Another recommendation by Bartholomew nearly induced Felix to remove the alto aria, “O rest in the Lord” (No. 31; Psalm 37:7), sung by an angel to accompany Elijah’s journey to Mt. Horeb. The translator had detected a nagging resemblance between the opening phrase and the Scottish air “Robin Gray,” which begins “Young Jamie lov’d me well, and ask’d me for his bride.” Fearing the similarity would expose Felix to “the impertinence of the saucy boys of the musical press,” 156 Bartholomew alerted the composer, whose first instinct was to delete the movement. But after arriving in London, Felix retouched the phrase slightly to disguise the similarity and spared the aria. Not so a chorus originally incorporated into the penultimate No. 41, “He shall open the blind eyes” (Isaiah 42:7). Eighty-six measures in length, the movement unfolded as a four-part canon with orchestral accompaniment. 157 But after trying it out at a rehearsal in Leipzig on August 5, Felix informed Bartholomew of its excision: “Pray let the choral people at Birmingham know this directly ; it will spare them much time, as the Alla breve is not easy, and as I am sure I will not let it stand.” 158
VII
Prior to departing for London, Felix answered an important letter of Fanny that revisited an old issue in their relationship. In the spring of 1846 she had met a young musician, Robert von Keudell (1824–1903), about to join the diplomatic corps (in 1873, during Bismarck’s term as chancellor of the newly unified Germany, Keudell would become German ambassador to Rome 159 ). Fanny found in him a skilled pianist who possessed a fine ear for music and impressive memory comparable to Felix’s. By July, she and Hensel were seeing the young man on a nearly daily basis: “Keudell keeps my music alive and in constant activity, as Gounod did once. He takes an intense interest in everything that I write, and calls my attention to any shortcomings; generally he is in the right too.” 160 Keudell’s and Hensel’s encouragement rekindled Fanny’s interest in publishing her music, and she accepted an attractive offer from the Berlin firm of Bote & Bock to bring out six Lieder as her opus primum .
Eager to have her brother’s approbation, she broke the news to Felix on July 9, but with some apprehension:
… I’m afraid of my brothers at age 40, as I was of Father at age 14—or, more aptly expressed, desirous of pleasing you and everyone I’ve loved throughout my life. And when I now know in advance that it won’t be the case, I thus feel rather uncomfortable. In a word, I’m beginning to publish…. And if I’ve done it of my own free will and cannot blame anyone in my family if aggravation results from it (friends and acquaintances have indeed been urging me for a long time), then I can console myself, on the other hand, with the knowledge that I in no way sought out or induced the type of musical reputation that might have elicited such offers. I hope I won’t disgrace all of you through my publishing, as I’m no femme libre and unfortunately not even an adherent of the Young Germany movement. I trust you will in no way be bothered by it, since, as you can see, I’ve proceeded completely on my own in order to spare you any possible unpleasant moment, and I hope you won’t think badly of me. 161
For more than a month, Fanny waited for a reply. When it finally came in mid-August, after Felix had met Keudell in Leipzig and a few days before Felix’s departure for London, she finally received her brother’s blessing for her decision “to enter our guild”: “… may you taste only the sweets and none of the bitterness of authorship,” he wrote; “may the public pelt you with roses, and never with sand; and may the printer’s ink never draw black lines upon your soul.” 162 Felix drolly signed his letter, “The journeyman tailor,” and thus somewhat facetiously recalled Zelter’s symbolic Gesellensprechung of 1824, when Felix had “graduated” from his apprenticeship. Abraham’s pronouncement, that music would be an ornament to Fanny’s life, was no longer valid; the curtain concealing her private musical thoughts was about to be raised. While Felix departed to premiere Elijah in Birmingham, Fanny decided to seek more public recognition of her music, and perhaps enter the lists as a professional composer. Reading between his lines a stinting approval, she recorded in her diary: “At last Felix has written, and given me his professional blessing in the kindest manner. I know that he is not quite satisfied in his heart of hearts, but I am glad he has said a kind word to me about it.” 163
Chapter 16
1846–1847
The Prophet’s Voice: Elijah’s Chariot
Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take Him down.
