Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  In Düsseldorf, Felix divided his responsibilities between the annual concert series, church services, and the opera. At the public concerts the instrumental and choral ensembles coalesced into a new Verein zur Beförderung der Tonkunst (Union for the Advancement of Music). But Felix complained that his musicians often appeared inebriated and could not play triplets clearly; 151 a disappointing performance of Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum on August 17, 1834 earned Felix’s private rebuke as schändlich (disgraceful). 152 His repertoire was almost exclusively German; he ignored French music, and of Italian composers performed only Cherubini and Mercadante. 153 Instead, Beethoven’s symphonies formed the foundation:

  Felix conducted at least five (Nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8) during his tenure. Earlier music included oratorios of Handel (Israel in Egypt , Samson , Judas Maccabeus , and Messiah ) and Haydn (Creation and The Seasons ) and various works of Mozart. Of his own music Felix presented little, though he appeared as a pianist and occasionally improvised; a concert of May 3, 1834 ended with a freie Fantasie on the just heard Overture to Mozart’s Magic Flute and selections from Handel’s Israel in Egypt . 154 Of “modern” German composers, Felix offered works by Hummel, Weber, Spohr, and Marschner, and anticipated a practice later instituted in Leipzig—mounting concert versions of operatic excerpts. Finally, he promoted the native Düsseldorf composer Norbert Burgmüller and read his Piano Concerto and Symphony in C minor on May 3 and November 13, 1834. Burgmüller had been a rival for Felix’s position in 1833 but soon became an unabashed admirer. When Burgmüller met an untimely death at twenty-six in 1836 (he had suffered from epilepsy), Felix composed the Trauermarsch , Op. 103, for his funeral. 155

  To the theologian Albert Bauer, Felix confided that, were he a Catholic, he would “set to work at a Mass this very evening.” 156 In his view, composers of modern Ordinary settings no longer respected their sacred purpose; by the eighteenth century Pergolesi and Durante were introducing “the most laughable little trills” into their Glorias. As a corrective, Felix revived old Italian sacred polyphony, which affected him like incense, 157 and during Holy Week reintroduced the monophonic chant of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, for which he improvised organ interludes between the verses. 158 Felix also performed works of J. S. Bach in the Catholic city. During Lent, Felix began rehearsing the St. Matthew Passion but had to abandon the project on account of the ensemble’s limitations. 159 Instead, he performed two cantatas (Du Hirte Israel, höre and the Actus tragicus , BWV 104 and 106) for the Feast of Peter and Paul (June 29, 1834).

  Perhaps predictably, Felix relied upon Masses of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; of Felix’s own music only Verleih’ uns Frieden was heard, and of contemporary composers only Cherubini and Moritz Hauptmann, a colleague of Spohr Felix met in Cassel. To accompany Beethoven’s Mass in C on the feast of Corpus Christi (May 29, 1834), Felix composed another festive wind march for the procession into the church. 160 But after directing a Haydn Mass in October, Felix threatened to resign unless an incompetent organist was dismissed. 161 A performance of Mozart’s Requiem the same month nearly precipitated another scandal. When the concertmaster, an outspoken critic, managed to disrupt the rehearsal, a Prussian general came to the rescue. Karl Emil von Webern relates how he replaced the concertmaster, a major then took up a cello part, and members of a regimental band replaced disaffected orchestral personnel, so that the performance could proceed. 162

