Ex. 2.6a: Mendelssohn, Die Soldatenliebschaft (1821), No. 4
Even as preparations for his first Singspiel were underway, Felix began receiving from Casper late in January 1821 installments of a new libretto, Die beiden Pädagogen (The Two Pedagogues ). Abraham challenged his son to have the score finished for a reading am Klavier on Lea’s birthday. Once again she reviewed her son’s achievement, how in six weeks he
wrote an opera, which, finished a few days before March 15, was quickly rehearsed and performed at the piano. You know Zelter is not a particularly sensitive, easily moved man; so imagine how I felt, when I relate that he sat next to Felix, turning the pages of the score, and could not keep his eyes dry.… Zelter, Pölchau and several other solemn gentlemen were not ashamed to sing in the chorus. The text is again by our house poet Dr. Casper, derived from the French and quite cheerful, light, and musical. As is appropriate for the text, there is less feeling and tenderness in this operetta than in the first, but more comic caprice and mature execution. 58
Ex. 2.6b: Mendelssohn, Die Soldatenliebschaft (1821), No. 11
Although Lea did not identify the cast, we know that the tenor Stümer and baritones Casper and Henning (Felix’s violin teacher) took three of the six roles. 59 Toward the end of April 1821, Felix entertained the traveling piano virtuoso J. N. Hummel with a performance of the Singspiel with strings. 60 The next year plans were laid for a fully staged production with full orchestra. The young actor-singer Eduard Devrient (1801–1877) replaced Henning; and on Zelter’s recommendation, Devrient’s future wife, Therese Schlesinger (1803–1882), sang one of the soprano roles. 61
Therese has left an engaging account of the frenetic preparations for the performance. The solicitous parents dispatched servants to deliver parts to the soloists, and rehearsals took place at the family residence in a room “not at all luxuriously appointed,” though projecting an “aristocratic tone” and offering “piquant and spirited conversation.” Therese received coaching from Zelter, who already had subjected her to a tedious course in figured bass; also attending were gentrified members of Berlin society and literati such as Varnhagen von Ense. Felix presided confidently from the piano and amazed his listeners by playing with such skill that one could “hear individual instruments of the orchestra.” 62 But the much anticipated production of Die beiden Pädagogen , planned with a reprise of Die Soldatenliebschaft , never materialized, owing to Lea’s ill health.
The source of Die beiden Pädagogen was an early comédie-vaudeville of Eugène Scribe, Les deux précepteurs, ou Asinus asinum fricat , which premiered in 1817 in Paris where Casper and Abraham perhaps encountered it in 1820. Its bilingual title, The Two Preceptors, or the Ass Rubs the Ass , betrays the subject, a satire about children’s education. In transforming the vaudeville into a Singspiel, Casper accommodated German taste. Thus, Die beiden Pädagogen concludes with a choral finale that replaces the rhyming couplets of Les deux précepteurs . Still, interspersed throughout Casper’s libretto are songlike couplets that recall the light-hearted airs of Scribe’s comedy. Casper converted the French roles into German characters: the two preceptors (Cinglant and Ledru) become Kinder-schreck (scare child) and Luftig (airy). In No. 8, for Zelter a quartet worthy of the comic-opera composer Cimarosa, 63 Kinderschreck and Luftig debate not about Rousseau and Voltaire (as in the original) but two reformers celebrated in German realms, Pestalozzi and Basedow. The Swiss J. H. Pestalozzi (1746–1827), a passionate advocate for educating the poor, argued for nurturing the child’s innate faculties. From exile in Königsberg during the French occupation of 1809, the Prussian Queen Luise imagined that Pestalozzi’s method was the only means of securing the domestic tranquility of her citizens. 64 His predecessor J. B. Basedow (1723–1790) won Goethe’s admiration in 1774 by publishing a massive tract for educational reform and establishing a school in Dessau. There Basedow’s colleagues approximated a state of nature by assigning their students Robinson the Younger , an entertaining revision of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe . 65 In Felix’s quartet the pedagogues’ argument is nothing more than absurd patter, with the adversaries rapidly exchanging the reformers’ names, while the landowner Herr von Robert and his son Carl, the object of the disputation, interject comments from the sideline.
