Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Felix gave some piano lessons to Nathan’s son Arnold and promised to compose a violin piece for Johannes Latzel, rector of the local school. 58 As for Nathan, he persevered in his enterprise for a few years but suffered substantial losses from flooding in 1827 and 1829. As we shall see, the industrious Felix found a way to help then, as well.

  III

  On Christmas Day 1823 Felix supposedly showed Eduard Devrient a score of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the document that would prompt “an actor and a Jew-boy” to “bring back to the people the greatest Christian music.” 59 According to Devrient, the score, prepared by Eduard Rietz, was a Christmas present from Bella Salomon. 60 In 1815, Zelter had begun to rehearse portions with a select group of singers; in 1818, Devrient joined the effort to disentangle the “bristly pieces” (borstige Stücke ) of Bach, then generally viewed as “an unintelligible musical arithmetician.” 61 Zelter zealously guarded his Bachiana and concealed the cache from a world “which he supposed no longer capable of prizing it.” Among his treasures were a copy of the Passion and the autograph Bach cantatas Abraham had sent from Hamburg in 1811. Occasionally Zelter led Felix to the closet where the manuscripts were stored, only to deny him access, causing a deep hurt the sensitive musician revealed years later to Ferdinand Hiller. 62 Devrient reports that Bella overcame considerable difficulty to procure a copy of the Passion from Zelter and thereby fulfill her grandson’s fervent wish.

  As an actor, Devrient would have appreciated the dramatic events leading to Felix’s 1829 revival of the Passion, precipitating, in turn, the modern Bach revival; indeed, Devrient seems to have enhanced his account on one critical point. How are we to understand Bella—an orthodox Jew who had cursed the Protestant Jacob Bartholdy in 1805 and was unaware in 1823 that her children and grandchildren had converted—presenting Bach’s Passion as a Christmas present? Bella was musically sophisticated and numbered with her sister Sarah Levy among Berlin cognoscenti dedicated to preserving the music of the Bach family. No doubt her musical interests supported the decision to have the Passion copied, in order, according to A. B. Marx, to present her grandson an essentially unknown composition. 63 Although Bella was among the first to recognize possibly the greatest musical composition of the Lutheran faith, 64 she did not give the score as a Christmas present. Pace Devrient, an inventory Fanny prepared of the family music library establishes that Bella made the gift in 1824, after other Bach acquisitions for 1823; furthermore, the copyist was Eduard Rietz’s father, Johann Friedrich Rietz. 65 Peter Ward Jones has surmised that Bella probably gave her grandson the present on his birthday in 1824 (she died in March 1824).

  Though Felix’s score survives, Zelter’s score along with much of the Berlin Singakademie library disappeared at the end of World War II. 66 What were the origins of Zelter’s copy? Marx averred that Zelter purchased it from a cheese merchant, who had treated it as mere waste paper, a probably fictitious, if amusing anecdote. In 1928 Friedrich Smend and Georg Schünemann studied the Passion manuscripts, including Zelter’s score; Martin Geck was later able to trace the primary source of Zelter’s manuscript to a copy prepared by J. C. Altnikol, a son-in-law of J. S. Bach. 67 After Altnikol’s death, the copy passed to Kirnberger in Berlin and entered the music library of Princess Anna Amalie, which Zelter helped catalogue in 1799. He thus could have prepared his copy from the Altnikol manuscript. (Like Zelter’s score, Altnikol’s copy omits the chorale fantasy “O Mensch, bewein’ dein Sünde groß,” with which the first part of the Passion concludes.)

