Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  In German literature, the popularization of the Lorelei legend effectively dates from 1802, when Clemens Brentano inserted a poem about the enchantress into his novel Godwi . Geibel’s libretto, published in memoriam to Felix in 1861, concerns the transformation of Leonore from mortal to supernatural seductress. The daughter of a Bacharach innkeeper, she has fallen in love with the Pfalzgraf Otto, betrothed (unknown to Leonore) to a countess. To seek revenge, she climbs the cliffs above the Rhine and invokes its spirits to grant her a “men-blinding beauty” (männerverblendende Schönheit ); then, casting a ring into the water, she plights her troth as the river’s bride. Ultimately, two acts later, an infatuated Otto plunges from the cliff into the hissing water, while the Lorelei joins the spirits through a gaping archway in the rocks.

  For Eric Werner, Felix succumbed to a charming lyricism in conceiving Leonore; she was a “mixture of Cécile and Jenny Lind,” but no “Malibran, whose wild charm and sexual magnetism would have been necessary here.” 161 More recently, John Warrack has found that Felix’s Rhinemaidens have “none of Wagner’s magic,” and “suggest not so much the gathering of a host of spirits as girls joining a new school.” 162 But to prejudge Felix’s opera on the basis of a few fragments is surely problematic. Rather, all we can realistically offer are preliminary observations about the general tone of the fragments, which no doubt would have undergone revision, possibly wholesale recomposition, before Felix completed the score, let alone released it. The surviving music suggests he intended to distinguish the mortal and supernatural realms through different musical colorations, with an earthen, folksonglike idiom for the peasants (Winzer-Chor ) and bright, regal music for the nobility (e.g., the unpublished march, ex. 16.18a ) and darker shades for the Rhine spirits. Connecting the two was a certain “churchly tone,” as evidenced by the softly lit Ave Maria , in which Leonore hears the distant pealing of bells, conveyed by a syncopated pedal point in the horns. The most substantial fragment, the through-composed finale ( ex. 16.18b ), shows that in 1847 Felix could not escape the influence of Weber—in particular, the Wolf’s Glen scene culminating the second act of Der Freischütz . But there are some admirable qualities of the music, which, chainlike, describes a complete cycle of keys by descending thirds (e–C–a–f ♯ —the key of Weber’s Wolf’s Glen, for Leonore’s appearance—D–b–G–E). Felix effects several of the linking modulations by means of so-called deceptive cadences 163 and thus uses a stratagem also employed by Robert Schumann in his famous Eichendorff setting Waldesgespräch (Op. 39 No. 3), in which a traveler encounters the Lorelei in a forest, to suggest harmonically her seductive magic.

  Ex. 16.18a: Mendelssohn, Die Lorelei , Op. 98 (1847), March (BJ, MN 44)

  Ex. 16.18b: Mendelssohn, Die Lorelei , Op. 98 (1847), Act I, Finale

  Though Die Lorelei remained a torso, early in September 1847 Felix completed another major work that preoccupied him during the Swiss sojourn—the String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80. Its thoroughly discordant affect, arguably a major stylistic departure at the end of Felix’s life, is usually viewed as his creative response to Fanny’s death; in 1961 the Marxist scholar Georg Knepler went farther and labeled this work of the pre-Revolution Vormärz the “requiem of an era.” 164 Friedhelm Krummacher has argued that, though the quartet awaited posthumous publication in 1850, Felix had essentially completed the score. 165 The quartet challenges, through unrelenting stylistic discontinuities and motivic disintegration, the smooth polish and classical veneer of the Op. 44 quartets. Like a tonal opprobrium, the key of F minor hangs over its emotionally charged four movements—only the lyrical third movement Adagio asserts a contrasting key, A ♭ major, though the beginning, with its descending figure in the cello (A ♭ –G–F–E ♮ –F), clearly invokes the F minor of the first two movements. Unifying all four movements is the cyclic use of a basic Urmotiv incorporating the dissonant interval of the diminished fourth, E ♮ –A ♭ , traditionally associated with the stronger, darker emotions ( ex. 16.19 ). Thus, in the first movement, the first violin outlines in agitated tremolos the motive F–E ♮ –F–G–A ♭ . The macabre scherzo, erupting in medias res with jarring syncopations on the dominant, unfolds the diminished fourth in a rising, chromatic bass line, as if Felix sought to fulfill his earlier prediction that Fanny would compose a “scherzo serioso .” 166 And the finale, which revives the tremolos of the first movement and syncopations of the third, also highlights the diminished fourth in its opening bars.

