Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Incredibly, only one month later, after “toiling day and night,” Bartholomew had produced the English version, a paraphrase kept “as scriptural as possible,” and also copied the choruses, so that they could be engraved for rehearsals. 119 For the next seven weeks composer and translator kept a brisk correspondence, with Felix sending portions of the second part as they were ready, Bartholomew returning the newly fabricated English texts, and Felix responding with a multitude of meticulous revisions. Their letters reveal indeed that he scrutinized Bartholomew’s work “bar by bar, note by note, syllable by syllable, with an attention to detail which might be termed microscopic.” 120 For Felix, this modus operandi was a matter of course; “a little more trouble” would be amply repaid by a “little improvement!” 121

  V

  Interrupting his labors on Elijah , Felix departed Leipzig for Frankfurt, to rendezvous with Jenny Lind, returning from a triumphant Viennese tour. Delayed, she did not reach Der weisse Schwan, the fashionable hotel where Felix waited fretfully an entire day, until midnight the evening of May 26. The next day, accompanied by friends and Jenny’s chaperone, the musicians embarked at Mainz on a steamboat down the Rhine. According to Emil Naumann, a Conservatory student who partook of the Rheinfahrt , Felix sought to entertain Jenny by comparing to composers the islands dotting the river and peaks dominating its sloping banks. Thus, the Johannisberg, with its Benedictine monastery and eighteenth-century castle, was the “Mozart among the vineyards”; the craggy rocks near Rüdesheim, Beethoven. 122 Safely established in Charlemagne’s old Kaiserstadt, Felix threw himself into the remaining rehearsals for the Aachen festival. May 30, the day before the first concert, proved especially exhausting. At 7:00 A .M ., he spent an hour discussing Elijah with Simrock, who had arrived from Bonn. Then the general rehearsal began, interrupted at 2:00 P .M . by an obligatory dinner, followed by another monumental rehearsal from 5:00 to 9:00. During the day, Jenny received an unexpected visitor: her friend E. G. Geijer (1783–1847), a history professor from the University of Uppsala, who had traveled from Sweden with his wife to attend the Musikfest, surprised her at the rehearsal. Felix had a piano sent to his room and late that evening played some Lieder ohne Worte and the Moonlight Sonata at an impromptu musical gathering. 123

  The festival began under Felix’s baton on Pentecost Sunday, May 31, with a Mozart symphony and Haydn’s Creation , performed by a chorus of 487 and orchestra of 139 before an audience of 1200 in the municipal theater. Jenny sang the roles of Gabriel and Eve. 124 The highpoint was the third part of the oratorio, when she “threw the whole poetry of her womanly nature into the part of Eve.” 125 The next day, she appeared in Handel’s Alexander’s Feast , for which Felix had tinkered with the German of Ramler’s translation, in order to render Dryden’s poem more intelligible. 126 In addition, Felix conducted works by Weber, Cherubini, and Mozart, but generated a special excitement by an announcement prior to performing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A letter from Beethoven to his publisher, Felix explained, had emerged that disclosed an error in the printed score of the third-movement scherzo. Just after the C-major trio, at the return of the opening C-minor motive, Beethoven had originally included two bars (for use in an expanded version of the movement, with full repeats of the scherzo and trio). Somehow, in 1809 and again in 1826, when the parts and score were printed, the superfluous bars had evaded the engraver’s attention. 127 Now, in 1846, Felix undertook to excise the bars for his Aachen performance and rectify a nearly forty-year-old error in the performance tradition of the familiar masterpiece.

  Though Breitkopf & Härtel published Beethoven’s letter in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , 128 and revealed the composer clearly had labeled the questionable passage an error, a controversy erupted among musicians and the press, with Berlioz and Habeneck in Paris defending the redundant bars. Beethoven’s former secretary Anton Schindler, no friend of Felix, admitted that the “noble creator of the work” had “put a curse on these two measures”; still, Schindler endeavored to rationalize their inclusion. And a Viennese critic sought to demonstrate that none of the printed parts from Beethoven’s time suppressed the measures; therefore, they must be legitimate. 129 Nevertheless, Beethoven scholarship subsequently endorsed Felix’s revision, putting the “cursed” measures to rest.

