Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Of the later twentieth-century efforts to rehabilitate Mendelssohn’s image, the first serious attempt came in 1963, with the publication of Eric Werner’s Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age . Werner was among the first to consult a wealth of unpublished manuscripts and documents unavailable to earlier biographers, including the family correspondence (now in the New York Public Library), some of which had appeared in abridged form in Hensel’s Die Familie Mendelssohn , and in volumes edited by the composer’s brother Paul and son Carl. With memories of the Holocaust still fresh, Werner was in part concerned with exploring Mendelssohn’s identity as a Jewish musician and awareness of his Jewish heritage. Now, as Jeffrey Sposato has recently documented, it appears that Werner exaggerated, indeed falsified, some evidence, and that Mendelssohn, who was baptized as a Protestant at age seven, remained throughout his career a devoutly practicing Lutheran—that he willingly paid, as it were, the “price of assimilation.” 26 However one may judge Werner’s scholarship, he did a great service by raising the question of identity, at the center of a nexus of problems confronting every biographer of the composer. As a member of a Jewish family that had “successfully” entered Prussian society, Mendelssohn would have been reminded of how the search for identity—spiritual, social, political, and aesthetic—was the critical issue affecting his life. Whether in retrospect we regard Mendelssohn as an “assimilated” German Jew who fully embraced Protestantism or who viewed his Christian faith as a “syncretic” “universalization of Judaism,” as Leon Botstein has proposed, 27 we must begin to realize the significance of the composer’s own project of assimilation, of finding common ground between his adopted faith and the rationalist Judaism of his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn.

  There is another issue in Mendelssohn reception that has come to the fore in recent decades—his relationship with his sister, Fanny Hensel, herself a musical prodigy and composer of several hundred works. While Felix enjoyed an extraordinary international, highly visible career, Fanny’s musical sphere was limited primarily to the musical salon she kept at the Mendelssohn residence in Berlin, a gathering place for many musicians of note but one segregated from public view. While Felix produced music for public consumption, Fanny composed in the smaller forms for her intimate circle of friends. Finally, and most controversially, while Felix’s authorship was widely celebrated, Fanny’s authorship was suppressed until late in her life, when she began cautiously to bring out her songs and piano miniatures in Lied ohne Worte style. Felix’s early publication of six of her songs under his own name has prompted no small amount of feminist indignation about his motives and “paternalistic” attitudes toward his sister. 28 The evidence suggests, though, as Nancy Reich has observed, 29 that Fanny’s “suppression” was as much an issue of class as gender—whereas the middle-class Clara Wieck/Schumann could pursue a professional career as pianist and composer, Berlin society in general did not permit ladies of leisure to do so. Still, the burgeoning, late twentieth-century revival of interest in Fanny Hensel has reclaimed from obscurity a remarkably talented composer whose music demands fresh consideration. Throughout this biography, I have attempted to bring into focus the parallel lives of the siblings and the “public-private” dichotomy that regulated their musical outlets. I have chosen to include Fanny’s music, ignored in earlier Mendelssohn biographies, not only because of the light it sheds on the work of her brother but also because of its own merits.

  For one buffeted by the inexorable swings of musical fashion, the posthumous Mendelssohn has proven a cooperative subject for a new biography. Now available to the scholar investigating his life and work is a staggering amount of primary source material, encompassing autograph manuscripts, sketches, diaries, letters, paintings, drawings, accounts, concert programs, and countless other documents. One can examine Mendelssohn’s honeymoon diary, his school notebooks, his assessments of students in the Leipzig Conservatory, not to mention the sketches and autograph drafts of his major works, and documents revealing the evolution of the libretti of his oratorios. Scarcely a few months elapse without a “new” Mendelssohn letter or manuscript appearing on the auction block. The composer himself preserved his manuscripts and thousands of letters of his incoming correspondence in bound volumes, as if to save the record of his life’s work for future scholarly inquiry. Today, sizable deposits of Mendelssohniana survive in Berlin, Leipzig, Oxford, Kraków, New York, and Washington, D.C., with smaller collections scattered among libraries ranging from Stockholm to Aberystwyth to Jerusalem, from Melbourne to Tokyo to St. Petersburg. Scholars are on the trail of several lost works that may yet appear. 30 I have relied heavily upon primary sources and have tried to cling to the facts they divulge about the composer Robert Schumann called the “unforgettable” one. 31 And I have written this biography convinced that the record of Mendelssohn’s life, more than anything else, will assist us in peeling away those layers of his reception that have revealed more about how succeeding generations canonize and de-canonize composers than about Mendelssohn himself. In 2003, it is still possible to concur with Friedrich Niecks, who in 1875 concluded his estimation of the composer thus: “Art is wide, there is room for all that are true to her, for all that serve her, not themselves. Such an artist was Mendelssohn. Therefore—honor to him!” 32