  Ex. 16.19a: Mendelssohn, String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 (1847), First Movement

  Ex. 16.19b: Mendelssohn, String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 (1847), Second Movement

  Ex. 16.19c: Mendelssohn, String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 (1847), Finale

  VII

  On September 18, Felix’s family resumed their domestic life in Leipzig, first at the guest house Zum großen Blumenberg, while some renovations were undertaken at Königstraße No. 3. 167 Gathering his courage, he traveled to Berlin for the last week of the month. There, he planned the Berlin premiere of Elijah , set for October 18, and envisioned the lyrical numbers of the second and third acts of Die Lorelei . But the sight of Fanny’s unaltered rooms at the family residence utterly unnerved him and, according to his nephew, “destroyed all the good effects produced by the journey to Switzerland.” 168 Returning to Leipzig at the beginning of October, Felix enjoyed trying out a new Broadwood grand piano sent from London 169 but shunned most society. On October 3, Gade inaugurated the new season at the Gewandhaus; secluded in an anteroom near the gallery, Felix may have heard Joachim perform the Violin Concerto Op. 64, though a report reveals that after an aria the composer stormed out in an irritable mood. 170

  One colleague who saw him nearly daily was Ignaz Moscheles. His diaries, edited by his wife, chronicle in detail Felix’s last weeks. 171 The friends walked in the Rosenthal, discussed “low” and “high” art—polkas Felix had heard in Frankfurt and Bach gigues—and examined Conservatory applicants, who labored over figured-bass exercises while Felix sketched landscapes on scraps of paper. With Julius Rietz, the new Kapellmeister at the Stadttheater, they played chamber music. Moscheles was among the first to see Felix’s last compositions, including that “agitation of painful feelings,” Op. 80; Moscheles also reports perusing the first movement of a string quartet in D minor—a theme and variations, “less gloomy, somewhat more cheerful, and harmonically quite tasteful.” 172 No such work survives, though among Felix’s manuscripts were two string-quartet movements, released posthumously as Op. 81 Nos. 1 and 2. The first, variations in E major that, save their key, resemble Moscheles’s description, begin with a graceful, classical theme, from which Felix progressively departs in five subsequent variations. Of these, the ultimate erupts as a turbulent Presto in E minor that dissolves all traces of the theme. Similarly, the scherzo in A minor follows a course that eventually fragments its theme, so that the movement ends with two empty, pizzicato chords.

  Felix devoted his final creative efforts to the Sechs Lieder , Op. 71, of which three (Nos. 4, 2, and 1) date from 1842 and 1845. To these he added three finished after Fanny’s death, on allusive Lenau and Eichendorff texts: Nos. 5, from the Swiss sojourn, and 3 and 6, written after the final return to Leipzig. On October 7 Felix drafted a seventh, his last surviving composition, 173 and considered its inclusion in the opus (instead, it appeared in 1850 as Op. 86 No. 6). Its text, from an old German spring song, begins “Bleak winter is over, the swallows return, now all bestirs itself afresh, the springs multiply.” Gently coursing through the music is a sinuous sixteenth-note figure, a soft undercurrent of aquatic imagery, interrupted by the final, telling lines, “only I suffer pain, I will suffer without end, since, most beloved, you must part from me, and I from you.”

  On October 9, Felix described his mood to Charlotte Moscheles as grau in grau (gray on gray), equally applicable to his final Liederheft . That afternoon, he visited Livia Frege, to try out the songs. Excepting the Frühlingslied (No. 2), on a Klingemann text
of springtime renewal, the soprano found the others suffused with melancholy. Thus, in No. 3 (An die Entfernte , “To the Distant One”) the poetic image is of withering roses, while No. 4 (Schilflied , “Song of the Reeds”), cast in a haunting, barcarolle-like F ♯ minor, concludes with a turn to the major for a “sweet thought of you, like a quiet evening prayer.” In No. 5 (Auf der Wanderschaft , “Wandering”) a wanderer confronts the cold wind for snatching away his beloved’s last greeting. The opus closes with the funereal Nachtlied , composed on October 1 for the birthday of Felix’s friend Schleinitz, though yet another musical vessel for the composer’s grief ( ex. 16.20 ): against syncopated, tolling bells in the piano, the singer asks, “Where now has the merry joy gone, the comfort of friends and faithful breast, the beloved’s sweet appearance?” “The whole book is serious,” Felix observed to Livia Frege, “and serious it must go into the world.” 174