  X

  Winning Felix for Düsseldorf had been a mainstay of Immermann’s plan to revitalize the municipal theater. To combat the provincial philistinism of the Lower Rhine, he instituted “master performances” of classic German plays by Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist, and foreign plays of Shakespeare and Calderón. Felix supported these efforts with incidental music and by directing operas conducive to Immermann’s reforms, including “classic” German works such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni , Die Entführung aus dem Serail , and Die Zauberflöte , Beethoven’s incidental music to Egmont , and Weber’s Der Freischütz and Oberon . Into this repertory Felix also admitted Marschner’s Templer und die Jüdin and a German version of Abraham’s favorite Cherubini opera, Les deux journées (Der Wasserträger ). Though Felix’s tenure had begun inauspiciously in December with Don Giovanni , by late March 1834 he could report a successful revival of Der Wasserträger , after wearying nine-hour rehearsals in which he supervised “everything—the acting, scenery, and the dialogue.” 163 A month later Immermann mounted his tragedy Andreas Hofer , about the Tyrolese patriot who led an uprising ruthlessly suppressed by the French in 1809. While researching the event, Immermann had drawn heavily upon the published account of Felix’s uncle, Jacob Bartholdy, 164 and now turned to Felix for incidental music. But Immermann’s popular drama stimulated only two minor pieces, a French march and folksonglike duet for two tenors. 165 Still, all these efforts promoted Immermann’s fondest aspiration, the establishment of a new Düsseldorf theater, which he and Felix would direct.

  To this end, in March 1834 the dramatist founded a Theater Verein and began raising funds. Somehow he cajoled Felix to serve as the “chief superintendent of the musical performances,” even though he felt “no sympathy for actual theatrical life, or the squabbles of the actors and the incessant striving after effect.” 166 Seeking to shield himself, Felix waived part of his salary in exchange for engaging a second conductor, on whom the “chief trouble” would devolve. Three letters to his preferred candidate, the cellist Julius Rietz (younger brother of Eduard), shed light on the arrangement. 167 Rietz would assume his post in September; Felix would manage the affairs of the company and conduct some of the operas, though the lion’s share of rehearsals and performances would fall to Rietz. Somewhat duplicitously, Felix exhorted his friend, “You will like it here, I am convinced; it grows more agreeable to me with each day….”

  In reality, Felix soon had reason enough to regret his administrative role and agreement to devote part of his summer to recruiting and hiring singers. On August 29 he arrived in Berlin and spent a month auditioning candidates. Felix was ill-prepared for the endless negotiations: “To wrangle with a creature for two Thaler; to be severe with the good, and lenient with the good-for-nothing; to look grand in order to keep up a dignity that no one believes in; to seem angry without anger; all these are things which I cannot do, and would not if I could.” 168 By the end of September he was fantasizing about operas without music, singers, or ballet dancers, in which only the sets would “perform.” 169 On the afternoon of September 28 he performed Fanny’s “wedding piece” on the organ of the Parochialkirche; two days later, he departed for Leipzig. 170

  His personnel search there also yielded slim results. Instead, he pursued Bachiana with Hauser, and attended a “majestic” rehearsal of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage at the Gewandhaus led by the concertmaster H. A. Matthäi. On this occasion, Felix was asked whether he would consider a position in Leipzig. 171 He visited the piano pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, who presented his most advanced student, a “quiet and shy” fifteen-year-old prodigy—his daughter Clara. On October 2 she played some Chopin, her own Conzertsatz (soon reworked as the finale of her Piano Concerto, Op. 7), and the virtuoso Toccata of another Wieck student, Robert Schumann. 172 Felix appears not to have met Schumann, then preoccupied with launching his music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , but was dutifully impressed with Clara and promised to return (within a year, he would assume the directorship of the Gewandhaus and premiere her concerto). Continuing to Cassel, he saw Hauptmann and read through half of Spohr’s new Passion oratorio, Des Heilands letzte Stunden . 173 With Spohr Felix now “moved stones” by singing through the score, heavily influenced by Bach and Handel, and stylistically akin to the forming music of Paulus .

  Dreading the “singer storms” (Sängerungewitter ), Felix assumed his duties as Intendant of the Düsseldorf Opera on October 9. At once the situation deteriorated. The very day he returned he was asked to travel to Aachen to engage singers. He refused but soon was issuing dozens
of contracts, organizing rehearsal schedules, and attending to the bureaucratic realities of management. For Immermann the new theater represented the culmination of his life’s work; for Felix it was an annoying intrusion into what mattered to him most—composing and making music. The two directors soon came to blows over hiring a stage manager for the opera. When Felix proposed a member of Immermann’s troupe, the playwright balked. Letters were exchanged, 174 and Immermann, alarmed at what he took to be Felix’s vanity, attempted to smooth over the affair.

