Felix’s statement flies in the face of Marx; rather than dismissed as a theorem-bound pedant, Zelter emerges as a practical musician who allowed his pupil latitude to discover the “proper boundaries.” But despite Felix’s assertion of freedom from treatises, Zelter circumscribed those boundaries around certain model texts, in particular Kirnberger’s Kunst des reinen Satzes (1779) for figured bass and chorale and Marpurg’s Abhandlung von der Fuge (1754) for counterpoint. Essentially, Zelter served as a musical hyphen to connect Felix to eighteenth-century German musical culture, epitomized by J. S. Bach and expounded in the music theory of the Berliners Kirnberger and Marpurg. Figured bass, chorale, and counterpoint formed the triangular foundation of that tradition and thus of Zelter’s instructional method.
Exactly when Felix and Fanny began lessons with Zelter remains unclear. Presumably formal instruction was underway by May 1819, for Felix and Fanny were then attending Zelter’s Ripienschule. 107 On June 12, Zelter referred to himself in Fanny’s album as her teacher, 108 and by July 19 Lea was able to assess Zelter’s pedagogical style:
… he weaves so much spirit, taste, meaning, humor, even genius into his discourses everywhere, that I often regret not having jotted down the best of it. In his case the belief of the ancients, that man has two souls, seems to be true, for I cannot deny that the same man who charms us with inspiration of an artist, touching seriousness of thought, and jokes à la Jean Paul, can also be downright insipid and prosaic. 109
At this time, her children’s studies had reached a hiatus—in June Zelter had departed for Vienna. In the imperial city he took walks with the aging court composer Antonio Salieri (still spinning out compositions, Zelter found, like a silkworm 110 ) but evidently did not meet Salieri’s former pupil, Schubert.
Instead, traveling to Mödling, Zelter encountered on September 12 a musician he had met in 1796 in Berlin. That occasion had been a visit to the Singakademie by Beethoven, who had improvised on a fugal subject from Fasch’s setting of Psalm 119. 111 Now, in 1819, Zelter embraced a composer imprisoned by deafness yet on the brink of exploring the transcendent late style, an abstract realm well beyond the limits of Zelter’s musical sensibility. When, in 1823, Beethoven offered to sell subscription copies of his colossal Missa solemnis , Zelter agreed to purchase it for the Singakademie, but only if Beethoven could supply an a cappella arrangement practical for performance. 112 Zelter admired Beethoven’s earlier, middle-period works—the Egmont Overture and Pastoral Symphony—in which he had “depicted the most strange [ideas].” 113 And Beethoven’s programatic symphony celebrating Wellington’s victory at Trafalgar transported Zelter to some uncharted, “brave, fearful-fearless and spiritual” realm. But ultimately Zelter remained a child of the eighteenth century, and, like many contemporaries, unwilling or unable to fathom Beethoven’s genius, against which Zelter’s own efforts as a composer indeed seem insipid and prosaic.
While Zelter was in Vienna, Felix was sedulously churning out figured-bass exercises (the more advanced Fanny was writing baroque gavottes, twelve of which she finished by August 18, just before the family departed on a trip to Dresden 114 ). A few survive in a bound manuscript volume transmitting his composition studies from late 1819 through January 1821 and documenting his astonishing progress. 115 Several stages of instruction are evident in Felix’s workbook: figured bass (through October 6, 1819), chorale (through January 1820), invertible counterpoint and canon in two and three parts (through May 1820), and fugue in two and three parts (through January 1821). In addition, scattered throughout the volume are some of Felix’s earliest surviving free compositions, chiefly variations and movements in binary-sonata form for piano solo or piano and violin.
The pieces for piano and violin (and similarly scored three-part fugues) raise an intriguing issue: who played which part during Felix’s lessons? We might assume Felix took the keyboard part while Zelter, a trained string player, read the violin part. But according to Lea, by May 1819 (around the time lessons with Zelter began) Felix took up violin as a surprise for Abraham. 116 His teacher was C. W. Henning, a court conductor and composer who eventually rose to become a royal Kapellmeister. 117 Succeeding the “accurate Henning” 118 was Eduard Rietz (1802–1832), with whom Felix was performing string quartets as early as 1820, and for whom he would compose several works. Felix’s early pieces for violin and piano thus may have served two purposes, as composition studies and to promote his development as a violinist.