In characterizing Kinderschreck, a mediocrity who rules by the whip while pretending to be versed in Pestalozzi, Felix revealed a genuine gift for comic opera. Kinderschreck’s entrance aria (No. 4) pompously asserts his authority by invoking the Latin refrain, Probatum est (“it is approved”). Accompanying his pronouncements is stilted music—repeated pitches and phrases mechanically transposed through sequential repetition ( ex. 2.7 ). To conjure up Kinderschreck’s instrument of torture, the orchestra periodically executes snaplike figures. No doubt Felix, a product of more humane tutors, enjoyed this bit of parody.
Though Eduard Devrient detected the influence of Carl von Dittersdorf, 66 an 18th-century Viennese composer of comic opera, Die beiden
Ex. 2.7 : Mendelssohn, Die beiden Pädagogen (1821), No. 4
Ex. 2.8a: Mendelssohn, Die beiden Pädagogen (1821), No. 10
Ex. 2.8b: Mozart, Violin Sonata in G (K. 301, 1778)
Pädagogen again draws upon the wellspring of Mozart’s genius. The D-major overture, “spinning a rapid and witty series of musical events out of virtually nothing,” 67 reminds us of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro , also in D major. Both begin with compact piano motives; both employ unison writing and a surprise forte explosion. In the penultimate No. 10, an ensemble with a chorus of peasants, Luftig is obliged to provide dance music, and he performs a solo violin melody borrowed from the second movement of Mozart’s Violin Sonata K. 301 ( ex. 2.8 ). Eventually the dance melody is combined with choral music in , a polymetrical experiment reminiscent of the Act I finale of Don Giovanni , in which Mozart’s celebrated minuet appears with other dances in and . Elsewhere Felix seems intent upon recapturing the sound of Mozart’s late orchestral style, as in the end of the C-major finale, resplendent with allusions to the Jupiter Symphony.
IV
Herr von Robert’s effort to mold Carl into a Gelehrter would have resonated with Felix, then pursuing a rigorous classical education with histutor, Carl Heyse. Eduard Devrient relates that when Lea noticed her son idle, she would admonish, Felix, thust du nichts ? 68 A letter from March 1821 to his former tutor, G. A. Stenzel, reveals the extraordinary development of an exceptionally gifted child. 69 After casually mentioning the two Singspiele, Felix summarized his academic regimen, beginning with six hours of Latin a week (four for Caesar and Ovid, one for grammar, and one for exercises). If the prose of the Gallic War presented few obstacles, the poetry of the Metamorphoses required prepared translations, at the rate of fourteen verses an hour, in order to reach Daphne’s transformation into a laurel in Book 1. In mathematics he was reading the fifth book of Euclid’s Elements and with Fanny had lessons in history, arithmetic, geography, and German conversation. 70 On Mondays and Tuesdays he attended the Singakademie, while twice a week Zelter came to the residence for lessons (around this time, as we have seen, Felix was beginning fugue in four parts). Finally, there were two hours of violin lessons each week; Felix was now practicing etudes of Rodolphe Kreutzer, prized for their innovative extensions of left-hand technique.
The letter presents a budding polymath. Music was at the center of the child’s existence, but his studies also led him to delve into poetry. Thus, we have in his hand part of a mock epic (ein Spott-Heldengedicht ), probably from 1820 or the early months of 1821, about the exploits of Felix’s younger brother Paul, assigned the Greek sobriquet Paphlos. Titled Paphlëis , this little-known poem comprises three cantos, of which the last two and part of the first survive. 71 Paphlëis is indebted to classical antiquity, for Felix crafted its approximately 450 verses in dactylic hexameter, a meter he encountered in Ovid.
Goethe’s Achillëis (1799, a sequel to Homer’s Iliad ) was a major source for Felix’s Paphlëis , though a second stimulus wa
s Goethe’s idyll Hermann und Dorothea (1798), also in dactylic hexameter and fraught with classical allusions (its nine cantos bear the names of the Greek muses). Goethe sought to appropriate a classical genre to tell a modern story, about refugees fleeing the horrors of the French Revolution. Imitating Goethe, Felix devised titles for his cantos and placed the Roman gods Mercury and Bellona at the beginning of the second and third. Unlike Achillëis and Hermann und Dorothea , though, Paphlëis treats no cataclysmic event; it sings, instead, of quotidian activities in the Mendelssohn household and sets the epic aspirations of the poetry against the mundane reality of a child’s life in Berlin.
