Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  After culminating in a turbulent presto, Felix’s first movement undergoes transformation through a succinct transition. First, the bassoon emerges from the final fortissimo chord and rises by step from B to C; after a few deft chromatic touches, Felix effaces E minor and replaces it with a calming C major. He abandons the passionate yearning of the Allegro to explore a warmly lyrical Lied ohne Worte that gently impels the violin to its high register. Only the contrasting middle section of the Andante, tinged by a turn to the minor mode, recalls in the quivering accompaniment something of the earlier agitation ( ex. 14.14 ). When, in the transition to the finale, the pitch C descends to B, and when the solo violin searches for a new theme, Felix seems intent upon reinstating the E minor and dactylic rhythms of the first movement. Instead, he introduces bright wind fanfares to announce another fleet-footed scherzo in his trademark capricious style—this one in E major. The whirlwind finale then unfolds as a rondo based upon two alternating themes—the first a delicate, major-keyed cousin to the principal motive of the Rondo capriccioso (see p. 229), the second a festive march that conjures up the mood of the Midsummer Night’s Dream wedding march ( ex. 14.15a, b ). From these allusive materials Felix spins a finale of irrepressible zest, an emotional pendant to the drama of the first movement. Further probing reveals that the key sequence of the finale reverses the tonal trajectory of the first movement, and it gives the entire composition an overarching symmetry and balance that indeed stamps this delightful work as the most classical of the great romantic violin concerti (see diagram 14. 1 ).

  Ex. 14.14 : Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), Second Movement

  Ex. 14.15a: Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), Third Movement

  Ex. 14.15b: Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), Third Movement

  Diagram 14.1 : Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844)

  VI

  On September 23, 1844, Felix finished drawing a cozy domestic scene in Bad Soden (plate 15) . 165 Resting on a sofa, Felix and Cécile take tea while maids attend their children; enveloping the group is a protective garland of lush vines and flowers at the borders of which Felix sketched some Frankfurt landmarks. The only disruptive element intrudes near the bottom, where Felix set two symbols of modern conveyance, the railroad and steamship, in opposite directions, signifying his restless, uprooted existence. Indeed, only two days later, after securing quarters for his family in Frankfurt, he departed for Berlin, via Leipzig and Dresden, and arrived in the Prussian capital on the last day of the month, with the intention of seeking his release from the king’s service.

  Felix’s diary records a visit to Potsdam on October 7, 166 when he may have had an audience with Frederick William IV. Somehow the two reached an amicable understanding: Felix was no longer obliged to live in Berlin or perform fixed duties; in exchange, his salary was reduced to 1000 thalers, and he agreed to fulfill royal commissions. A dismayed Fanny realized she would not be able to grow old together with Felix and Cécile, for Felix announced his decision to Devrient “never again to stay” in Berlin; to Klingemann, he described the resolution as if a heavy stone had fallen from his heart. 167 Through the end of November he lingered in Berlin to conduct two orchestral soirées (October 31 and November 14) and, at the king’s pleasure, Paulus at the Singakademie (November 28). He polished Athalie , composed choruses for Oedipus at Colonos , began a collection of twelve Studien für die Orgel for Fanny’s birthday, 168 sat for an oil portrait by Wilhelm Hensel, 169 and, on October 21, through the sculptor Ludwig Wichmann, met the young “Swedish nightingale,” then about to take the Berlin opera stage by storm—Jenny Lind. Her debut, in Bellini’s Norma , was postponed until December, but her fame had preceded her; Felix, who had not yet heard her sing, remarked about her “great talent.” When she challenged him to explain, he replied, “all who have heard you are of one opinion only, and that is so rare a thing that it is quite sufficient to prove to me what you are.” 170