  March 2003

  Durham, N.C.

  MENDELSSOHN: A LIFE IN MUSIC

  Prologue

  Porcelain Monkeys and Family Identities

  Friar :

  Nathan! Nathan! You are a Christian. By God, you are a Christian! There never lived a better Christian!

  Nathan :

  Alas! For what makes me a Christian in your eyes, makes you a Jew in mine!

  —G. E. Lessing, Nathan der Weise , iv.7

  The clarion call of the Enlightenment for religious tolerance found, perhaps, no more illuminating metaphor than the friendship of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn—the composer’s grandfather—and the criticplaywright G. E. Lessing. Before their meeting in 1754 the young Lessing broached the issue in the comedy Die Juden (1749). A traveler foils two bandits, disguised as Jews, from assaulting a baron, who, offering his daughter’s hand in reward, discovers his rescuer is a Jew. The mores of the time thwart the wedding, yet the baron concedes, “How admirable the Jews would be if they were all like you!” To which the traveler rejoins: “And how amiable the Christians if they all had your qualities.”

  Lessing’s introduction to Moses Mendelssohn provided an opportunity to test inter -faith tolerance. At first sharing a fondness for chess, the two formed an abiding friendship. Lessing encouraged Mendelssohn to publish his first major work, the Philosophische Gespräche (1755), and the same year they collaborated on a critique of Alexander Pope’s optimistic Essay on Man . They exchanged ideas about the theory of tragedy that resurfaced in Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1769), an eloquent attempt to break the grip of French neoclassicism on the nascent German theater. Mendelssohn brought to Lessing’s attention Winckelmann’s pithy phrase about the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of ancient Greek statuary, thereby catalyzing the modern aesthetics of Lessing’s seminal Laokoön (1766), in which the critic challenged the classical Horatian formulation, ut pictura poesis , that for centuries had linked painting and poetry as sisterly arts.

  Two years before his death, Lessing recorded a final act of friendship in Nathan der Weise (1779), the title role of which was understood to represent Moses Mendelssohn. Set in twelfth-century Jerusalem, the play revisits the topic of religious freedom. In the pivotal third act, Nathan appears before the sultan to adjudicate whether Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is the true faith and, as Peter Gay has suggested, argues that each creed is the “incomplete incarnation of a larger truth.” 1

  I

  Moses Mendelssohn’s own advocacy of religious tolerance resounded meaningfully for his descendants. Of his ten children, six survived. The eldest, Brendel (1764–1839), divorced her husband, the banker Simon Veit, conve
rted to Protestantism and, assuming the name Dorothea, married Friedrich Schlegel; the couple later embraced the Catholic faith. The second daughter, Recha (Rebecca, 1767–1831), and the eldest son, Joseph (1770–1848), a thriving banker, remained Jewish. Henriette (1775–1831), known as Jette, turned to Catholicism and served as a Parisian governess. The last two children—Abraham (1776–1835), Felix’s father and a partner in Joseph’s firm, and Nathan (1782–1852), an engineer—became Protestants. Although Moses remained faithful to Judaism, four of his children thus did not, so that one generation confronted issues affecting the three principal European faiths. The children coped also with the ongoing assimilation of German Jewry into the mainstream culture, a process meaningfully accelerated by the work of Moses. The philosopher’s struggle to mediate between two German worlds—the dominant Christian society, tied to the monarchy of Frederick the Great, and the disenfranchised Jewish society and subculture—was not lost on Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who, after his boyhood baptism as a Protestant, remained mindful of his Judaic roots. At the zenith of fame in the 1830s and 1840s, the composer pondered his spiritual heritage in St. Paul and Elijah , oratorios on New and Old Testament subjects addressing issues relevant to his family—the conversion of Saul, and the pre-Messianic prophecies of Elijah.