The figured-bass exercises betray a conspicuous debt to Kirnberger. For each one, Felix added figures to a bass line, and on the staves above, made two realizations in four- and three-part harmony. Finally, on a stave beneath the figured bass, he abstracted a separate, imaginary bass line according to the precepts of the Grundbaß , or fundamental bass, an analytic tool Kirnberger had adapted from the basse fondamentale of J.-P. Rameau to reveal the essential harmonic root movement of tonal music. Kirnberger had devised a system of rules governing the Grundbaß and had even published a meticulous analysis of a Bach fugue to which he subjoined a fundamental bass. 119 That Felix was trained in 1819 to analyze chord progressions according to Kirnberger’s Grundbaß reveals Zelter’s conservatism, especially when one considers that around this time the theorist Gottfried Weber was developing a new analytical technique, the series of Roman numerals still familiar to students of harmony today. 120
After completing figured bass, Felix notated some thirty chorales in four-part harmony, the first of which dates from October 1819. Zelter provided melodies in the soprano voice, for which Felix devised a figured bass line, tested it at the keyboard, and filled in the tenor and alto parts. Several melodies were Zelter’s own invention, though they appear alongside such Protestant staples as Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr , Nun danket alle Gott , and Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ . The last, a melody several centuries old, evinces archaic features recalling the medieval church modes; indeed, Kirnberger recommended harmonizing the tune by modal rather than modern tonal progressions, 121 a bit of advice Zelter imparted to his student. One of Zelter’s newly minted melodies merits special comment: the opening of the sixth chorale recalls Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten , to which, as we have seen, Zelter alluded in his setting of Goethe’s Harper Song (cf. exs. 1.1 and 1.2 ). Probably not by accident, Zelter emended the second and third measures of Felix’s bass line, as if to make them conform to the Bach harmonization of the chorale recalled by the Lied. Completed on October 23, 1819, Felix’s exercise required considerable effort, for he committed several errors and gauche doublings that earned Zelter’s reproving comment, “produced totally without thought” (war ganz ohne Gedanke verfertigt ).
Though a demanding taskmaster, Zelter was quite aware of Felix’s extraordinary musical aptitude. He later informed Goethe of a compelling demonstration of the boy’s analytic abilities, which may have occurred in late 1819 or early 1820, as Felix pondered in his own exercises the centuries-old prohibition against parallel fifths (two parts progressing in parallel motion from one perfect fifth to another):
In the score of a magnificent concerto by Sebastian Bach the hawk eyes of my Felix, when he was ten years old, became aware of a succession of six pure fifths, which I perhaps never would have found, since I did not pay attention to them in larger works, and the passage is in six parts. But the handwriting is [Bach’s] autograph, beautifully and clearly written, and the passage occurs twice. Now is that an oversight or a license? 122
In 1911 Albert Schweitzer uncovered the passage in the 1721 holograph of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto Bach gave to the Margrave of Brandenburg. Early in the first movement, Bach attempted to ameliorate hidden octaves between the viola and solo violin, only unwittingly to fall “out of the frying-pan into the fire.” 123 Altering the viola part, he inadvertently produced a new series of parallel fifths between the viola and harpsichord. We know that Zelter’s Ripienschule rehearsed the Fifth Brandenburg; indeed, Felix’s great aunt Sarah Levy had performed the keyboard part
in 1808. Clearly the fifths were an oversight, not a musical license. It is difficult to imagine Zelter’s musicians executing the passage with unmediated parallel fifths; rather, the ensemble parts probably transmitted the hidden octaves of the earlier version, the lesser of two evils. In any event, Felix’s discovery of Bach’s error must have chastened the redoubtable Zelter.
Ex. 1.2 : Mendelssohn, Chorale Exercise (1819)*
VI
By 1819 Zelter’s pupil was not only correcting Bach but also composing. Surprisingly, his first efforts have attracted scant scrutiny. We know that for his father’s birthday on December 11, 1819, Felix wrote a short Lied 124 and some weeks before, by the end of October, had produced a double piano sonata, in the midst of Latin, French, and arithmetic lessons with Carl Heyse. 125 We can confidently identify the song as the Lied zum Geburtstage meines guten Vaters , which eventually came to rest in an album of Felix’s fiancée , Cécile Jeanrenaud, in 1836. 126 Though the manuscript’s date, “den 11ten December,” lacks the year, the text of the Lied is identical to that of Fanny’s salutation dated December 11, 1819, Lied zum Geburtstag[e] des Vaters . 127 As for the double sonata, no dated autograph survives, although a manuscript of a Sonata in D major for two pianos, written in a juvenile handwriting suspiciously similar to that of the Lied, has come down to us. The English scholar Peter Ward Jones has proposed that this work is the double sonata of 1819. 128 If so, the sonata and the Lied represent the earliest surviving compositions of a ten-year-old musician.