  At some point in 1824 J. S. Bach’s autograph score of the Passion 68 arrived in Berlin. Like Zelter a devoted antiquarian, Georg Pölchau acquired this treasure from the estate of C. F. G. Schwencke (1767–1822), C. P. E. Bach’s successor in Hamburg. Lea Salomon knew Pölchau as early as 1799, several years before she married Abraham; when Pölchau returned to Berlin in 1813, he remained on friendly terms with Bella Salomon’s family. Moreover, Geck’s 1967 research found that Felix’s copy agreed fundamentally with the version of the Passion transmitted by the Pölchau autograph, and thus argued, contrary to Devrient, that Felix’s copy, at least initially, was made from this source. But in 1974 Alfred Dürr proposed instead that the basis of Felix’s copy was a score in the Singakademie library prepared from Bach’s autograph parts. 69 By December 1823 the only portions of the work Felix likely knew were the six movements Zelter had been rehearsing since 1815 70 —four solo numbers and two short choruses, a few, tantalizing glimpses at the choral monument.

  Bella’s gift was revelatory: Felix was now free to fathom the manifold beauties of Bach’s most profound work. The double orchestras and choruses, enriched eight-part writing and antiphonal effects, reflective arias and chromatically imbued recitatives, halolike enveloping of Jesus’ part with string accompaniment, 71 and strategic placement of chorales—all of this deeply impressed Felix, for whom the St. Matthew Passion became a cornerstone of his musical faith. For Zelter, the fundamental impediment to reviving Bach’s masterwork had been how to make the music accessible to modern audiences. Zelter’s solution was to simplify the recitatives and choral parts in order to produce versions imitating the popular style of C. H. Graun. 72 But Zelter’s tinkering only scratched the surface of Bach’s colossus and never resounded beyond the secretive Friday rehearsals. Instead, the task of revival fell to Felix.

  On Felix’s fifteenth birthday, February 3, 1824, Zelter proclaimed him a journeyman. Among the celebrants was Samuel Rösel, who gave Felix an album of sepia Swiss landscapes, several scenes of which Felix had duplicated during his 1822 Swiss sojourn (Rösel’s motto—“To live by reminiscence is a doubled life”—thus alluded to his own experiences and those of his student). 73 But the main event was the first full rehearsal of Felix’s fourth opera, Die beiden Neffen , or Der Onkel aus Boston (The Two Nephews , or The Uncle from Boston ). 74 Based, like its predecessors, on a Casper libretto, the opera had originated in May 1822. Felix dated the first act on September 11 in Lausanne; the second and third acts, in March and October 1823 in Berlin. Following a time-honored tradition, he composed the overture last and put the final touches on the score early in November. Once again, Abraham underwrote a production at the family residence, with two performances before one hundred and fifty guests on February 7 and 9, 1824. 75 Therese Devrient reports that among them was Savary, the Duke of Rovigo, a former aide-de-camp of Napoleon who had perpetrated atrocities during the war but was an enthusiastic music lover. 76 According to the young Heinrich Dorn, 77 who sang in the chorus, the cast included Eduard and Therese (they were married on February 11 of that year), 78 Johanna Zimmermann, and the Doctors Andrissen and Dittmar. 79 Presumably Casper participated as well. The orchestra again consisted of the king’s elite musicians, and before this august company at the first orchestral rehearsal on Felix’s birthday, Zelter delivered his speech, ratified by toasts and merry part-songs.

  “Now work on until you become a master,” Zelter exhorted Felix, tapping him on the cheek as if knighting him. 80 In elevating Felix, Zelter invoked Mozart, Haydn, and “old father Bach,” though the opera had little to do with them and more with Weber, now a significant influence on Felix (just weeks before, he had performed with Spontini Weber’s Konzertstück ). 81 Like Der Freischütz , Die beiden Neffen consisted of an overture and three acts, with spoken dialogue conveying the dramatic action. The expanded compass contrasts with Felix’s other Singspiele, all of which fitted comfortably into one act. Still unpublished, Die beiden Neffen has attracted scant attention, partly because the dialogue for the third act is lost, and because the libretto is among Casper’s poorer efforts. 82 The plot concerns Theodor and his servant Carl (tenors), eventually revealed to be nephews of Colonel Felsig (bass). The nephews have returned to Germany from America, where their father reportedly died during the Revolution (in the third act, he miraculously appears and is reunited with his family).