—Mark 15:36
Reunited in London with Klingemann by August 18, 1846, Felix attended that day a concert in his honor by the Beethoven Quartet Society. Among the participants were the violinists Henri Vieuxtemps and Joachim, and cellist Alfredo Piatti, who joined five other musicians in what was billed as the English premiere of the Octet. 1 Felix improvised and played the piano part of his Second Piano Trio. But excepting this appearance, he devoted all his energies toward Elijah . On the 19th Moscheles heard him play from memory the newly composed overture and read through the arias with the principal soloists, Maria Caradori-Allan (soprano), Maria Hawes (alto), Charles Lockey (tenor), and Joseph Staudigl (bass). The women proved prime donne : the soprano asked Felix to transpose down a step the aria “Hear ye, Israel,” as it was not a “lady’s song”; and the alto dared introduce an extraneous trill at the close of “O rest in the Lord.” 2 On the 20th and 21st Felix led two orchestral rehearsals in the Hanover Square Rooms but lost considerable time proofing and collating the hastily produced parts, spread out on benches in the hall. Then, at 2:00 on August 23, he boarded a special train at Euston Station for Birmingham. Among the passengers were the soloists, members of the orchestra and chorus, and a press contingent. The reporters included the young critic J. W. Davison, recently hired by the Times and on assignment from London.
One of the singers who traveled to Birmingham was the bass Henry Phillips, who sang in the chorale-like “Regard thy servant’s prayer” (first version of No. 15). Around the time of the 1842 English premiere of the Scottish Symphony, Felix had agreed to compose for Phillips a scena for bass and orchestra and, on August 22, 1846, finally made good on his word by delivering the manuscript of On Lena’s Gloomy Heath . 3 Though Macpherson’s eighteenth-century Ossianic forgeries had long been exposed, Phillips still thought to exploit the fascination with the pre-Christian bard and cobbled together two unrelated texts from the fourth and third books of Macpherson’s Fingal . In the first, a vision of Ossian’s deceased wife, Everallin, stirs him to rescue their son, Oscar, trapped in an ambush. In the second, Ossian girds himself for battle to a text actually designed for another Celtic hero, Calmar.
Phillips’s choices inspired from Felix a three-part setting, with a dreamy, tonally evasive recitative centered on G minor followed by Everallin’s plea and a martial march in the major. The haunting iambic rhythms and dark imagery of Macpherson’s prose (On Léna’s glóomy héath the vóice of músic díed awáy ) encouraged Felix to revisit the brooding Ossianic style of earlier works such as the Fingal’s Cave Overture and Scottish Symphony. Thus, the scena begins with several soft wind fanfares, fleeting visions of an exotic, distant past, accompanied by a series of blurred trills in the bass line that distort our sense of tonal stability ( ex. 16.1a ). From this phantasmagoric atmosphere emerges Ossian’s voice in a subdued passage reminiscent of the Scottish Symphony (cf. ex. 16.1b and p. 430). Everallin’s plea is delivered over a chromatically agitated, rising sequence. Then, at the moment of truth, the fog disperses, and Ossian sings a square-cut march tune, a transformation of his opening material into the major mode. But after all the fine, atmospheric music, the march is rather banal, perhaps betraying the haste with which Felix produced the work and explaining why he chose not to keep a copy for himself. According to Phillips, after reviewing the score, Felix was dissatisfied and offered to write another work, a proposal he was unable to fulfill. Instead, Phillips premiered On Lena’s Gloomy Heath in London at a Philharmonic concert of March 15, 1847, 4 after which it fell into obscurity.
