Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  In marked contrast to this indecision was the relatively effortless creation of the concert overture Ruy Blas for a production of Victor Hugo’s play to benefit the pension fund of the Leipzig Theater. Felix was approached in February to compose an overture and a chorus for the second act. But on reading the play, set in seventeenth-century Madrid, he found it “detestable” and “utterly beneath contempt.” 105 Apparently its intrigues—the grandee Don Salluste seduces the Spanish queen’s lady-in-waiting, and his valet, Ruy Blas, falls in love with the queen—offended Felix’s sensibilities. Declining to write an overture, he finished instead on February 14 an unassuming Romance for a chorus of washerwomen (“Wozu der Vöglein Chöre”). The theater management pressed him again for an overture; he now took up the task as a personal challenge and completed it in three days (March 5–8), just in time for the copyist to prepare parts and Felix to rehearse the piece before premiering it on March 11. Then, on the final Gewandhaus concert of the season (March 21), after premiering the Schubert “Great” Symphony, Felix performed the overture again but without reference to the play—it was announced simply as an overture for the Theater-pension-Fond .

  His eagerness to divorce the overture from the play might imply he conceived the score without meaningful links to Hugo’s drama. After all, the celebratory C-major climax of the overture, with its vivacious amphibrachs ( ), seemingly has little to do with Hugo’s “horrific” conclusion, in which Ruy Blas, having won the queen’s intimacy by masquerading as a nobleman, murders Don Salluste and commits suicide when the disguise is finally exposed. But, there is evidence Felix responded musically to Hugo’s metaphor of the servant as “an earthworm enamored with a star.” Felix captured the mixing of classes by juxtaposing distinctly different, high and low musical styles. The solemn, slow opening, fortified by trombones and stated three times, uses majestic dotted rhythms, by 1839 a cliché for an elevated style ( ex. 11.11a ). The restless, agitated first theme of the Allegro suggests intrigue and deception, while the contrasting second theme, accompanied by clipped staccato chords, connotes a popular idiom ( ex. 11.11b, c ). Tying the whole together is the recurring use throughout the overture of various forms of a descending tetrachord (C–B ♮ –B ♭ –A ♮ –A ♭ –G), traditional symbol of a lament. But was all this posturing in earnest or in jest? In the 1930s Sir Donald Tovey suggested that the infectious second theme was a response to Hugo’s affected, if virtuoso twelve-syllable Alexandrines, 106 and recently Thomas Grey has heard the overture as a “perfectly straight-faced ‘parody’ of a melodramatic overture in the modern Franco-Italian idiom.” 107 Whatever Felix’s intention, the overture is a testament to his prodigious abilities; nevertheless, after the two performances he set the work aside and left it for posthumous publication as Op. 95 in 1851.

  With the end of the concert season, Felix prepared to direct the twenty-first Lower Rhine Musical Festival in Düsseldorf before enjoying his annual leave. Just before departing Leipzig on April 24, he forwarded to Breitkopf & Härtel a new collection of six Lieder; 108 they appeared in November as Op. 47, with a dedication to Constanze Schleinitz, wife of Konrad Schleinitz. The opus comprised new and old songs. On April 17 and 18, Felix created the buoyant setting of Lenau’s Frühlingslied , Op. 47 No. 3, animated by reverberant harplike effects in the piano, and the simple but dignified Volkslied No. 4. Two days later he again captured a folksong quality for Uhland’s Hirtenlied (Shepherd’s Song ), which he arranged the same day as a part-song but elected to withhold for his next Liederheft (it appeared as Op. 57 No. 2, and, posthumously, as the part-song Op. 88 No. 3). Among the older songs of Op. 47 were Nos. 5 and 6, fashioned in 1832 and 1833 on Klingemann texts. No. 6, the gentle Wiegenlied (Lullaby ), with its characteristic rocking figure, had been composed on the birth of the Moscheles’ son Felix. Perhaps the most successful Lieder were the first two. The Minnelied (No. 1), on a text by Tieck, compares a beloved to a murmuring stream, represented in the piano by gently meandering, sixteenth-note figuration. Heine’s poem Morgengruss (Morning Greeting , No. 2) inspired simple but effective music that again aspired toward folksong. A shepherd tending his flocks greets his beloved, who does not answer. For Oswald Lorenz, Felix’s music displayed the “beautifying power of a good engraving, which can lend to an insignificant locale … a bright, attractive appearance.” 109 Felix conceived the songs for the growing market of domestic music making; impeccably crafted, they indeed show great polish but in the main impress as an undemanding supplement to the earlier Op. 34 set.