  After reading through the Lieder several times, Felix suffered a stroke and appears temporarily to have lost sensation in his hands. He described the affliction as if “a foreign body wanted to impress itself forcefully into his head” 175 and later compared the symptoms to less severe ones he had experienced in 1840 (see p. 402). Somehow he managed to walk home, where a terrified Cécile found him stretched out, shivering, on a sofa. Two Leipzig physicians, Ernst Hammer and J. C. A. Clarus, now beganto “treat” Felix, and he passed a first fretful night with a few hours of sleep interrupted by severe headaches. On October 10 Dr. Hammer ordered leeches, applied unfortunately by an unskilled barber, who “tormented” Felix for several hours. Still, during the following week he rallied and received friends, including Julius Benedict, who arrived from London. Postponing the Berlin performance of Elijah , Felix still intended to conduct the oratorio in Vienna on November 14. When exemplars of the first edition of the full score arrived from Simrock, he sent a copy to Frederick William IV, with regrets that illness prevented him from personally delivering the score to the monarch. 176 By October 19 Felix was able to visit a newly dedicated obelisk commemorating the Battle of Leipzig (1813) and examine copper engravings of Albrecht Dürer, including the well-known Ritter Tod und Teufel (1513). But these reminders of death did not oppress him; when his headaches abated, Rebecka sent from Berlin a cheering letter about his improvement, and Felix could write that he was again “among the living.” 177

  Ex. 16.20 : Mendelssohn, Nachtlied , Op. 71 No. 6 (1847)

  In the evenings he played cards with Cécile, and by the last week of October had resumed daily two-hour walks. On October 25 he sent Op. 71 to Breitkopf & Härtel and began to think of rescheduling the Viennese premiere of Elijah . But after embracing Cécile three days later, he suffered a second stroke that rendered him speechless for fifteen minutes. The intense headaches resumed, and leeches were again applied, this time by a skilled surgeon. Paul, having received a disquieting bulletin from Cécile, now hastened from Berlin with another doctor—but to no avail. Felix began to slip from lucidity into incoherence; his mind wandered, and, according to Moscheles, his speech mixed English and German. On the afternoon of November 3 he suffered a third stroke and became unconscious, as Paul futilely rubbed his brother’s temples with vinegar. By the next morning his facial gestures seemed to imitate the percussive rhythms of a march, perhaps the music that the American correspondent William B. Bradbury, in a dispatch to the New-York Tribune , reported that Felix was composing on his deathbed. 178 At times, he could still recognize Paul and Cécile, and to her inquiries Felix replied he was “tired, very tired” (müde, sehr müde ). These were among the final words he uttered. By then, crowds of Leipzigers had gathered outside and nervously awaited reports. The exhausted Cécile slept for a few hours but was awakened by a commotion among those attending her husband—he had suffered a final paralysis, his breathing became slow and shallow, and Moscheles was reminded now of a passage from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony; Moscheles’s torpid friend resembled a model for a sculpture of Canova or Thorwaldsen. Surrounded by Cécile, Paul, David, Schleinitz, Moscheles, and his doctors, one of whom held a watch, Felix expired at 9:24 P.M . on November 4, 1847. Probably within a few months of his death, Cécile drafted a detailed report of his last twenty-seven days, which corroborated and augmented more cursory eyewitness accounts of Moscheles, David, and Benedict. 179 Handed down through generations of family members, Cécile’s report remained neglected until 2000, when its contents were finally examined and published by Peter Ward Jones. 180 It provides the basis for our summary of Felix’s final days.