The first canto introduces the eight-year-old Paul with a Homeric epithet. The “fleet-footed Paphlos” (leichtfüßiger Paphlos ) is a Greek field commander who has marshaled his comrades against Fesca’s band. But Paphlos turns heel in a skirmish and flees, only to faint into a pile of mud. His companions rally, defeat their opponents, and incarcerate Fesca in a cellar, and then, with water from a pump, clean off their besmirched leader, who promptly claims credit for the victory.
In the second canto, presided over by Mercury, god of cunning and commerce, Paphlos’s companions assemble for a game of marbles. Here Felix bends his hexameters to fit the German titles of Shakespeare’s plays Twelfth Night (Was Ihr Wollt ) and As You Like It (Wie’s Euch Gefällt ), revealing that by 1821 he was reading A.W. Schlegel’s translations. 72 The main portion of the canto is Paphlos’s account of his great deeds, prefaced by an invocation to the muses for inspiration. But the story of his life, little more than a chronicle of academic studies with Heyse, impresses as a parody of Felix’s letter to Stenzel of March 1821.
Thus, our hero is a polyglot who reads Latin fables of Phaedrus and A Thousand and One Nights in Arabic, peruses a Greek primer, and has mastered Syrian, Chaldean, and Sanskrit—all mere child’s play. Paphlos studies arithmetic with his father and geometry, history, geography, French, politics, and Greek mythology. He plays the cello, accompanied by Fanny (Mamsell Benicke ) on the piano and Felix on the violin, and is learning etudes by “Quikrack,” no more demanding than hair cream (Pomade ). He draws and paints, is skilled in sepia, and has even composed a Morgenlied with a key signature of fifteen flats. He rises at five in the morning before his brother, and sometimes awakens Felix by splashing water in his face. “And so,” he sums up, “I am at once an artist and a scholar, and now you know with what sort of man you have to deal.” 73 Nevertheless, Paphlos is mortal: when a flower box suddenly collapses and he feigns injury, his companions turn on him as “the most cowardly inhabitant of the earth.” In the final canto, titled after the Roman goddess of war, Fesca wins release and plots a surprise attack on Paphlos, who once again faints in the thick of the fray. Police break up the melée, and he returns home, only to be boxed on the ears and sent to bed by Abraham. Maintaining the epic conceit to the end, our young bard closes with a final Homeric allusion: “And so they laid to rest in bed the hero’s corpse.”
Although centered on Paul, Paphlëis reveals of course as much about Felix, who projects his own worldview onto his brother. There is a wistful, if playful, sense that Paul’s path has already been trodden by Felix, that Paul’s misadventures comically reflect and replicate Felix’s own, more serious experiences as a child. Ultimately the authority of the classical epic and its crisp hexameters provide only a comical foil to a certain truth Felix must have known, that despite his precocity and sensitivity, in the real world his status as a baptized Jew was questionable. Paphlos is a younger version of Felix, who indeed became a great artist, while the pragmatic Paul entered the family’s banking business.
The closing lines of Paphlëis refer to Paul’s residence and identify its address as Neue Promenade No. 7. This stately abode, owned by Lea’s mother, Bella Salomon, was in the Spandauer Vorstadt near the eastern end of Unter den Linden. Though the chronology of the Mendelssohns’ Berlin residences remains unclear, a letter of Lea dated February 18, 1819, already mentions the new residence. 74 Unaware of this letter, and drawing on evidence from contemporary address books, Manfried Kliem suggested that the family moved to Neue Promenade no later than October 1820. Writing to Fanny from Paris on October 15, 1820, Henriette Mendelssohn observed that Abraham now had a greater distance to traverse from his new quarters to his firm on the Jägerstraße. This statement does not quite square with Lea’s letter of 1819 but might well if she mistakenly misdated the year as 1819 instead of 1820, a type of oversight to which Felix too was susceptible in his correspondence. From Henriette’s letter Kliem deduced that the family had moved from Markgrafenstraße 48 (their other documented residence of the early Berlin years), near the Gendarmenmarkt, a short distance from the Jägerstraße. The owner of Markgrafenstraße 48 was Pastor Stegemann, who had baptized the Mendelssohn children in 1816 and died in March 1820. 75 If Kliem is correct, Neue Promenade No. 7, where Bella occupied the ground floor and Abraham’s family the second, while the third was rented out, was the site of the lavish productions of Felix’s early Singspiele. And if Lea’s letter was indeed written in 1820, February 1820 might serve as a terminus post quem for Paphlëis .