  Ex. 11.11a: Mendelssohn, Ruy Blas Overture, Op. 95 (1839)

  Ex. 11.11b: Mendelssohn, Ruy Blas Overture, Op. 95 (1839)

  Ex. 11.11c: Mendelssohn, Ruy Blas Overture, Op. 95 (1839)

  En route to Düsseldorf, Felix, Cécile, and Carl paused in Frankfurt to visit her family. There they learned of the death in Berlin of Eduard Gans, the Mendelssohns’ intimate Hausfreund and former suitor of Rebecka, eulogized by Felix as a “worthy, irreplaceable man.” 110 Fanny reported that he was buried next to Fichte and Hegel. The shock of Gans’s passing (added to Rebecka’s depression following the death of her son) raised new concerns about her health, so that later that summer Fanny escorted her to the Baltic resort of Heringsdorf for a cure.

  Arriving in Düsseldorf on May 11, Felix plunged into rehearsals. The festival opened on Pentecost Sunday (May 19), with Handel’s Messiah . Since no organ was available, Felix employed the 1789 arrangement by Mozart with supplemental wind parts. The event marked the debut of the young alto Sophie Schloss, whom Felix subsequently engaged for the next Gewandhaus season. 111 The next day featured Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Mass in C major, an overture by Felix’s successor in Düsseldorf, Julius Rietz, and Felix’s own Psalm 42. The soloists included the sopranos Auguste von Fassmann from the Berlin opera and Clara Novello, who imbibed the local Maitrank with Felix and performed “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the German version of “God save the Queen” for Prince Frederick, governor of the Prussian Rhine Province. 112 Despite Felix’s desire to mount a staged production of Gluck’s Alceste on the third day, the final concert was devoted to the soloists, who sang arias and operatic excerpts; Felix played his Piano Concerto in D minor, Op. 40. With combined forces of 574 participants, the orchestra and chorus made an impressive spectacle: hundreds of dilettantes playing nearly to perfection, according to the critic of the Kölner Zeitung , Ludwig Bischoff. Only Novello was gently chastised for adding too many embellishments (Schnörkeleien ) to her parts. 113

  VII

  By late May 1839 Felix and family were once again enjoying the good life in Frankfurt, where they remained through the middle of July. To Lea he revealed Cécile was expecting their second child, 114 and on June 4 he happily performed organ music at the wedding of Cécile’s sister Julie to Julius Schunck. Felix considered traveling to Vienna in the fall to conduct Paulus , and he accepted an invitation from the critic W. R. Griepenkerl to direct the Brunswick Music Festival in September. Among the diversions that summer was performing canons, including one designed to accommodate three voices and “sung” ad infinitum by Felix, Cécile, and Carl. 115

  To honor Felix, patrician Frankfurters organized a fête champêtre on the evening of June 19, when a party of forty (among them Dorothea Schlegel, her son Philipp Veit, and the writer Heinrich Hoffmann) crossed the Main and journeyed by omnibuses into the adjacent hills. There, amid beech trees softly lit by lanterns, an ensemble of twenty performed Felix’s part-songs, including three newly composed, the canonic Lerchengesang (Song of the Lark ), Op. 48 No. 4, Hirtenlied , Op. 88 No. 3, and, appropriately, Im Wald (In the Forest ), Op. 100 No. 4. The guests drank champagne and supped on strawberries before returning to Frankfurt in the early morning hours. 116 Felix recorded the scene in a drawing 117 and came away appreciating how songs ought to sound in the open air; “it does seem the most natural of all music,” he wrote to Klingemann, “when four people are rambling together in the woods, or sailing in a boat, and have the melody all read
y with them and within them.” 118 Later that year, the experience inspired Felix to complete his second collection of part-songs for mixed voices, Op. 48, and to begin his first collection for male chorus, Op. 50.