  Despite the libretto’s weaknesses—most of the action occurs in the first act—the score
contains some impressive music. Of the adroitly orchestrated overture Zelter reported: “Imagine a painter flinging a dab of color on his canvas and then working it about with fingers and brushes till at last a group appears, and you look at it with fresh wonder, and only see that it must be true because there it is.” 83 The “dab of color” is the series of piano horn calls with which the overture begins ( ex. 4.5a ), presumably a symbol of separation, as in Beethoven’s Les Adieux Piano Sonata. From this material Felix shapes an expressive Andante for winds, linked to the Allegro vivace for full orchestra, a bright Weberian movement probably meant to depict the nephews’ return from abroad ( ex. 4.5b ). There is also orchestral music for two ballets (finale of Act I and middle of Act II), brimming with infectious folksonglike melodies reminiscent of Weber ( ex. 4.5c ). According to Eduard Devrient, the most successful number was a chorus some friends compared to the bridesmaids’ chorus in Der Freischütz . 84 A brother-in-law of Varnhagen von Ense, the poet Ludwig Robert, actually offered to prepare a new libretto based on Felix’s chorus. 85 But his parents vetoed the proposal and by the time of the premiere, Felix was already contemplating a new opera on an episode from Cervantes’s Don Quixote .

  Ex. 4.5a: Mendelssohn, Die beiden Neffen (1823), Overture

  Ex. 4.5b: Mendelssohn, Die beiden Neffen (1823), Overture

  Ex. 4.5c: Mendelssohn, Die beiden Neffen (1823), Ballet

  By 1824 Felix’s circle of friends was expanding considerably. From the middle of the year dates the first reference in his letters to Karl Klingemann (1798–1862), 86 who had entered the diplomatic service of the Kingdom of Hanover, newly created after the dismantling of Westphalia, the puppet monarchy over which Napoleon’s brother Jérôme had briefly ruled. Dispatched to Paris to assist with the collection of reparations, Klingemann moved in 1818 to the Hanover embassy in Berlin and gained access to the Mendelssohns’ circle. Heinrich Dorn found him “unaffectedly aristocratic.” 87 According to Klingemann’s son, who published his correspondence with Felix, 88 the diplomat’s musical abilities exceeded those of the average dilettante. A volume of his Lieder appeared in Berlin in 1826 and a second volume in Leipzig in 1859. 89 He also produced an abundance of lyrical verses that Felix set. 90

  Among Felix’s other friends was the Hamburg violinist Leopold Lindenau, who figured increasingly in Felix’s musical life after Eduard Rietz injured his left hand while performing Spontini’s Olympia ; 91 the law clerk Wilhelm von Boguslawski, who submitted compositions to Felix’s review; 92 and Louis Heydemann, a law student at the university. Then there was the young critic/reformer Hermann Franck (1802–1855), whom Felix probably met in Breslau in 1823. Franck moved in the circles of Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe, and Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, the painter and amateur violinist whom Franck accompanied in Rome. His politics tilted toward the republican Ludwig Börne and Heinrich Heine, whose “admission to European culture” 93 (baptism into the Protestant Church) Franck witnessed in 1825. Among his musical acquaintances were Meyerbeer, Liszt, Chopin, the Schumanns, and Wagner, whose Tannhäuser , Franck believed, captured the spirit of the times. 94 Franck appreciated the momentous significance of Felix’s 1829 revival of the St. Matthew Passion, and during the 1820s Franck contributed articles to a music journal inaugurated under the polemical editorship of A. B. Marx (1795–1866), destined to have an especially complex relationship with Felix.