  On the morning of June 2, the Aachen festival closed with the “Artists’ Concert,” at which portions of Haydn’s Creation were encored and Felix’s String Quartet Op. 12 and an overture by Georges Onslow performed. Onslow, who reviewed the festival for the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris , received Felix’s baton as a memento. 130 But the star attraction was again Jenny, who sang Felix’s Lieder so successfully that the entire three-day event was remembered as the Jenny-Lind-Fest , probably the first public music festival dominated by one virtuoso. Felix was moved to add another song to the Liederheft he had sent her for Christmas. Then, the two spent a day visiting Cologne and the lore-encrusted Drachenfels (Dragon’s Rock) south of Bonn. When they parted, Jenny left for Hanover and Felix for Düsseldorf, where on Trinity Sunday (June 7) he participated in a concert of Julius Rietz, which “would have been a fine one if Jenny Lind had been there.” 131 Still, two competing singing societies serenaded Felix, and at a friend’s residence he had access to a new Erard piano and discovered Veuve Clicquot to be an “excellent woman.” 132

  Four days later, Felix was in the Church of St. Martin of Liège, for the premiere of Lauda Sion on Thursday, June 11, 1846, the six hundredth anniversary of the feast of Corpus Christi, first observed in the Belgian city in 1246. He had intended to assist with the rehearsals but not to direct the performance. What he found were musical forces woefully inadequate to the task, as two accounts by the English critic Chorley and the choral director John Hullah, who journeyed from London, disclose. The church was “one of those buildings which swallow up all sound, owing to the curve of the vaults and the bulk of the piers; the orchestra was little more powerful, when heard from below, than the distant scraping of a Christmas serenade far down the street; the chorus was toneless, and out of tune; and only one solo singer, the soprano , was even tolerable…. Mendelssohn gave up the matter in despair. ‘No; it is not good; it cannot go well; it will make a bad noise,’ was his greeting to us.” 133 Somewhat offsetting the poor preparation was the solemn pageantry of the event, attended by fourteen bishops, “magnificently vested in scarlet, and purple, and gold, and damask—a group never to be forgotten.”

  Following a sermon on the mysteries of the Eucharist, Felix’s score was read by a “scrannel orchestra, and singers who could hardly be heard.” 134 Hullah found the chorus “most inefficient,” owing to a bishop’s refusal to allow women to sing the soprano and alto parts. 135 But in the final movement, at Ecce panis angelorum, factus cibus viatorum (“Behold the bread of angels, made the food of pilgrims”), came a “surprise of a different quality.” The Host was suspended “in a gorgeous gilt tabernacle, that slowly turned above the altar, so as to reveal the consecrated elements to the congregation. Incense was swung from censers; and the evening sun, breaking in with a sudden brightness, gave a fairy-like effect to curling fumes as they rose, while a very musical bell, that timed the movement twice in a bar, added its charm to the rite.” Chorley felt a grasp at his wrist. “Listen!” Felix said. “How pretty that is! It makes me amends for all their bad playing and singing,—and I shall hear the rest better some other time.” 136

  Felix’s most substantial Catholic setting, Lauda Sion draws upon a rich tradition extending back to the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas composed the text as a sequence 137 for the liturgy of the newly instituted Feast of Corpus Christi. Falling predominantly into trochaic dimeters (Láuda Síon sálvatórem, láuda dúcem ét pastórem ), the twelve-odd stanzas of the poem employ a modal chant originally used for twelfth-century Parisian sequences. During the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation composers such as Brumel, Victoria, Lassus, and Palestrina wrote polyphonic motets that paraphrased or cited t
he chant. A sure sign of its popularity was the decision of the Council of Trent (1543–1563) to remove from the liturgy all sequences save a small handful, including Lauda Sion and Dies irae . Whether Felix had access to early polyphonic settings is unclear (he reported to Robert Schumann that old Italian church music came over him like incense 138 ); in any event the Latin verses, inextricably associated with the doctrine of transubstantiation, and thus removed from Felix’s own Protestant tradition, inspired him to create a major, unjustly neglected composition.