At Neue Promenade No. 7 the Mendelssohns enjoyed a rich musical life. Here Felix and Fanny entertained traveling dignitaries, including, in 1821, Hummel and Weber. Another visitor was the part violin virtuoso, part charlatan A.-J. Boucher, who likened Felix to a phoenix. Boucher impressed audiences with a Napoleonic physiognomy with which he struck various poses from popular engravings—for example, the emperor upon the smoldering ruins of Moscow. 76 (Jacob Bartholdy found the resemblance ludicrous; in his view, a conquering emperor was so far removed from a musician’s life that the one should not imitate the other. 77 )
At a musical gathering during the winter of 1820, the French flutist Louis Drouet witnessed Felix’s compelling abilities. The piano being out of tune with the flute, Drouet strained to transpose his part down a step, only to abandon the attempt, while Felix effortlessly raised the piano part a semitone. “I listened with the greatest apprehension,” Lea reported, “though the young devil succeeded with only a few mistakes.” 78 Drouet was equally impressed with Fanny, but he found her rares talen[t]s more difficult to describe than writing counterpoint and opted to inscribe a fugue in her album. 79 On another occasion, in October 1820, a colleague of Pushkin, Wilhelm Karlowitsch Küchelbecker, later exiled to Siberia for his participation in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, attended a performance at the Mendelssohn residence of a Requiem (almost certainly Mozart’s), and documented an early example of a Sunday musical soirée. Much impressed by Felix, who sang in the chorus, Küchelbecker penned an intimate, sensual portrait: “Never have I seen such a perfectly beautiful youth. His dark locks fell in natural freedom halfway down his back, his snow-white neck and chest were open; his dark southern eyes glowed and betrayed future conquests over souls! His small, roseate mouth seemed to have been shaped for kisses; in his voice resonated a spirit that knew and felt more than one thought usual for one of his age to know and feel.” 80
An especially close relationship now developed between Felix and Fanny. According to Lea, he routinely submitted compositions to Fanny’s judgment and took her criticisms to heart, “mercilessly” striking passages she questioned. 81 Fanny became his Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and decorative arts, who in classical mythology sprang fully mature from Jupiter’s head. Felix’s respect for Fanny’s musical acumen, playfully expressed through mythological fantasizing, was high praise, indeed. Though Fanny at age sixteen offered penetrating critiques of Felix’s music, she could only stand by as his musical horizons continued to expand. And so, more spectator-like than divine, she expressed curiosity about Henriette von Pereira Arnstein’s plan in 1821 to send Felix a “naive-sentimental” opera libretto on a Swiss subject. There would be choruses with obbligato bellowing of cattle, sunlit glaciers, and a nostalgic, languishing shepherdess 82 (the libretto evidently never materialized). As for her own creative efforts, Fanny conti
nued to write Lieder and submitted her idyllic settings of Florian to the visiting French violinist Pierre Rode, who praised some but found others “too French.” According to Lea, Fanny was “musical through and through,” a pianist whose accomplished technique elicited words of praise from the usually taciturn youngest son of Mozart, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (1791–1844), who concertized in Berlin and played duets with her. 83
A special opportunity for the siblings to collaborate arose in June 1821, when Karl Begas (1794–1854) visited the family. The young painter had apprenticed in the Parisian atelier of Antoine-Jean Gros, a leading exponent of Empire art. 84 Though Gros provided Begas a solid grounding in technique, he found the Frenchman’s panegyrizing canvases on Napoleonic subjects politically difficult in the post-Waterloo Restoration, and potentially compromising to his career. By 1817 Begas had turned to religious subjects, and attracted the patronage of Frederick William III, who funded further study in Paris. Four years later, Begas returned to the Prussian capital with a new canvas for the altar of the Berlin cathedral, Die Ausgießung des Hl. Geistes (The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit ), and on this occasion met the Mendelssohns. According to Lea, Begas was passionately devoted to music and drawn to her children, and they responded with musical mementos of his visit, including a piece by Fanny based upon the musical letters of his name. 85 Her customized offering, unrecognized since 1821, can now be identified as a fifty-five bar piano work in A ♭ major, recorded on June 27, 1821, on some staves beneath a chorale exercise for Zelter. 86 Along with J. S. Bach and the Dane Niels Gade, Begas possessed an exceptionally musical surname; Fanny recognized that musical pitches could represent all its letters (in German nomenclature, B=B= ♭ ; and As=A ♭ ). Ex. 2.9 gives the opening of her solution, a serpentine melody that touches on F minor, before turning to A ♭ major.
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 12