  On October 28, the new theater opened with Kleist’s Prinzen von Homburg ; Felix conducted overtures by Weber (Jubel ) and Beethoven (presumably, Consecration of the House ), and Immermann contributed a Vorspiel to which Felix fitted some incidental music. 175 Titled Kurfürst Johann Wilhelm im Theater , Immermann’s prologue comprised a dialogue between the architect of the new theater and his assistants, interrupted by a “visit” from the municipal statue of Johann Wilhelm (1658–1716), Elector of the Palatinate. The somber knocking of the statue at the door inspired Felix to quote material from the Overture and Finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni , but this charming parody evidently failed to impress. The inauguration scored only a modest success, as did Marschner’s Templer und die Jüdin two days later. Meanwhile, while preparing Weber’s Oberon , Felix made new demands on Immermann. Dissatisfied with the elf king’s garments, Felix required from the set designer a new “starry heaven” and sea. Immermann was unable to comply, and Felix began to believe resources needed for the Opera were being diverted to the theater. Even before Oberon opened on November 7, he declared his desire to be free of his role as Intendant. Three days later, and just two weeks after the theater opened, he took a salto mortale . 176 Felix compared his precipitous resignation to the abdication of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who, weary of the religious wars of the Reformation, had abruptly renounced his throne in 1556. 177 The simile did not impress Devrient, who thought Felix had displayed a “snappish temper that one would hardly have suspected in him.” Nor was Felix’s father pleased by the dramatic upstaging of Immermann’s authority; in one rash gesture, Felix had appeared unreliable and antagonized Immermann. 178 Still, Felix had won his freedom; the theater management granted him a dispensation, provided he would conduct an occasional opera. For all purposes, Julius Rietz now directed the Opera, and Felix, like “a fish thrown back into the water,” 179 could redouble his efforts on Paulus .

  The New Year brought a regrettable epilogue to the affair. After Felix had shunned Immermann for more than two months, the playwright moved to repair the damaged friendship in a letter of January 18, 1835. 180 By January 26 Felix was reassuring Lea the two were resuming their friendly intercourse. 181 But Immermann’s diary refers to an unpleasant meeting early in February and a “dreadful experience with the totally wild Mendelssohn” that prompted two lengthy reports to the directors of the theater. 182 Felix himself labored for two days on an account of the latest dispute for the same body and revealed some particulars to Abraham. 183 In a conciliatory gesture Immermann, it seems, had recognized Felix’s release as Intendant, only to maneuver behind the scenes to persuade the directors to force Felix to resume the position. This double-dealing caused the final, irreconcilable rupture for Felix, and he severed all ties to the Opera. For Immermann, the resignation wiped away the flowering of his cherished undertaking before its “buds” could even burst. 184 The hypersensitive Felix took the episode as a personal affront, even though a complex of issues was at work, including Abraham’s long-standing desire to see his son succeed as a stage composer, and, of course, the painful memory of the Camacho debacle in 1827. But in 1870, the musicologist Friedrich Chrysander went farther. 185 After reviewing the Immermann episode, Chrysander took up Felix’s lifelong failure to compose a major opera and expressed a sentiment that echoed in the Mendelssohn reception history: Felix’s fortuitous childhood had not prepared him to apply his talents with “resignation,” and he lacked the consummate mastery of the great opera composers.