In all likelihood Felix designed the double sonata for performance with Fanny. By 1819 the two were appearing together in private musical gatherings, including a dinner party Zelter hosted in May 1819, during which they entertained Hegel and other dignitaries. According to Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie, the siblings exhibited “unbelievable skill, precision, and knowledge of art.” 129 The double sonata, which we may tentatively place ca. October 1819, has three movements (Allegro, Minuet and Trio, and Prestissimo). Occasionally it simulates the transparent textures of Mozart’s two-piano sonata in the same key (K. 448, 1781), but Felix’s limited tonal compass and insecure treatment of form betray the neophyte’s hand. All three movements (excepting the B-major Trio) are centered on D major. In the sonata-form first movement, the contrasting theme of the exposition fails to reappear in the recapitulation, while the finale begins with what resembles a rondo refrain, only to unfold as a monothematic sonata-form exposition. The maladroit handling of form stamps this composition as an early effort, consistent with a dating from 1819. So, too, do several awkward harmonic doublings, revealing that the boy had not yet progressed far with his chorale exercises. Even so, the sonata is a remarkable effort for one so young, not fully versed in harmony and counterpoint.
Far less ambitious is the twenty-six-measure Lied for Abraham’s birthday, set syllabically to a congratulatory quatrain:
Felix’s chordal style recalls Zelter’s Lieder, in which the upper voice of the piano occasionally doubles the vocal line and distributes the text evenly between four-measure phrases. Felix does indulge in one liberty: extending the last phrase into a ten-measure piano postlude, he playfully disrupts the predictable symmetry of the song.
Inevitably, Felix’s youthful efforts prompt comparison with those of another prodigy to whom he would often be compared—Mozart. At age five, Wolfgang had begun to compose simple keyboard pieces, and within a year or two violin sonatas and orchestral music, culminating in his first symphony, at age nine. Both Wolfgang and Felix had older sisters who exhibited precocious musical gifts; both were proficient at the keyboard and violin; and both composed fluently at early ages in a variety of genres. And yet, their educational and social backgrounds were strikingly dissimilar. Felix’s musical authority during his formative years remained Zelter. In Wolfgang’s case, musical and paternal authority was vested in Leopold. As a servant of the Salzburg court, Leopold had a specific motivation for supervising his children’s education: their precocity was marketable. Thus the siblings experienced public scrutiny early and during a “Grand Tour” appeared before the courts of Europe. For Abraham, since his family had already attained the highest levels of Berlin society, Felix’s and Fanny’s musical training was part of their general education, not a means of economic betterment.
Wolfgang’s early travels exposed him to a variety of musical influences—Italian opera, Parisian sonatas of Johann Schobert, London concerti of J. C. Bach—so that the young composer developed a cosmopolitan style. In comparison, Felix’s genius blossomed in the conservative atmosphere of Berlin, where Zelter nourished him on German models of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, but also sheltered his charge from newer, implicitly more questionable, avenues of musical expression. Thus, contemporary musical styles—the “heroic” style of Beethoven, the onslaught of romanticism (Carl Maria von Weber’s “romantic opera” Der Freischütz would premiere in Berlin in 1821)—were not a significant factor in the very earliest stage of Felix’s training.