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Ex. 16.1a: Mendelssohn, On Lena’s Gloomy Heath (1846)
Ex. 16.1b: Mendelssohn, On Lena’s Gloomy Health (1846)
Not so, of course, Elijah , which even before its premiere received favorable press attention that marked the oratorio as a momentous musical milestone. After hearing two “naturally imperfect” rehearsals at the Hanover Square Rooms, a reporter for The Musical World declared the work the masterpiece of Felix’s genius, though, in contrast to St. Paul , its “essentially dramatic” character caused some to wonder why Felix had not written an opera. 5 In the London Times Davison published a fairly detailed analytical survey, commented on the surprising paucity of fugues from the “most accomplished living musician,” and labeled the oratorio the “greatest achievement of Mendelssohn’s genius” and a “great event in the present dearth of serious purpose.” 6
The festival offered no fewer than six concerts, of which Elijah formed the zenith on Wednesday, August 26. Rehearsals in Town Hall began Monday morning and continued Tuesday evening, after the first morning concert, which featured Haydn’s Creation . When Moscheles, scheduled to conduct several concerts, fell ill, Felix graciously took over a rehearsal Monday evening of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis , possibly the only occasion on which Felix explored that monumental composition. Of the rehearsals the Birmingham Journal commented on Felix’s “remarkable power over the performers”; “molding them to his will, and though rigidly strict in exacting the nicest precision, he does it in a manner irresistible—actually laughing them into perfection.” 7 By then the town was “in a state of great bustle and excitement” in anticipation of Elijah , now elevated in the Times as “the cynosure of universal interest” on which depended “the entire prestige of the festival.” 8
On Wednesday morning, nearly four hundred musicians filled the stage of Town Hall, behind which the organ with “its thirty-two-foot pipes, looking like gigantic rolls of oil-cloth, rose up from behind till its head touched the roof, like some vast animal of mysterious form.” 9 The orchestra numbered 125 musicians, principally members of the London Philharmonic and opera orchestras (when Joseph Moore had attempted to exclude a few Philharmonic members who in 1844 had treated Felix rudely at a rehearsal, the composer protested against the “spirit of vindictiveness,” and insisted they be engaged 10 ). The chorus, 271 strong, was allotted to 79 sopranos, 60 “bearded” male altos, 60 tenors, and 72 basses. Shortly before entering the hall, filled with an audience of some two thousand—among them clergy, earls, members of Parliament, and Felix’s friends Sterndale Bennett and Charles Horsley—the composer requested of Henry Chorley, music critic for the Athenaeum , “Now stick your claws into my book. Don’t tell me what you like, but tell me what you don’t like.” When Felix reached the conductor’s rostrum, “the forms of etiquette were unanimously laid aside, and one loud and universal cheer acknowledged the presence of the greatest composer of the age.” 11
By all accounts, 12 the performance was an unqualified triumph, with eight numbers (four arias and four choruses) encored. The close of the final chorus was “drowned in a long-continued and unanimous volley of plaudits, … as though enthusiasm, long checked, had suddenly burst its bonds, and filled the air with shouts of exultation.” Elijah was hailed as not only Felix’s masterpiece but also “one of the most extraordinary achievements of human intelligence.” 13 Felix himself noted to his brother that no other premiere of his music enjoyed such an enthusiastic reception. 14 The festival committee had hedged its bets by adding music to the concert; it stretched the program to accommodate (after the oratorio) arias of Mozart and Cimarosa, sung by the fashionable Italian couple Giulia Grisi and Giovanni Mario, and a chorus of Handel. Following the concert, Felix led Chorley and other friends on the “prettiest walk in Birmingham”—the banks of the canal, where, amid piles of coal and cinders, he hit upon the idea of transforming the duet “Lift thine eyes” (No. 28, Psalm 121) into an a cappella trio. 15 Then, after a few hours respite, he returned to the hall for the third concert, which featured Moscheles’s unrehearsed performance—time had not permitted rehearsals—of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, among other works.
The fourth and fifth concerts followed on Thursday morning and evening, August 27. Heard first was Handel’s Messiah , completing (with Haydn’s Creation , and Elijah ) a triptych of oratorios. But Messiah too was unrehearsed, and the addition of “two serpents, three trombones, and an ophicleide” made an “absolutely ridiculous” effect. 16 At the evening concert Felix performed with Moscheles the latter’s piano duet Hommage à Handel and directed the overture and some of the incidental movements to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . In lieu of a rehearsal, there had been “a sort of scramble” over the scherzo, “Ye spotted snakes,” and final chorus, so the performance was less than ideal. 17 Thus, in the overture, which Felix took at an unusually fast tempo, he had “no small difficulty in checking the rallentandi , in the middle and at the end, which he never dreamed of when he made the score, but into the habit of which our London orchestras have, by some mistake, been led.” But the Wedding March was encored, and “in some measure redeemed previous inaccuracies.”