  Around this time Felix corresponded with Griepenkerl about potential opera libretti; to his proposals for subjects such as the Destruction of Jerusalem or Shakespeare’s Tempest , Felix replied that he rather wished to discuss with the librettist not the what but how of a collaboration. 171 But there was little time to contemplate new creative projects, as Felix hurriedly wound up his affairs in Berlin and arranged to move his possessions. To that end, he made detailed inventories of his library, music, and personal belongings, as if to impose a superficial order over the disruption in his life. Perhaps most revealing was his list of books; Peter Ward Jones has demonstrated that less than ten percent concerned music: the majority were standards of the literary canon, including Greek and Roman classics; editions of Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, and Hegel, Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, Cervantes, and Boccaccio; lyric poetry of Uhland, Eichendorff, Tieck, and Rückert; and novels of Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, and Dickens. 172 There were foreign-language lexicons, Bibles, hymnals, the Graduale Romanum , and various guidebooks Felix had accumulated during his travels, including a copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Companion .

  On November 24 Felix took his musical leave of Berlin, as it were, by copying two part-songs he had composed earlier on texts of Eichendorff, the high poet of German romanticism, whose works are filled with images of Wanderlust. Der frohe Wandersmann (The Happy Wanderer ), on popular verses from the novel Ahnung und Gegenwart , projected a carefree, optimistic view of restless wandering. The darker Abschiedstafel (Farewell Banquet ) sings of failed deeds along life’s path but trusts in God’s protection. 173 A few weeks before, Fanny had set two poems of Eichendorff in a solo song titled Traum (Dream ). On the autograph Wilhelm Hensel drew a vignette of a dreaming shepherd, who recalls happier times, and the mountain from which in past spring times he had surveyed the land, with thoughts of his mother, friends, and brethren. 174

  On November 30, 1844, Felix left his family home. For the first time in more than ten years, his career was unencumbered. Away from the court intrigues of Berlin and the frenzied music making of Leipzig, he chose the relative tranquility of Frankfurt for rest and recuperation. For the moment, he could breathe freely and rediscover his muse in the company of his wife and children.

  Chapter 15

  1844–1846

  The Noon of Fame: Years of Triumph

  Felix Mendelssohn comes sometimes to Berlin, and I have often been in his company. He is a man , and at the same time he has the most supreme talent. Thus should it be.

  —Jenny Lind 1

  During his return trip, Felix visited Dresden to see Eduard Devrient, who had accepted a position at the Saxon Royal Theater. The two discussed opera subjects, including the Lorelei legend, for which Felix began to compose music in 1847, only to die before he could realize his final operatic ambition. 2 Another issue drew him to Dresden: Frederick Augustus II sought to entice Felix to move there, or at least resume his Leipzig post. Still nominally in the employment of Frederick William, Felix was obliged not to serve another monarch. Private entertainments were another matter, and so at the Saxon court on December 4, 1844, Felix performed a Beethoven piano sonata and regaled the court with improvisations. The Leipzig physician C. G. Carus left an account. From a grand duchess Felix solicited as his theme a march from Spontini’s La Vestale and, after a quiet introduction, introduced the march as if from afar. Then, manipulating the theme to render its “approach” increasingly festive, Felix insinuated into the fantasy the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and wove the two together into a delightful musical garland, before he finished with some Lieder ohne Worte . 3 In gratitude the king sent two vases of Meißen porcelain. 4

  Arriving in Leipzig on December 5, Felix found a worrisome letter from Cécile about their son Felix, perilously ill with the measles, and from Florence came word that Rebecka, expecting her second child, was suffering from jaundice. The composer hastily rejoined his family in Frankfurt and throughout December sent medical bull
etins to Paul in Berlin. By December 18 young Felix had improved considerably, 5 but Rebecka’s condition was so disquieting that Fanny and Wilhelm planned to leave at the New Year for Italy. Felix spent a quiet Christmas with Cécile in Frankfurt and gave her a special present, an album filled with autographs of political, musical, and literary celebrities. Among its treasures: signatures of Frederick the Great and other monarchs, letters of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich von Kleist, and the Schlegels, verses by Victor Hugo, the opening pages of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, Op. 52, and a pencil drawing by Felix of the Frankfurt woods, from the period of his courtship of Cécile in July 1836. 6