  A somewhat more intimate occasion occurred near the end of June, when Cäcilienverein members organized an evening of tableaux vivants, for which Felix’s music provided the inspiration and accompaniment. In the last illustration Fritz Schlemmer struck a humorous pose to imitate Felix absorbed in composition. Despite this merriment, Felix did produce serious music that summer, including three organ fugues in E minor, C major, and F minor. 119 Of these, the second eventually reappeared in the finale of the second Organ Sonata, Op. 65 No. 2, and Felix later considered redeploying the third in Op. 65 No. 1. 120 The occasion for the three fugues is not known, but Felix’s Bachian studies may have prompted them, for in June the Frankfurt Kapellmeister, K. W. F. Guhr, showed Felix several Bach manuscripts, including autographs of the Passacaglia and chorale preludes. 121 Felix’s C-major fugue is not unlike that of BWV 545, and the chromatic lines of the E-minor fugue recall something of the “Wedge” Fugue, also in E minor (BWV 548). In Frankfurt Felix found an unusual way to sharpen his organ playing through Fritz Schlemmer, who provided a pedal piano, 122 an odd invention that coupled a pedal board to a piano keyboard and thus allowed the musician to approximate the dense textures of an organ in a private residence (in 1845 Robert Schumann composed several studies for the instrument).

  Undoubtedly the most impressive accomplishment of the summer was the Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49, drafted in June and July and revised in the fall before its release to Breitkopf & Härtel in January 1840. This was the work that prompted Schumann to label Felix the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the “most brilliant” of modern musicians who had reconciled the “contradictions” of the time. 123 Exactly which contradictions Schumann had in mind is unclear, but Ferdinand Hiller shed light on at least one issue of paramount importance to Felix—the tension between modish virtuoso display and the structural integrity of the work. When Felix played a draft of the trio for Hiller, he found the piano figuration too traditional:

  Certain pianoforte passages in it, constructed on broken chords, seemed to me—to speak candidly—somewhat old-fashioned. I had lived many years in Paris, seeing Liszt frequently, and Chopin every day, so that I was thoroughly accustomed to the richness of passages which marked the new pianoforte school. I made some observations to Mendelssohn on this point, suggesting certain alterations, but at first he would not listen to me. “Do you think that that would make the thing any better?” He said, “The piece would be the same, and so it may remain as it is.” “But,” I answered, “you have often told me … that the smallest touch of the brush, which might conduce to the perfection of the whole, must not be despised. An unusual form of arpeggio may not improve the harmony, but neither does it spoil it—and it becomes more interesting to the player.” We discussed it and tried it on the piano over and over again, and I enjoyed the small triumph of at last getting Mendelssohn over to my view. 124

  Ex. 11.12a: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49 (1839), First Movement (first version)

  Ex. 11.12b: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49 (1839), First Movement (final version)

  According to Hiller, the exchange convinced Felix to rework the entire piano part, and give it a more brilliant polish. An examination of the original version 125 reveals that Hiller exaggerated somewhat, for the changes affected primarily the first movement. Even so, the retouches added a modern veneer to a work steeped in the classical tradition. Ex. 11.12a, b shows how Felix recast a passage from the closing group of the first movement, replacing routine triplets in the bass with thickened, cascading arpeggiations in the treble and syncopated chords in the bass.

  What Felix did not alter was the thematic content and harmonic design of the work, and its measured formal proportions. With the exception of the scherzo, thematically unpredictable and delightfully quirky, the composition generally displays symmetrical phrase structures, sometimes in tension with the underlying affect of the music. The first thirty-nine measures of the first movement offer a case in point. The noble, opening cello melody falls into a sixteen-bar period that unfolds evenly in four-bar phrases ( ex. 11.13 ). To create an undercurrent of rhythmic tension (the tempo is marked Molto Allegro agitato ), Felix accompanies the theme with syncopated, pianissimo chords in the piano. Now the violin answers in two four-bar units, broadening the ascending fourth of the cello to an expressive sixth. In the third stage, all three instruments join in the thematic statement, which reaches its climax with an octave leap. The phrases again fall into predictable four-bar segments, as if Felix intends to balance the opening sixteen-bar period of the cello with one for the ensemble, to yield a readily apprehensible design: 16 + 8 + 16 bars. But the final phrase is cut short one bar, so that we have instead 16 + 8 + 15 bars, thus slightly disturbing the perfect symmetry and reconciling, as Schumann might have it, the needs of formal clarity and romantic unpredictability. When the recapitulation enters, Felix makes some adjustments to avoid routine repetition: the cello theme now appears against a new countermelody in the violin, and the symmetrical four-bar phrases momentarily yield to a five-bar, piano cadenza that again mars the symmetry. If a Mozartean grace suffuses the whole, there are nevertheless signs that mark the work as modern and romantic.