  News of Felix’s death spread rapidly throughout Leipzig; soon the entire city was in mourning and preparing for a solemn funeral. 181 As if in anticipation, on November 4 the Gewandhaus directorate cancelled the fifth subscription concert, scheduled for that evening—according to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , the composer passed away exactly when the concert would have ended. 182 At the deathbed Cécile placed five flowers upon her husband’s body for their children. Wilhelm Hensel, arriving from Berlin, decorated Felix’s coffin and sketched his countenance (plate 20 ). 183 To accompany the drawing, which captures a certain seraphic expression, Hensel added a quotation from Elijah (No. 34): “And after the fire there came a still small voice, and in that still voice, onward came the Lord.” The Dresden painters Eduard Bendemann and Julius Hübner also executed deathbed sketches, and Hermann Knaur made a mask of the deceased. 184 For two days hundreds of mourners kept a wake-like vigil at the residence. Eduard Devrient found his friend resting “in a costly coffin, upon cushions of satin, embowered in tall growing shrubs, and covered with wreaths of flowers and laurels.” 185

  Late in the afternoon of November 7, a procession of thousands formed and slowly wound its way through the Leipzig streets from the Königstrasse to the Paulinerkirche. Before the bier members of the Gewandhaus orchestra and Thomanerchor, and the faculty and male students of the Conservatory assembled. The casket, an “isle of peace in the midst of a surging crowd,” 186 was draped with silver-embossed velvet and adorned with palm branches. Four horses covered in black drew the hearse, escorted by six pallbearers—Moscheles, David, Hauptmann, Gade, Rietz, and, from Dresden, Robert Schumann. Behind them walked Paul as the chief mourner, then members of family, clergy, faculty of the university, civic and military officials, and the public. Among the mourners was Otto Jahn, director of the archaeological museum in Leipzig. Grieving “the early loss of a master, whose cultivation, self-discipline, and endeavors after the good and beautiful had exercised a truly beneficial influence over the art of our time,” Jahn turned his thoughts to Mozart and conceived the idea for a new, multivolume biography of the composer to whom Felix had often been compared. 187 During the procession a wind band played a funeral march by Beethoven, and Moscheles’s hastily prepared arrangement of Felix’s Lied ohne Worte , Op. 62 No. 3, which had served, a few years earlier, as Felix’s lament on the death of his mother.

  In the Paulinerkirche the open coffin was placed on a catafalque illuminated by six tall candelabras. Before it the senior Conservatory student placed a cushion bearing a laurel wreath and the Ordre pour le mérite , awarded the composer by the Prussian monarch. As the mourners entered the church, an organist performed a movement from Antigone , the marchlike music heard when Creon appears with the corpse of his son Haemon. Then, a chorus of four hundred sang chorales, including Jesu meine Zuversicht , before Pastor Samuel Rudolf Howard of the Reformed Church preached a sermon on Job 1 (“The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away”). Then came the chorus from Paulus that follows the stoning of Stephen, “Siehe, wir preisen selig,” and the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion. After the church had emptied, Cécile entered alone and prayed by the side of her husband.

  In the evening the students accompanied the casket to the train station in a torch-lit procession. At 10:00 P.M . an Extrazug departed for Berlin. At Cöthen the local singing society turned out to pay homage to the composer. By 1:30 A.M . the train had reached Dessau, the birthplace of M
oses Mendelssohn. There the aging Kapellmeister, Friedrich Schneider, led his pupils in an open-air performance of a threnody he had composed to this affecting text: “Angel voices sang thus, ‘Lov’d one come and join our choir. Thy exalted songs have soar’d above to God’s high throne!’ Then the singer gently bow’d his head when they had sung. He, the unsurpassed source of holy music, gently bow’d his dear head, and died.” 188 Schneider’s composition ( ex. 16.21 ), scored for male choir, alluded to Felix’s part-songs, and thus his place in the popular musical culture of the time.

  At 6:00 A.M . the casket was transferred in Berlin to a hearse drawn by six horses covered in black. Thousands followed the procession, accompanied by an arrangement of the funeral march from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 26, to the cemetery of the Trinity Church before the Halle Gate. A hastily convened committee, consisting of Taubert, the violinist Hubert Ries, and the music publisher Bock, organized the choral music for the service, at which the Pastor Berduscheck officiated. The Domchor, for which Felix had composed sacred music, again sang the chorale Jesus, meine Zuversicht , and Rungenhagen, Felix’s old nemesis at the Singakademie, directed part of that organization in a motet composed by Grell. Felix was then laid to rest next to Fanny in the family plot he himself had visited only weeks before.