  In 1729 Moses ben Mendel Dessau was born into a modest family in the Jewish quarter of Dessau (eighty miles southwest of Berlin), the center of the small duchy of Anhalt-Dessau. Jews had settled there early in the seventeenth century, but only a few decades after the devastating Thirty Years War did Jewish communities win official recognition. During the eighteenth century, Dessau became a center of the Haskalah , the Judaic revival of scholarship, philosophy, and science often compared to the German Enlightenment. When the local rabbi, David Fränkel, was called to Berlin in 1743 as chief rabbi, Moses, of frail constitution and disabled by a hunchback, followed. According to an anecdote, at the Rosenthaler Tor (the only gate Jews could use), a sentry asked the fourteen-year-old Moses why he had come to Berlin. His answer, to study with his rabbi, was probably the only legal way for him to enter the city.

  The state rigorously controlled the Jewish community—some 1,200 in a population approaching 100,000—and classified Jews into six categories. At the summit, a few prosperous families enjoyed a “general privilege,” a distinction created by Frederick the Great during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) to reward court Jews who had assisted the war effort. The privilege granted rights to own property, change domicile, and ply business trades, all transferable to children of protected families. At the bottom were private workers, permitted to remain in Berlin only so long as they were employed. Separating the two extremes were four “protected” and “tolerated” categories, with diminishing levels of “concessions.” Citizenship was not conferred, except on a few members of the most privileged.

  Living frugally in Berlin, young Moses read the Talmud and medieval Jewish philosophy. A turning point came with his decision to study German literature, a bridge to the secular literature of the Enlightenment and to Christian theology. He also learned French (preferred by the court philosophes ) and English, and parsed a Latin translation of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Especially formative for Moses’ intellectual development was the philosophy of Leibniz as disseminated by his disciple Christian von Wolff, who expounded a form of Christian rationalism. Leibniz’s theory of monads (elemental particles purposefully arranged by divine providence) convinced Moses that German philosophy was compatible with modern Judaism. 2

  In 1750 he found employment as a tutor in the household of Isaac Bernhard, a prosperous silk manufacturer, who established factories in Berlin and Potsdam, and augmented his looms to more than one hundred. Moses became a clerk and a partner in 1761; when Bernhard died in 1768, Moses managed the firm with the merchant’s widow. The Prussian court recognized his entrepreneurial acumen, and in 1763 he received the “privileged” status, after the Marquis d’Argens importuned Frederick the Great: “A poor Catholic philosopher begs a poor Protestant philosopher to give the privilege to a poor Jewish philosopher. There is too much philosophy in all this, for reason not to concur with the petitioner.” 3 (In 1787, the year after Moses’ death, Frederick William II extended privileges to his widow and children.) Through Lessing, Moses met J. G. Sulzer, a Swiss aesthetician who nominated him in 1771 to become a member of the Berlin Academy in speculative philosophy. But the king ignored the request and thereby vetoed the nomination of le juif Moses .

  From Sulzer’s musical advisor, J. P. Kirnberger, Moses took lessons in keyboard 4 and probably music theory as well. A violinist who joined the retinue of Princess Anna Amalia, Kirnberger was a colleague of C. P. E. Bach, the accompanist of the flute-playing Frederick for almost thirty years. Kirnberger was a rigorous instructor; having studied with J. S. Bach in Leipzig, Kirnberger dedicated his career to disseminating the Thomaskantor’s pedagogical method and labored for years editing Bach’s chorale harmonizations. Kirnberger’s imposing treatise, The Art of Pure Composition (Die Kunst des reinen Satzes , 1771–1779), stood as the last meticulous examination of figured bass. Exactly how far Moses pursued his studies with Kirnberger is unclear, though the theorist’s influence remained potent in conservative Berlin into the opening decades of the nineteenth century. When Felix Mendelssohn began composition lessons in 1819, Carl Friedrich Zelter guided him through a course of instruction substantially derived from Kirnberger.