  Ex. 11.13 : Mendelssohn, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49 (1839), First Movement

  The B ♭ -major slow movement (in ternary ABA song form) begins as a gentle Lied ohne Worte for piano solo, answered by a duet for violin and cello. The contrasting middle section in the parallel minor introduces a new theme and accompaniment, in which the supple sixteenths of the opening give way to more insistent triplet chords. The return of the opening underscores the abstract vocal model of the genre, as the piano pauses to allow the violin and cello to execute two “vocal” cadenzas. Then the strings take up the sixteenth-note accompaniment and leave the piano to draw this enchanting movement to its murmuring close.

  The third and fourth movements employ similar rondo designs, anchored by recurring refrains, and two statements each of two contrasting sections, to produce the scheme ABACABCA’. The puckish scherzo in D major begins with an asymmetrical refrain, an impish seven-bar figure that divides into three plus four and injects an element of playful whimsy. Animating much of the movement are the bustling sixteenth notes of the piano, which knit together the delicate tissues of the ensemble. Near the end an attenuated version of the refrain appears and dissolves into another telltale pianissimo puff, as the piano executes an ascending flourish that vanishes into delicate chords.

  The weighty finale begins quietly with a restless theme that destabilizes the tonic D minor by dwelling on its Neapolitan, E ♭ major. Though the music adopts a serious tone reminiscent of the agitated first movement, there is a subtle link to the scherzo: the defining rhythmic figure of the refrain, a quarter and two eighths (later at work too in the B section), derives from the scherzo, which springs from a rhythmic kernel of an eighth and two sixteenths. Proceeding farther into the finale, we realize that its function is to summarize the whole composition. Thus, the lyrical C section in B ♭ major recalls the slow movement, and near the end, the metamorphosis of the brooding D minor into the parallel major recaptures something of the effervescent scherzo. The result is a masterful trio with subtle relationships between the movements, and a psychological curve that incorporates the agitated brooding of the first, subdued introspection of the second and the playful frivolity of the third. The finale combines all three moods, before reconciling them in the celebratory D-major ending.

  The ink was hardly dry on the autograph of Op. 49 before Felix and his family left Frankfurt on July 19 to visit Horchheim for three weeks. There, near the vineyards of Uncle Joseph’s estate, he settled into a quiet, uniform (einformig ) 126 routine: composition in the morning, and swimming or drawing, piano practice, and walks in the afternoo
n. Drawing on his memory, he completed with Cécile the entries of their honeymoon diary. In the middle of this summer idyll came news of the death of Dorothea Schlegel, which Felix related to Lea: after an eight-day illness, his favorite aunt had succumbed, having lost her strength, “but not the consciousness, cheerfulness and spirit that always accompanied her in life.” 127

  In Horchheim Felix penned the sentimental song In dem Wald , eventually released as Op. 57 No. 1. The major new effort was a magisterial setting of Psalm 114, for double chorus and orchestra. Little is known about the origins of the score, other than that Felix produced it in about two weeks, between the closing days of July and August 9. 128 In 1840 it inaugurated the New Year’s Day Gewandhaus concert; later that year Felix revised the work and added a dedication to the Düsseldorf painter J. W. Schirmer, before publishing it in 1841 as his Op. 51.

  The choice of text, a psalm in eight verses about the wonders of the Exodus (and one of the Hallel psalms sung before and after the Passover meal), prompted Sir George Grove in his landmark Dictionary of Music and Musicians of 1880 to hear the score as reaffirming Felix’s Judaic roots: “The Jewish blood of Mendelssohn must surely for once have beat fiercely over this picture of the great triumph of his forefathers….” 129 But, as Wolfgang Dinglinger has argued, Groves’s conjecture was not based upon any statement from the composer himself. 130 Even so, it is difficult to imagine the Protestant Felix oblivious to the significance of the text for his family history. Here the positive imagery of the Exodus—e.g., the second verse, “Judah became God’s sanctuary, Israel his dominion”—contrasts notably with the decidedly negative depiction of the Jews in Paulus as a “stiff-necked” race. Op. 51 may point to Felix’s attempt to reconcile his Jewish ancestry and Christian faith by adopting what Jeffrey Sposato has termed a “dual perspective,” 131 a process that would ultimately reach its goal in Elijah .