  For the moment, family took precedence over career. Felix tutored his children in reading and arithmetic, but when he attempted to teach Marie the C-major scale, he erroneously had her turn her thumb under the fourth instead of third finger. 7 Uncharacteristically, Felix now declined professional invitations, including a flattering proposal from the United States. In November Ureli Corelli Hill, president of the fledgling New York Philharmonic Society and director of the Sacred Music Society, had entreated Felix to come to New York to direct a “Grand Musical Festival.” A student of Spohr, Hill had served as a violinist in the orchestra at the 1836 Düsseldorf premiere of Paulus and witnessed Felix’s magnetic charisma as a conductor. Hill’s terms were generous and included Felix’s trans-Atlantic passage (a journey of fifteen days from Berlin, via a Liverpool steamer), $1000 in cash, and a comparable amount for an additional benefit concert. Felix would have at his disposal an orchestra of 250 and chorus of 500; his role would be that of a “musical missionary,” to provide the “means of stimulating and advancing the musical art” 8 in the United States. But Felix declined, citing poor health: “a journey like that to your country, which I would have been most happy to undertake some 3 or 4 years ago, is at present beyond my reach” (to Paul, Felix described the undertaking as “no more possible than a trip to the moon”). 9

  For the better part of 1845 Felix remained in Frankfurt and directed his newly found leisure toward composition. Among his tasks was the completion of the English organ “voluntaries,” for which he quickly drafted seven new movements in December and January. Succumbing to a need to impose an overarching unity, he gradually culled and molded the movements into six sonatas that cohered through key relationships and various unifying devices. By sonata Felix had in mind not the classical paradigm, dependent upon sonata form and thematic development, but a conception more familiar to J. S. Bach—a multimovement instrumental work that might encompass a variety of genres and styles, such as the fugue, toccata, or fantasia. Dissatisfied with the Fourth Sonata in B ♭ major, Felix finished on April 2 a new fugal finale, the last piece composed. 10 He then revised and polished his work, 11 and arranged its simultaneous international publication on September 15, 1845, as Op. 65 by four firms: Coventry & Hollier in London, Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, Maurice Schlesinger in Paris, and Giovanni Ricordi in Milan. The new opus was quickly embraced for giving fresh impetus to the instrument and reviving its rich historical legacy. In England, where generations of organists had worked largely ignorant of Bach’s music, one hundred and sixty musicians—among them eleven cathedral musicians—subscribed in 1845 at a cost of one guinea per copy. 12 What Felix feared would have a limited market in fact encouraged a rash of composers to write for the “King” of instruments, including Robert Schumann, who in 1846 published his erudite Sechs Fugen über BACH , Op. 60, and Joseph Rheinberger, who later in the century produced twenty organ sonatas.

  Felix envisioned Op. 65 as a “kind of Organ-school,” 13 and even before its publication Coventry & Hollier was avidly marketing its pedagogical utility. To Breitkopf & Härtel, Felix described the work as illustrating his personal way of handling the instrument. 14 Not surprisingly, he affirmed his Bachian proclivities through the prominent placement of chorales and fugues. Four of the sonatas employ chorales, including Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh allzeit (No. 1), Aus tiefer Noth (No. 3), and Vater unser in Himmelreich (No. 6); in No. 5 Felix frames the sonata with the strains of a freely composed chorale. Every sonata except No. 5 has fugal writing or full-fledged fugues. Among them are a chorale fugue in No. 3 that, like the St. Paul Overture, employs an accelerando; a fugue on a wedge-shaped subject in No. 4; and a fugue culminating the last sonata, designed as a chorale partita, or variations, on Vater unser .

  At least two sonatas draw on compositions from Felix’s early maturity. The second movement of No. 2, a majestic Allegro, reuses a festive postlude (Nachspiel ) composed in Rome in 1831. 15 And the opening of No. 3, in a radiant A major, was probably a reworking of the processional Felix sketched in 1829 for Fanny’s wedding ( ex. 15.1a ). This sonata, which continues with the chorale fugue on Aus tiefer Noth , betrays a connection to one other work of Felix—the initial fugal subject quotes a recitative from the Lobgesang Symphony ( ex. 15.1b , c ). 16 Against this dissonant subject, Felix intones in the pedals the chorale Aus tiefer Noth (Psalm 130); eventually the return of the bright opening music dispels the symbolic darkness and tribulation, and the sonata concludes with a reflective Andante as a postlude.