Paralleling this musical conservatism was the reactionary temper of the time, which reached a critical phase in 1819, as Felix and Fanny were beginning their study with Zelter. On March 23 of that year, the theology student K. L. Sand murdered the playwright August von Kotzebue in Mannheim, sending shock waves throughout German realms. An isolated example of political fanaticism, the incident nevertheless provoked repressive countermeasures from the authorities, who viewed with alarm the growth of popular student associations. In 1815 the Burschenschaft (student union) movement had sprung up at the University of Jena. Initially inspired by a “vague patriotic sentiment,” the students extolled an “abstract Germanism,” in which “all distinction between Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony was to disappear….” 130 The movement spread to other universities, but Berlin remained relatively unaffected. Then, on October 18, 1817, at a festival in Eisenach, nearly five hundred students, dressed in medieval garb and carrying black, red, and gold banners, marched on the Wartburg castle. Three hundred years before, signaling the beginning of the Reformation, Luther had posted in Wittenberg his ninety-five theses to protest the sale by the Catholic Church of indulgences, and at the Wartburg, in 1521 had begun to translate the New Testament into vernacular German. As it happened, October 18, 1817 marked the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, so that the festival coupled observance of the Reformation and Napoleon’s defeat, and symbolized the liberation of Germany from religious and political tyranny.
At the Wartburg, books by reactionary authors were burned, a ceremony witnessed by Sand. One book consumed was a history of the Reich by Kotzebue, a German who had become a Russian nobleman. A prolific playwright read by Lea Mendelssohn and acquainted with Henriette Mendelssohn, 131 Kotzebue was suspected by student organizers of being a Russian agent. His murder prompted Metternich to convene the Germanic Confederation in Carlsbad and issue decrees prohibiting student associations and tightening control of the press. In Berlin, Jahn was arrested and his gymnastic society banned.
Among the extreme expressions of the student movement was an increasingly virulent strain of anti-Semitism. The students now “regarded themselves as a neo-Christian knighthood, displaying their hatred of the Jews with a crude intolerance which strongly recalled the days of the crusades.” 132 Animating them in part was an inflammatory pamphlet of the Berlin historian Friedrich Rühs that argued against Jewish citizenship unless accompanied by conversion to Christianity. 133 For Rühs and other nationalists, Christianity was “one of the elements of German national culture, and a Jew who acquired German culture also acquired Christianity as one of its parts.” 134
The pamphleteers incited the so-called “Hep-Hep” Riots, which began in August 1819 in the Bavarian town of Würzburg and spread for two months through Germany. 135 Taunted by the slogan “Hep, Hep” (from the Crusaders’ Latin rallying cry, Hierosolyma est perdita , or “Jerusalem is lost”), Jews were harassed and attacked and their property vandalized. From Carlsbad, Metternich saw the riots as confirmation of a Jacob
inist uprising and convinced his colleagues to suppress them. The Carlsbad Decrees, originally in response to Kotzebue’s murder, now attempted to quell what the authorities regarded as a counterreactionary movement threatening the very stability of the post-Napoleonic political order.
Was the young Felix victimized by these social tremors? The only evidence we have is a sketchy account from the belletrist and minor Prussian diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense:
In one middle-sized town, I can’t remember which, there suddenly started up, for no good reason, a wild anti-Jewish clamor. With the wild yell of “Hep, Hep!” individuals were assaulted and followed in the streets, their homes attacked and partly plundered, and abuse and violence of all kinds used on them. But no blood was shed—that was where the courage or the ill-nature of the malefactors ended…. The violence was accompanied by a heedless mockery and pleasure in making mischief; one royal prince jovially shouted ‘Hep, Hep!’ after the boy Felix Mendelssohn in the street. Not all of this was done with malicious intent, and some of those who shouted like that would, if necessary, have come to the Jews’ assistance if things had gone any further. 136
We might accept the account and view the Neuchrist Felix as a target of anti-Semitic sentiments. Some have gone farther; in a 1963 biography of the composer, Eric Werner maintained that the unidentified prince spat at and taunted the young composer, a detail not found in Varnhagen’s text. What is more, Werner believed the incident prompted Abraham and Lea to have their children baptized—a clearly untenable conclusion, since they had already converted in 1816. 137 Was the Mendelssohn family exposed in 1819 to the new wave of anti-Semitism? Probably they were; in August Abraham described Berlin as “wretched” (erbärmlich ) and apparently considered moving his family to Paris. 138 Still, we can no longer corroborate the veracity of Varnhagen’s report. It is as if, in order to record something worthy of recollection (denkwürdig ), he linked the pogrom to an event in the young composer’s life and then deflated the incident by asserting the prince’s comment was all in jest. Part journalistic anecdote, and possibly part confabulation, the passage revives Treitschke’s judgment that Varnhagen’s writing was a “medley of profound thoughts … intermingled with sparkling nonsense,” a “storehouse of aphoristic half-thoughts for the feuilleton writers.” 139
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