Felix had no official role in the sixth, final concert of Friday morning, yet an unusual circumstance compelled his participation. The “monster” program included among other works an overture by Méhul, a psalm setting by Moscheles, arias of Marcello, Stradella, and Handel, a trio from a Cherubini Mass, selections from Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Christ on the Mount of Olives , a solo by the festival organist, H. J. Gauntlett, and a hymn of Spohr. Its crowning conclusion, Handel’s Zadok the Priest , was jeopardized just before the performance. The distributed program book included the words of a recitative, introduced when the coronation anthem had been given during the 1837 festival celebrating Queen Victoria’s accession. “The Lord God Almighty, who ordereth all things in heaven and on earth, hath anointed His handmaid,” the text read. Unfortunately, no music could be found for this Victorian accretion, until Felix withdrew to an anteroom and, during the performance of the anthem, composed in a few minutes a convincing Handelian simulation. Parts of the new recitative were hastily generated and, with the ink barely dry, inserted into the performance, so that no one save “those who were in the secret” realized the movement was not the “genuine” article. 18 “That’s the way a Mendelssohn manages,” Moscheles recorded in his diary. 19
Largely owing to Felix’s celebrity, the festival earned a surplus of some £4800, donated to the charitable work of the Birmingham General Hospital. 20 Having declined to direct two concerts in Manchester, Felix returned to London with Moscheles and recuperated with the Beneckes at Ramsgate, where Felix’s only tasks were to take sea air and eat crab. The Sacred Harmonic Society was eager to perform Elijah in London, but objections from Birmingham foiled the scheme. On September 6 Felix departed London with Joseph Staudigl for Ostende and made a leisurely return trip, visiting the vineyards of his uncle Joseph in Horchheim and stopping in Frankfurt before reaching Leipzig.
Felix now had sufficient leisure time to complete one minor and two more significant commissions, all for sacred works. In May 1846 Pastor Appia, officiant at Felix and Cécile’s wedding in Frankfurt, requested a contribution to a new edition of hymn tunes for the French Reformed Church. 21 Since the mid-eighteenth century, a growing repertory of cantiques , freely composed melodies set to new devotional poems, had supplemented the largely sixteenth-century corpus of French psalm harmonizations. Felix now composed for Appia Venez et chantez les louanges de ce Christ (“Come and sing the praises of this Christ”). 22 Its verses, probably by the Huguenot minister D. A. Touchon of Hanau, proved difficult, as Felix struggled to fit “weak,” feminine endings into the phrases of a chorale-like setting. In 1849 his melody, but not the supporting harmonization, appeared in the Huguenot hymnbook Recueil de cantiques chrétiens without attribution of authorship; not until 1997 was the complete cantique , Felix’s sole work for the Huguenots, finally published. 23
In May 1846 Frederick William IV had issued two commissions to Felix for the Berlin Domchor. 24 First, he was to compose two additional Sprüche to follow the reading of the Epistle in the Prussian liturgy (Agende ). By joining the new pieces to the four written in 1843 and 1844 (see pp. 465, 467), Felix completed in October 1846 a cycle of six a-cappella miniatures for high feast days—Advent, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Holy Week, Good Friday, and Ascension Day. Each piece concluded with a short, cadential “Alleluia,” reflecting the placement of the verse before the Alleluia in the Agende of 1829 (still observed by Frederick William IV) and also Felix’s interest in imbuing the music with a cyclic, timeless quality. That he intended to publish the music is clear from a letter of October 17, 1846, dispatched with the manuscript to Bote & Bock, then preparing to bring out Fanny’s Opp. 1 and 2. 25 But for unknown reasons, a month later Felix withdrew the work, and it did not appear until 1849, when Breitkopf & Härtel published it posthumously as the Sechs Sprüche , Op. 79.
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