  From the outset the score radiates euphonious, Italianate warmth foreign to the chromatic, Bachian austerities usually characteristic of Felix’s sacred music. The work begins with an ascending, incalescent C-major figure announcing a chorus of praise ( ex. 15.14a ). In the second movement, the figure reappears in a minor-keyed incarnation against pulsating string tremolos, solemnly linking the Eucharist to the Last Supper. The theme of praise returns in the third movement, which, like a response, alternates between a soprano soloist and chorus. We now approach the three central movements, the core of the composition, in which Felix allies the mysterious ritual of Holy Communion with the centuries-old art of counterpoint. In No. 4, the text refers to the New Covenant replacing the Old and to truth chasing shadowy appearance. Here Felix crafts a series of canons for pairings of four solo voices. Then, in the culminating fifth movement, he celebrates the sacerdotal “dogma given to Christians” by unveiling the modal chant of Lauda Sion as a cantus firmus. Felix’s exact source for the melody is unknown, but significantly he transformed it from its original, mixolydian church mode into a version compatible with the more modern aeolian, or natural minor, a technique that rendered the melody at once exotic yet vaguely familiar ( ex. 15.14b , c ).

  Three times the chorus sings the opening strain in unison, a reference to the Trinity, as the celebrants, “learned in the sacred institutions” (docti sacris institutis ), consecrate the bread and wine as the Host of salvation. At the fourth repetition, the text extols Christ’s presence through living faith and “different signs, not things” (sub diversis speciebus, signis tantum, et non rebus ); here the chorus abandons its stark unison declamation in favor of a free harmonization, with the chant transposed to the bass. The sixth movement explores the same text by means of a chorale fugue ( ex. 15.14d ), in which trumpets and trombones intone the chant between expositions of the fugal subject. Curiously, when Lauda Sion appeared in 1848 as Op. 73, the first of Felix’s posthumous works, the fugue was omitted; it disappeared until a Belgian scholar published the movement in 1954. 139 Clearly Felix intended to include it, although “it is a bit strict and although it is a fugue and although it is too long.” 140 Taken with the canonic and cantus-firmus techniques of the fourth and fifth movements, the fugue completes the association of high counterpoint with the ineffable ritual of the Eucharist.

  Ex. 15.14a: Mendelssohn, Lauda Sion , Op. 73 (1846), No. 1

  Ex. 15.14b: Lauda Sion Salvatorem

  Ex. 15.14c: Mendelssohn, Lauda Sion , Op. 73 (1846), No. 5

  Ex. 15.14d: Mendelssohn, Lauda Sion , Op. 73 (1846), No. 6

  Next, a soprano aria (No. 7) reminds the communicants that the breaking of bread does not divide Christ but “accepts Him whole.” The final movement begins dramatically, as the thousands of good and evil receive communion. While the text hints at the Last Judgment, Felix reinforces the idea by alluding to another sequence, the Dies irae , as set by Mozart in the Rex tremendae of his Requiem. But Felix’s fortissimo chords in majestic dotted rhythms subside to a calming transition that returns us to the “bread of the angels,” and the music of the opening movement. The score ends pianissimo with a vision of Christ the Good Shepherd (bone Pastor ) and the bread that nourishes the faithful.

  VI

  Felix’s next musical experience contrasted starkly to the high solemnities of Corpus Christi. From June 14 to 17, 1846, he attended the first (and only) German-Flemish Singing Festival (Deutsch-Vlaemisches Sängerfest ) in Cologne. An orotund mass, some two thousand men—“everything in Belgium, the Rhine Land, and Baden, that could bear a part in a part-song” 141 —convened to sing concerts and compete for a prize. The rowdy participants crammed into Gürzenich Hall, an old, turreted building festooned with the colorful banners of the various Liedertafel societies. Here, Felix directed “O Isis und Osiris” from Mozart’s Magic Flute and the premiere of An die Künstler (To Artists ), Op. 68, for male choir and brass band, to a text of Schiller. Similar in style to the Gutenberg Festgesang of 1840, Op. 68 celebrates the power of art to guide its sacred magic to the “great ocean of harmony” ( ex. 15.15 ) and to preserve “human worthiness.” Also heard on the concert was the Bacchus chorus from Antigone , “no bad prelude to the drinking bouts” 142 that followed. Both works were encored, and at a second concert one of Felix’s part-songs was sung from memory. Late that night, a procession of torch-bearing musicians serenaded the composer. During the festival, Felix met the young composer Joachim Raff (later Liszt’s assistant at Weimar), whose music Felix had recommended to Breitkopf & Härtel in 1843. 143 On June 16, there was more singing, this time atop the Drachenfels, after a leisurely Liederfahrt up the Rhine. And on June 17, Felix and his party toured the unfinished cathedral to inspect the “hives upon hives of Gothic ornaments ready to be placed—hundreds of grotesques, thousands of crockets, canopies, and finials.” 144 With the head architect Felix imagined composing music for the nave, though he reported to Moritz Hauptmann that the acoustics were less than desirable. 145