  Ex. 15.1a: Mendelssohn, Organ Sonata in A major, Op. 65 No. 3 (1844), First Movement

  Ex. 15.1b: Mendelssohn, Organ Sonata in A major, Op. 65 No. 3 (1844), First Movement

  Ex. 15.1c: Mendelssohn, Lobgesang Symphony, Op. 52 (1840), “Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?”

  This unabashed revival of baroque forms, chromatic part-writing, active pedal parts (as in Bach’s organ works, Felix called upon the feet “to do everything that the hands were asked to do”), 17 and immersion in fugal science imbue the music with a distinctly Bachian coloration. Nevertheless, Felix tempered his revival of the German baroque in Op. 65 by referring to contemporary styles of writing, an approach he had already exploited in keyboard works such as the Sieben Charakterstücke Op. 7, Six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35, and Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 37. Thus the slow movements of Nos. 2 and 4 impress as a Lied and Duett ohne Worte , while the Andante con moto of No. 5, with its peculiar staccato work in the pedal part, suggests a lumbering scherzo. Beyond these examples, the sonatas exude a spontaneous invention and formal freedom—for example, nowhere do they illustrate a conventional sonata form—reminding us that Felix was especially celebrated for his organ improvisations and suggesting that some of the movements may have originated as private improvisations.

  The first sonata in particular reveals Felix at his most spontaneous and innovative mode: here elements of fugue and chorale (first movement), Lied ohne Worte (second), recitative (third), and toccata (fourth) combine to form a flexible, variegated composition bordering on the realm of the fantasia. The sonata begins with a brief exordium for full organ, a series of chords embedded in which is the expressive motive (A ♭ –E ♮ –F; ex. 15.2a ). A few bars later, above an organ pedal point Felix introduces a chromatic fugato derived from this motive ( ex. 15.2b ). But then, rising from a different manual, we hear the calming, opening strains of the chorale Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh allzeit , which now alternates with the unfolding fugue ( ex. 15.2c ). In the second half of the movement Felix applies the fugal subject in mirror inversion before combining the two and reintroducing the chorale in the closing bars.

  Ex. 15.2a: Mendelssohn, Organ Sonata in F minor, Op. 65 No. 1 (1844), First Movement

  Ex. 15.2b: Mendelssohn, Organ Sonata in F minor, Op. 65 No. 1 (1844), First Movement

  Ex. 15.2c: Mendelssohn, Organ Sonata in F minor, Op. 65 No. 1 (1844), First Movement

  The unusual shape of the movement suggests a model in the pathosladen recitative from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (No. 25), in which, as Jesus arrives in Gethsemane to pray, an agitated, disjunct tenor recitative alternates with the chorale Herzliebster Jesu, was hast Du verbrochen? ( ex. 15.3 ). 18 Not only is Bach’s movement in the same key, F minor, but the motive A ♭ –E ♮ –F saturates the recitative in imitative counterpoint and even appears over a pedal point, as in the sonata.
As for the chorale, Bach does employ Was mein Gott will a few movements later in the Passion (No. 31), appropriately, in response to Jesus’ prayer, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.” All in all, the first movement of Felix’s sonata impresses as a musical reading, or improvisation, on Bach’s music and uses Bach’s preferred instrument to penetrate the spirit of the Passion. Elsewhere the sonata returns us stylistically to the 1840s, as in the Lied-like Adagio or the resplendent moto-perpetuo -like arpeggiations of the finale. Ultimately, the sonata, and Op. 65 as a whole, remains paradoxically Janus-faced, eyeing the baroque splendors of Bach through the lens of Felix’s own stylistic identity.