Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Ex. 2.9a: “Begas” represented by pitches

  Ex. 2.9b: Fanny Mendelssohn, Piano Piece in A ♭ major (1821)

  Felix’s piece for Begas remains unidentified. As for Begas, he recorded his impression of Felix by painting the youth’s portrait. Lea found the result a “splendid souvenir” of Begas’s “masterful brush.” 87 Even though the original oil was destroyed in a fire early in the twentieth century, two nineteenth-century pastel copies by the Englishman Charles Horsfall (grandson of Alexander Mendelssohn) survived, 88 as did a preliminary oil sketch by Begas (plate 4 ). After his 1821 visit Begas retained this sketch for reuse in a historical canvas (whether in fact Felix’s boyish face was again pressed into service remains unknown). 89 The copies and oil sketch impress as the very realization of Küchelbecker’s literary portrait of 1820: Felix appears with shoulder-length locks flowing down his back, roseate lips, an exposed white neck and chest, and penetrating, dark eyes turned askance, as if contemplating some visual or musical object.

  Earlier in 1821 another young painter entered the Mendelssohns’ lives. Wilhelm Hensel (1794–1861) was the son of a poor Protestant minister from Brandenburg, who opposed his son’s artistic aspirations (Wilhelm could draw before he could speak), and in 1811 sent him to Berlin to study engineering. 90 Shortly thereafter the pastor died, leaving Wilhelm free to pursue painting; by 1812 he was exhibiting work at the Academy of Art. But when the War of Liberation erupted, he enlisted. Thrice wounded, he served with distinction and in 1815, as an officer of the victorious allies, entered Paris, where he perused the masterpieces of the Louvre. After the war Hensel earned his living by producing illustrations for calendars and almanacs. A turning point came early in 1821, during a state visit from Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia and his Prussian wife, the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna (formerly Princess Charlotte). The royals needed entertainment, and Wilhelm was among several artists engaged to provide it. This occasion brought Wilhelm and Fanny together, though no one would have predicted their future union, because, as their son Sebastian later observed, they were from dissimilar backgrounds, one of a “Christian-Teutonic” type, the other “of pure Jewish descent.” 91

  The entertainment chosen was a series of tableaux vivants (“living pictures”: staged scenes in which actors assumed fixed poses) on Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh . Today largely forgotten, the Irish poet Moore was a biographer of Byron and a political satirist of the Regency who never forgot the suppression of the United Irishmen in 1799. Among his poems were ten volumes of Irish Melodies (1808–1834), which elicited from Hector Berlioz several elegiac chansons . Moore also composed the popular song “The Last Rose of Summer,” the inspiration for a wistful piano fantasy by Felix (Op. 15, 1830). In 1817 the Irishman created a sensation with the escapist “Eastern romance” Lalla Rookh , about a sixteenth-century Indian princess who journeys from Delhi to Kashmir to marry Akiris, the young king of Bucharia. Moore’s publisher payed £3000 for the manuscript sight unseen. Structuring the romance as four allegorical verse tales, Moore stitched together the whole with a prose introduction and interludes. The second tale, “Paradise and the Peri,” later inspired Robert Schumann’s secular oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri (1843), about a fallen Persian fairy seeking to reenter Paradise by discovering the gift “most dear to Heav’n” (after two attempts, she succeeds with a repentant sinner’s tear). The fourth, “The Light of the Harem,” about a lovers’ quarrel between the Emperor Selim and his concubine Nourmahal, prompted Spontini to compose an operatic rendition for the Prussian court.

  In designing tableaux vivants, Hensel drew upon a tradition several centuries old. 92 Opinions vary about the aesthetic merits of this unusual diversion, but with some imagination one might recognize in the genre the precursor of several later art forms. As a posed, framed space, the tableau vivant anticipated photography; when presented as a sequence of tableaux, it was a forerunner of cinematography; and when “performed” with music, it foreshadowed the multimedia synthesis of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk .

  The Prussian exchequer spared little expense for the event, held at court on January 27, 1821, and repeated on February 11 before an audience of three thousand. According to Hensel’s friend the novelist Theodor Fontane, 93 a Spontini march escorted a bejeweled procession of nobility and guests (symbolizing the wedding party of the Indian princess) into the palace. The assembly viewed successively twelve tableaux depicting scenes from the four fables, to the accompaniment of romances by Spontini. For the occasion the architect K. F. Schinkel provided decorations, and the English historian Mountstuart Elphinstone designed oriental costumes. Nobility, including the family of Prince Radziwill, Beethoven’s patron, struck the poses. Entering the hall on a gold stretcher, the Grand Duchess Alexandra played Lalla Rookh.

  Fontane’s account places Fanny among the audience but fails to divulge how she met Hensel. Presumably she attended the second performance, to which the Intendant Count Brühl had invited several artists and literati. 94 But in The Mendelssohn Family Sebastian Hensel offers a different scenario. After the second performance the Grand Duchess Alexandra imagined that future generations should have a remembrance of the event, whereupon the king instructed Hensel to prepare a “drawing-room book” with paintings of the tableaux. Once again, the royals assumed their poses, while Hensel executed his drawings nach der Natur . Before sending them to Russia, Hensel exhibited them in his studio and there “made the acquaintance of Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who had come with her parents to admire his beautiful drawings.” 95 In 1823 the volume was published in Berlin, one of several royal attempts—ranging from commissions for Persian vases to Spontini’s exotic opera Nurmahal (1822) 96 —to preserve the festival for posterity.

  During this period Abraham continued to tend to the religious education of his children. On May 21, 1820, Fanny was confirmed as a Protestant. 97 In July Abraham broached from Paris a difficult, sensitive subject—the religious divide separating the parents from their children. His letter opens optimistically with a vision of natural religion, an ideal not far removed from Moses Mendelssohn’s enlightened views or Lessing’s vision in Nathan der Weise . Seeking a common spirituality binding all faiths, Abraham wrote, “I know that there exists in me and in you and in all human beings an everlasting inclination towards all that is good, true, and right, and a conscience which warns and guides us when we go astray. I know it, I believe it, I live in this faith, and this is my religion.” 98 Although Abraham and Lea had been able to “follow the divine instinct” without forsaking Judaism, they had chosen Christianity for their children, because “it is the creed of most civilized people, and contains nothing that can lead you away from what is good, and much that guides you to love, obedience, tolerance, and resignation, even if it offered nothing but the example of its Founder, understood by so few, and followed by still fewer.” Having obtained “the name of a Christian” by confessing her Protestant faith, Fanny could now realize her full potential by following the inner voice of her conscience. In August 1821 that voice moved her to accomplish a remarkable deed, the reconciliation of her uncle Jacob Bartholdy with his estranged mother, Bella Salomon. 99 Fanny’s talent so impressed Bella that she offered as a reward “anything Fanny liked.” Bella honored the unexpected request—forgiveness for Jacob—thereby healing the sixteen-year-old wound caused by his baptism in 1805. For his part, Jacob praised Fanny’s “skillful and felicitous negotiations,” and observed that her heart had somehow accomplished what the mind could not. 100 But offsetting this joyful event was a tragedy, for around this time Lea gave birth to a stillborn infant. 101 During her recuperation, J. G. S. Rösel, later Felix’s drawing instructor, gave her an inscribed stone from a Roman temple 102 :

  In Aesculapius’ temple was I found

  By a cheerful, lucky customer,

  In a most blessed hour.

  Therefore luck to me is bound,

  Whoever wears me soon will be sound.

  Lea had the stone set, and wore
the ring faithfully as a talisman of good luck.

  Chapter 3

  1821–1822

  The Second Mozart

  [Mendelssohn,] the greatest, specifically musical genius to appear in the world since Mozart.