  XI

  Embroiled with Immermann, Felix turned to others for companionship. At some point in 1835 Wilhelm von Schadow painted Felix’s portrait 186 and on his birthday that year gave his friend another evening ball. Among the gifts that day was a Maezel metronome from an industrialist and music-lover from Solingen, so that Felix might specify precise tempi in his scores. 187 Early in the morning a regimental band serenaded the composer and made a droll effect by rendering with contrabassoons and bass drum the rustic drones of Chopin’s Mazurka in B ♭ , Op. 7 No. 1. 188 But Felix found himself in an “all-devouring mood.” Thus Chopin’s mazurkas were “mannered”; Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was a wearisome Philistine composition, despite its best efforts “to go stark mad”; there was no point to Liszt “with his two fingers on one key”; and Cherubini had succumbed to Parisian fads in his new opera Ali-Baba . 189

  Even Fanny did not escape unscathed her brother’s criticism. Late in October 1834 she finished a major work, her String Quartet in E ♭ , and sent it to Felix. 190 It begins with two sororal allusions to his music, the openings of his own String Quartet in E ♭ , Op. 12, and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage ( ex. 9.14 ). In January he rendered his judgment: of the four movements, Felix preferred the second, a capricious scherzo in C minor, but found much of the composition formally diffuse and tonally ambiguous. In the first, fantasia-like movement, the modulations to F minor and F major vitiated the stability of the tonic key and impressed as a mannerism; and the thematic contents were not strong enough to justify the formal freedom of the music. 191 Felix softened the blow by admitting his own music betrayed similar faults, but the damage was done. There now ensued a bit of sibling rivalry, with Fanny criticizing Felix’s cantata Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh’ darein for its tonal and formal latitude. 192 She observed that while Felix had experienced and lived through Beethoven’s later style, she remained stuck in it and lacked the strength to sustain its nostalgic tenderness. Thus, her larger compositions died “in their youth of decrepitude,” and she was in her element only in writing songs, for which “merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice.”

  Ex. 9.14 : Fanny Hensel, String Quartet in E ♭ (1834), First Movement

  When not absorbed in Paulus , Felix turned out a quantity of smaller pieces. Among the most compelling is his setting of Byron’s “Sun of the Sleepless” (published in 1836 along with “There be none of beauty’s daughters”). Twenty years before, the Englishman Isaac Nathan had used Jewish cantorial melodies in setting Byron’s popular collection of “ethnic” poems, Hebrew Melodies (1815–1819). Felix was acquainted with Nathan’s songs and also Carl Loewe’s Die Sonne der Schlaflosen , Op. 13 No. 6, on a German rendition by Franz Theremin of “Sun of the Sleepless. 193 Dissatisfied with the translation, Felix prepared his own (Schlafloser Augen Leuchte ) and on December 31, 1834 set the poem in E minor, with a wistful, repeated high B to capture the image of the distant star ( ex. 9.15 ). 194 Byron’s poem begins: “Sun of the Sleepless! Melancholy star! Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far.” In Nathan’s exegesis, the star referred to Balaam’s third oracle (Numbers 24:17): “A star shall come out of Jacob.” But, as Frederick Burwick has argued, the same passage was also “read as a prophecy of the Star of Bethlehem” and the coming of Christ 195 —a reading indeed familiar to Felix, who later used the same scripture in his unfinished oratorio Christus . Felix’s decision to set Byron’s poem in 1835 was probably not coincidental, coming as it did while Felix was fully engaged with Paulus . Byron’s verses—“So gleams the past, the light of other days, which shines but warms not with its powerless rays,” the second verse continues—offered another opportunity for Felix to mediate the space between his Jewish ancestry and Christian faith.

  Ex. 9.15 : Mendelssohn, “Sun of the Sleepless” (1834)

  Late in the Düsseldorf tenure Felix began arranging several of his smaller pieces into groups for publication. To the three Heine Volkslieder he added two part-songs
and prepared a Reinschrift of all five in May 1835 196 (they appeared with a sixth part-song as the Sechs Lieder , Op. 41, in 1838). He also pondered a cycle of piano etudes and fugues for Attwood, 197 an idea that gradually coalesced into the Six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35 (1837). To that end, Felix asked Fanny to send his two E-minor fugues from 1827 (one became Op. 35 No. 1) 198 and in December 1834 composed a fugue in F minor and began one in A ♭ (Op. 35 Nos. 5 and 4). 199 A contemporaneous organ fugue in D major, transcribed as an organ duet for Attwood, 200 was later reworked as Op. 35 No. 2.