  Ex. 15.15 : Mendelssohn, An die Künstler , Op. 68

  Hardly had Felix returned to Leipzig before he was playing host to Louis Spohr, who arrived from Cassel on June 22 for a six-day visit. Each day culminated in intense music making, and at the Gewandhaus Felix organized a surprise concert (June 25) dedicated to Spohr’s compositions. 146 But the unrehearsed reading of his Fourth Symphony (Die Weihe der Töne ) nearly led to an embarrassing moment. When Felix invited the esteemed visitor to conduct the third movement, he neglected to inform Spohr of a substantial cut entered into the parts but not the score. After receiving the news with an “Olympian calm” from Ferdinand David, Spohr revealed that in Cassel he had instituted the same cut, for the work was “too long.” 147 At the Thomaskirche Moritz Hauptmann read choral works of Spohr and J. S. Bach, and at private dinner parties Felix took up three instruments in his guest’s chamber works: piano in the Piano Trio Op. 119, viola in the Third Double String Quartet Op. 87, and violin in the new String Quartet Op. 132. 148 Felix also performed, Spohr informs us, with “monstrous bravura ,” an “unheard of difficult and most highly idiosyncratic composition of his own,” 149 the Variations sérieuses . Among the listeners was Richard Wagner, who had come to Leipzig to meet Spohr, and impressed him with his liberal political sympathies. Regrettably, Felix seems not to have recorded in his letters his impressions of Wagner in what was probably their last meeting.

  After Spohr’s departure Felix took up the second part of Elijah , interrupted only by a memorial concert for the trombonist C. T. Queisser on July 19, when the composer performed Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with David. 150 Prior to leaving for the engagements in the Rhineland, Felix had sought Schubring’s assistance with the libretto of the second part, still in a tentative, disorganized state. Among Felix’s concerns were how to connect Jezebel’s threat against Elijah (1 Kings 19) with the prophet’s flight into the wilderness, whether to have Elijah sing at his ascension, and whether to introduce his disciple Elisha. The last point led to a droll exchange: when Felix imagined Elisha as a child and asked if a soprano could sing the part, Schubring responded by alluding to Paulus : “Such a question should not be put by one who has set Christ’s words for a chorus…. One who ploughs with twelve yoke of oxen (1 Kings 19:19) is no child.” 151

  In the end, Elisha did not have a role in the oratorio, nor did Elijah sing at his ascension, represented instead by the chorus No. 38, “Then did Elijah the prophet break forth like a fire” (Sirach 48). Ho
w to conclude the oratorio remained a difficult issue. Schubring had argued for giving the work an avowedly New Testament flavor and recommended a final trio of Peter, John, and James. When Felix found this stratagem “too far removed from the grouping of the (Old Testament) story,” Schubring replied, “I see most distinctly that the oratorio can have no other than a New Testament ending; the Old Testament (Malachi) and also the New Testament demand this in terms of the most definite kind. Elijah must help to transform the old into the new covenant—that gives him his great historical importance.” 152 By alluding to Malachi 3 (“The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts”), a passage Handel had incorporated into the first part of Messiah , Schubring sought to reaffirm a common Christian reading linking the Gospels to the prophets Isaiah and Malachi and interpreting Elijah as a precursor to John the Baptist and Christ.

  As the summer of 1846 advanced and the deadline approached, Felix “lived the life of a marmot,” 153 scrambling to finish the second part while refining Bartholomew’s English translations. Not until the middle of June did the chorus master, James Stimpson, begin receiving the choruses of Part 1, which, though printed, were filled with enough alterations in black, red, and blue ink to render their decipherment taxing. The final chorus of Part 2 arrived only nine days before the festival. Even before “finishing” the oratorio, on August 11, 1846 (plate 17 ), 154 Felix began implementing revisions, some at Bartholomew’s suggestion. As early as June he had encouraged Felix to write an overture, but the composer had intended to begin the work with Elijah’s solemn recitative announcing the drought and could not imagine what an overture “should or could mean before that curse.” 155 Bartholomew then devised a creative solution: the overture, “descriptive of the misery of famine,” could immediately follow the recitative, and thus prepare the opening chorus, “Help, Lord! Wilt Thou quite destroy us?” Felix acceded to the request and early in August hastily composed the orchestral movement.