  In 1762 Moses married Fromet Gugenheim (1737–1812), daughter of Abraham Gugenheim of Hamburg, descended from the Viennese court banker Samuel Oppenheimer. Fromet’s grandchildren later perpetuated her memory as a Xanthippe who challenged her husband’s philosophical pursuits, and Felix averred that the children’s method of arguing derived from Fromet. 5 Still, Moses had earnestly wooed her, and, according to family legend, tenderly overcame her resistance with a clever argument when she recoiled from the sight of his deformed back: heaven had preordained their marriage and the disfigurement, which Fromet was predestined to receive until Moses requested it for himself, so that his future wife could be “well made and agreeable.” 6

  Another family legend, transmitted by Sebastian Hensel (Felix’s nephew) and the novelist Fanny Lewald, 7 is considerably less endearing. When Fanny visited Felix’s sister Rebecka Dirichlet in the 1840s, she made an unusual discovery:

  Soon after I had met Mrs. Dirichlet, I noticed one day that an extensive collection of ugly porcelain monkeys stood in a large cabinet in the dining room of her otherwise very tastefully decorated apartment. Their effect was doubly appalling because of the good quality of the rest of her furnishings. I could not help but ask what had moved her to use these nasty figurines as decorations. “Oh,” she replied, “these are not decorations, but heirlooms and historical documents. At the time that my grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, settled in Berlin, every Jew who had married had to buy a certain number of pieces from the Royal Porcelain Works, which Frederick the Great wished to promote in this manner. It was not enough that this was a real financial hardship at times, but the Jews had no right to select their own figurines and had to take what was given to them by the factory. In this way, my grandparents acquired a whole menagerie of monkeys, which his children later divided as memorabilia and which we in turn inherited from our parents. We keep them as a remembrance of the good old times.” 8

  As late as 1929, one of these ungainly creatures was exhibited in Dessau on the bicentenary of the philosopher’s birth. But recent research has challenged the story’s authenticity, for Frederick the Great purchased the china factory in 1763, more than a year after Moses married, and promulgated the decree affecting Jewish subjects in 1769. As for the figure displayed in 1929 (plate 2 ), it was of Meißen, not Berlin provenance. Thus, two independent events, Moses’ wedding and the edict concerning Jewish porcelain, may have coalesced “to form an impressive legend.” 9

  Moses Mendelssohn partitioned his Berlin existence into several sectors: h
e was a faithfully practicing Jew, a successful businessman, and an eminent philosopher. Growing recognition of his formidable intellect facilitated his assimilation into German culture and, as Abraham later explained to Felix, led the philosopher to change his name from Moses ben Mendel Dessau to Moses Mendelssohn, separating himself “irrevocably … from an entire class.” 10 An initial distinction came in 1763, when Moses entered an essay competition of the Academy of Sciences. His submission, on whether metaphysical truths were susceptible to mathematical proofs, received the first prize (Immanuel Kant settled for an honorary mention). Four years later Moses achieved international fame with Phaedon , part translation, part paraphrase, and part reworking of Plato’s timeless dialogue. In a modern retelling of Socrates’ final conversation with his friends before he drank the hemlock, Moses initially adhered to Plato’s text but then departed more and more, refashioning Socrates into a kind of enlightened Leibnizian in classical Athens, who defended natural theology with lucidly reasoned arguments.

  Just as Socrates had overcome superstition and sophistry, so Moses Mendelssohn surmounted considerable barriers in emerging from the ghetto to effect a rapprochement with the Enlightenment. Some imagined Mendelssohn could achieve full assimilation only by converting to Christianity, and no one urged this course more ardently than the chiliast J. K. Lavater, who assumed some Jews would willingly commit apostasy. Lavater was convinced the “regeneration” of the most distinguished German Jew could stimulate mass conversions to Christianity, signaling, in turn, the millennium of the rule of Christ. And so, in 1769, Lavater appealed publicly to Moses Mendelssohn. The occasion was a translation of a treatise by the Swiss philosopher Charles Bonnet, who, Lavater believed, had argued convincingly for the superiority of Christianity. 11 Lavater addressed Moses as “an Israelite in whom there is no guile,” but then challenged him to rebut Bonnet’s arguments, or “do what prudence, love of truth, and honesty bid you do—what Socrates would have done, had he read this treatise and found it irrefutable.” 12