a “mild satire on medieval churchly bigotry” that opposed a “pure monotheism, derived from natural philosophy, against the superstitious usages of the early European Church.” Lawrence Kramer found the “object of Mendelssohn’s carnivalesque flyting” not Christianity but “Phariseeism, the narrow, dogmatic, anti-cosmopolitan cast of mind that Robert Schumann identified with the Philistines.” And Heinz-Klaus Metzger heard the score as a “Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity.” 37

  Felix added one significant element not in the poem: an overture depicting wintry “foul weather” and the transition to spring. The poet’s dialectic of tradition and innovation thus prompted naturalistic tone painting, so that spring, season of renewal, became associated with an uncontaminated form of druidism, uncorrupted by the encroachment of civilization and reaffirmed after the raging elements of winter. The basic motive of the overture, which reduces to the A-minor triad in second inversion (E–A–C), is already implicit in the unsettling sixteenth-note accompaniment of the lower strings that agitates much of the overture ( ex. 9.2a ). At the end of the development the bassoons and horns interrupt the storm with a recitative based upon the motive, and in the recapitulation, the turbulence eventually subsides, as the motive serves as a harbinger of spring ( ex. 9.2b ). Now the blustery of winter broadens to , and soft wind tremolos propel a gently falling figure in the strings and flutes, a passage Johannes Brahms surely later invoked in his Second Symphony ( ex. 9.3 , 1877).

  Through-composed, the nine numbers of the cantata fall into two parts. In the first (Nos. 1–4), the Druids prepare their sacrificial fires, even as they lament their suffering at the hands of the Christians and position guards to ward off intruders. The opening chorus shifts to a bright A major, with the elemental motive rearranged to the form A–C#–D–E,

  Ex. 9.2a: Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , Op. 60 (1833), Overture

  Ex. 9.2b: Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , Op. 60 (1833), Overture

  Ex. 9.3a: Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , Op. 60 (1833), Overture

  Ex. 9.3b: Brahms, Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 77 (1877), First Movement

  affirming the triad in root position (A–C#–E). The new permutation returns in the chorus of Druid guards (No. 4), a lightly scored march in E major punctuated by brisk chords and mock fanfares ( ex. 9.4 ). In the second part (Nos. 5–9), as the pagans hatch their plot, the music adopts the tone of a macabre scherzo. Adding bass drum, cymbals, and piccolo, a complement that revives the sound of Janissary music (associated with military music but also “pagan,” Eastern culture), Felix begins softly with an ostinato-like figure in G minor, repeated through several variations (No. 5). In No. 6 a chorus of pagans joins the guards, and the music attains a new level of frenzy through an abrupt shift to A minor and boisterous metrical displacements. Once again Felix rotates the Ur -motive, so that its pitches outline the first-inversion form of the triad (C–E–A, ex. 9.5 ). The increased dissonance level and reappearance of A minor revive the discordant tone of the overture, as the howling pagans scatter the Christians with pitchforks and rattles. After they flee (No. 8), the Druids resume their sacrificial rites, and from the purifying smoke of fire rises a glowing C major, and a motive outlining the second inversion of the triad (G–C–E), and returning us to the starting point of the original motive ( ex. 9.6 ). “And if they steal our ancient rite,” the chorus concludes, “who can rob us of thy light?”

  Ex. 9.4 : Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , Op. 60 (1833), No. 4

  Ex. 9.5 : Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , Op. 60 (1833), No. 6

  Ex. 9.6 : Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , Op. 60 (1833), No. 8

  Unifying this vision of pantheistic paganism is a taut network of motives, all based upon the Ur -motive of the overture, as if to suggest the immanence of the druidic Allvater . Felix later drew upon this thematic repository in another example of musical exoticism, the Scottish Symphony (see p. 430). In 1830, Felix had envisioned that work, the Italian Symphony, and Die erste Walpurgisnacht in southern climes. But in 1832 he was not yet ready to commit symphonic thoughts of the Scottish wilderness to paper. Rather, the counterestablishment abandon of the cantata and images of a pagan German past gave him respite from the stifling culture of Berlin.

  III

  Unexpected relief arrived with invitations from London and Düsseldorf. On November 5, 1832, the Philharmonic Society had offered Felix one hundred guineas for a new symphony, overture, and vocal piece. 38 The commission facilitated the twenty-four-year-old’s passage from “amateur” to professional status in England and spurred the completion of the Italian Symphony. Between the middle of January and March he finished the score and
dated it on March 13, 1833, 39 in time for the new London concert season. Another reason impelled him to return to England, to stand as godfather for his namesake, Felix Moscheles, born in February.

  February brought a request from Immermann, who as the new director of the Düsseldorf theater planned to mount a series of classic plays, among them Calderón’s El príncipe constante , after A. W. Schlegel’s translation (Der standhafte Prinz ). Abandoning the collaboration on Shakespeare’s Tempest , Immermann secured instead Felix’s commitment to provide incidental music for the seventeenth-century Spanish tragedy. Within a few weeks, four movements were ready. 40 The play concerns Prince Fernando, brother of the Portuguese king and hero of the reconquista , the war between the Christians and Moors on the Iberian Peninsula. Captured in 1438, Fernando died in captivity for refusing to surrender the stronghold of Ceuta in exchange for his freedom. In the play, his martyred spirit leads the Portuguese to victory.