  —Richard Wagner 1

  At precisely 7:00 P.M . on June 18, 1821, a slightly lame, bespectacled man entered the hall of Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt and limped to the rostrum. This was the Dresden Kapellmeister Carl Maria von Weber, in Berlin to premiere his “romantic opera,” Der Freischütz . As a folksonglike melody wafted from four Waldhörner , the overture exuded a German flavor. The natural horn had been revived in the Arnim-Brentano folk anthology, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn , 1805), and Weber himself would receive the dedication of Wilhelm Müller’s Gedichte “from the Posthumous Papers of a Traveling Waldhorn Player” (1824). Müller’s poems inspired Schubert’s song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise —replete with horn calls worked into the piano parts. The male-dominated world of German romanticism centered on sylvan settings in which hunters wandered toward self-actualization; the Waldhorn was their instrument of choice. Among Weber’s audience were Felix and his parents, Dr. Casper, Heinrich Heine, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and scores of veterans of the War of Liberation, their chests emblazoned with Iron Crosses.

  The portentous premiere fell on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. A polemic erupted in the press, with Weber’s adherents and detractors exchanging verbal volleys. The champion of a new, nationalist German opera, Weber was opposed to the court Kapellmeister, Spontini, creator of un-German, Empire-style operas. Spontini’s neoclassical Olympia , commissioned by the Prussian monarch, was based on an earlier French tragédie lyrique . The new German version offered stately processions (Statira, Alexander the Great’s widow, entered on an elephant, accompanied by a clamorous band crammed onto the stage), a bacchanal, and an apotheosis with the macabre specter of Alexander. Straining with hyperbolic effects, Olympia was a stentorian affair: a German physician reportedly cured a deaf patient by taking him to the opera, even though the therapy cost the physician his own hearing. 2 Spontini’s music appealed to royal taste, and the court responded by patronizing three performances.

  Weber’s score addressed a distinctly different, middle-class audience. The music teemed with popular tunes that were all the rage; Heine reported that Berlin barbers, washerwomen, and schoolboys hummed the catchy bridesmaids’ song from Act III, and Zelter endured a cobbler’s apprentice singing the same number off pitch. 3 The core of the opera was the Wolf’s Glen scene concluding Act 2, a continuous, twenty-minute complex in the unfamiliar key of F# minor, representing the hour between midnight and 1:00 A.M . Worlds removed from Spontini’s pomp, this diabolical scene took place in the depths of a German forest, where the young huntsman Max, to win the hand of Agathe, sold himself for seven magic bullets to the satanic Samiel. As each was cast over a seething cauldron, a fresh apparition appeared, nearly exhausting the theater’s special-effects resources. There was a mechanical owl with eerily lit eyes and flappable wings, 4 a wild boar, a carriage with fireworks to depict flaming wheels, an unseen chorus of wild huntsmen, and other “chilling” effects that touched the German soul.

  The morning of the premiere Weber completed another major work, the Konzertstück in F minor, Op. 79. A telescoped piano concerto, with four connected movements, it belonged almost as much in the opera house as the concert hall, for it was pure musical theater. Felix’s friend Julius Benedict sketched its mawkish medieval program 5 of a damsel pining for her knight, a variation on the theme of separation and reunion, explored a few years earlier by Beethoven in his piano sonata Les Adieux (Op. 81a). Weber premiered the Konzertstück on his farewell Berlin concert (June 25), an event Felix almost certainly attended. 6 The audience witnessed an extraordinary scene. The violinist Boucher, accompanying Weber in a chamber work, inserted a cadenza, into which he managed to blend a “pot-pourri of motives” from Der Freischütz . But when he conjured up the “Wolf’s Glen” scene on his E-string, he floundered and had to save himself by feigning exhaustion and exclaiming to the dumbstruck Weber “Ah! grand maître! que je t’aime! que je t’admire! ” 7

  Weber’s triumphant reception in Berlin overwhelmed young Felix, then grinding out fugues for Zelter. What Spontini contemptuously dismissed as the “little deviltries” (Teufelein ) of Der Freischütz 8 offered Felix a glimpse of a musical world remote from the sacred motets of Bach that Zelter prized so highly. Even before the premiere Felix begged his friend Julius Benedict to play the opera at the piano, and after Weber’s departure Fanny and Felix eagerly awaited the appearance of the piano score. 9 The Konzertstück later became a staple of Felix’s piano repertoire and provided a model for several of his virtuoso concert works. But in 1821 the young apprentice was still under Zelter’s sway, and Zelter was unimpressed by the opera, though he conceded to Goethe the music “is so good, that the public doesn’t find all the nonsense and gunpowder unbearable.” 10

  I

  In the same letter, Zelter mentioned a promising young student hard at work on his third comic opera. Now Zelter decided to exhibit Felix to the German poet laureate and, late in October 1821, announced an imminent departure for Weimar with his daughter Doris and prize student, whom he described as “cheerful and obedient,” and, as an afterthought, the uncircumcised son of a Jew. 11 En route to Weimar, they stopped in the Lutheran bulwark of Wittenberg, where three hundred years earlier the Reformer had preached and nailed his theses to the door of the Schloßkirche. For the 304th anniversary of the Reformation (October 31), a new statue of Luther by J. G. Schadow, director of the Berlin Academy of Art, was to be unveiled. Into this cradle of the Reformation Zelter, Felix, and Doris arrived on the morning of October 27. Felix busied himself with a new opera, Die wandernden Komödianten , which had already progressed to the finale, and played the organs in the local churches. But the highpoint of the visit was his meeting with E. F. F. Chladni (1756–1827), an amateur musician/acoustician.

  In the 1780s Chladni had observed that “if a plate of glass or metal were sprinkled over with a fine powder, the vibrations of the plate, as they varied in direction or strength, would throw the grains of powder into different shapes on the surface of the plate.” 12 To demonstrate the phenomenon, he stroked plates with a violin bow and generated nodal patterns, including stars with varying numbers of rays. 13 Even Napoleon took notice; in 1809 he instructed the Académie des sciences to offer a prize to whoever could explain the elastic qualities of solids. Finding plates constraining, Chladni invented two new musical instruments. Related to Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica of the 1760s, the euphon comprised several thin glass rods, about the thickness of goose quills, which, when moistened and rubbed, produced pitches. Most listeners found the sound more pleasant than that of the glass harmonica and less grating on the nerves. 14 The clavicylinder was considerably more elaborate. Resembling a small piano, its depressed keys activated an interior mechanism that contacted a revolving glass cylinder. A skilled performer could elicit dynamic shades and perform rapid passages, although the instrument was ideally suited to music “of a slow, sustained, and even melancholy cast.” 15 Felix compared its sound to that of a “very soft oboe.” 16

  Zelter chose to celebrate the Reformation in Leipzig, where the travelers arrived on October 30. For centuries the bustling locus of the German book trade, Leipzig was also a center of Bach’s legacy, a distinction only partially rivaled by Berlin. But by 1821 Leipzig had lapsed into musical dormancy. On his death in 1750, the Thomaskantor had been succeeded by a series of modest musicians: Gottlob Harrer, J. F. Doles, J. A. Hiller, A. E. Müller, and J. G. Schicht. Of these, only Hiller had made a lasting contribution by establishing in 1781 the Gewandhaus concerts, which eventually expanded to comprise an annual subscription series that began after Michaelmas (end of September) and ran to Easter.

  At age twelve Felix could scarcely have imagined that fourtee
n years later he would lead the Gewandhaus Orchestra to unprecedented heights, or that by mid-century, Leipzigerisch would connote in musical circles Mendelssohnism. Rather, in October 1821, he dwelled upon past glories. His first priority was to visit Schicht, for whom he played a fugue, etude, and the Sonata in G minor, Op. 105. At Schicht’s request, one of Felix’s motets, most likely Psalm 19, was copied; Schicht later performed the work at the Thomaskirche, as Lea proudly reported to her Viennese cousin. 17 Awestruck by shades of Bach in the Thomasschule, Felix rambled in a report to Berlin that the elderly Schicht “sleeps in the same chamber in which Sebastian Bach lived, I have seen it, I have seen the little spot, where his Clavier stood, where he composed his immortal motets, where he (in Professor Zelter’s expression) ‘punished’ [kuranzte ] his young charges, and hopefully I will bring along a drawing of this honorable house, in which Rosenmüller, Bach, Doles, Hiller, and Schicht worked and still work.” 18