  This estimable music theorist—Marx later developed a textbook definition of sonata form—had come to Berlin to study law. His first love, though, was music, and he found inspiration in the multifaceted E. T. A. Hoffmann, a judge of the Prussian Supreme Court, notorious for rendering legal opinions while scribbling caricatures of his colleagues. Hoffmann’s madcap tales were all the rage in Berlin, and, what counted more for Marx, Hoffmann had won fame as a composer. In an example of homage or narcissism, he had added the name Amadeus (“loved by God”) after his celestial model, Mozart, and in 1816 launched the opera Undine , based on a romantic fairy tale by de la Motte Fouqué. No less telling for Marx was Hoffmann’s music criticism, including his review that plumbed the ineffable content of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the innately romantic qualities of instrumental music. 95

  A Hoffmannesque turning point for Marx’s career came during a performance of Gluck’s opera Armide . In the slumber scene of Act 2, when the vengeful Armida plots the sleeping Rinaldo’s murder only to fall in love with him, Marx detected parallel fifths. 96 His theater companion refused to concede the faux pas, so the two visited the music shop of A. M. Schlesinger to consult the score. When Marx located the fifths, the publisher offered him the editorship of the new Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung . The first issue appeared on January 7, 1824; Marx led the weekly periodical for seven years, until it ceased publication late in 1830. Schlesinger’s goal was to establish a house organ to rival the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , founded in 1798 by the leading Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel. The young Marx seized the opportunity to promote a new type of music criticism for what he perceived as a new musical age.

  In the early issues Marx brought out a serial manifesto, “Concerning the Demands of Our Age on Music Criticism,” which described his own time as a third musical era following those of J. S. Bach (characterized by counterpoint) and Mozart (associated with melodic lyricism). Influenced by Hoffmann’s vision of musical romanticism and Hegel’s idealism, Marx explicated a fundamental “art principle” (Kunstprinzip ) that undergirded seminal musical compositions. 97 The new age, still in a nascent state, required a radically new type of music, and Marx seized upon Beethoven as a pioneering musical aesthete. Marx was particularly struck by Beethoven’s depiction of extramusical ideas through “tone painting” and read the Fifth Symphony as a “sequence of soulful states with deep psychological truth.” 98 In contrast, musicians supporting the status quo came in for heavy criticism. Thus, Marx rebuked Zelter for performing irrelevant eighteenth-century repertoire, failing to add “modern” wind instruments to Handel’s orchestral scores, choosing improper tempos, and altering composers’ scores (e.g., smoothing out expressive leaps in Graun’s recitatives). 99 Perturbed, Zelter later vented some anti-Semitic spleen to Goethe. 100

  How Marx met the Mendelssohns is unclear, but he soon became a habitué of the Sunday musicales. Fourteen years Felix’s senior, Marx “gained an ascendancy over Felix such as no one ever exercised over him” 101 —for some, a particularly baneful effect. Varnhagen von Ense was especially blunt: “… he immediately impressed me as unpleasant through his common appearance and coarse manner. He crawled like a cockroach before Felix, uttered obsequious admiration for him… [Marx] was so fat and short, so overly plump, so unpleasantly pungent and suffocating…. ‘Man as bug,’ one said of him.” 102 According to Devrient, Marx’s “intellectual and flowing speech dominated every conversation, his many new and striking ideas, his adroit flattery, so discreetly veiled, made him, for a time, very popular with the family, notwithstanding his awkward manners, his ungainly appearance, short trousers, and clumsy shoes.” 103 Initially, Abraham was attracted to the Abbé , as Marx was dubbed after his initials, for the “elder Mendelssohn was very fond of contradicting, and of being contradicted.” 104 But at some point the repartee lost its charm; because “people of that kind, who talk so cleverly and can do nothing, act perniciously on productive minds,” 105 Abraham was concerned enough to entreat Devrient to break Marx’s hold on his son.

  In 1869, Marx’s widow, Therese, published a spirited rejoinder to Devrient’s account. 106 As for Marx, he believed his relationship with Felix was based on unaffected openness, which matured quickly and developed a “strength that may be rare even between brothers.” 107 The friendship “grew so close and fast that scarcely a day passed when we did not exchange visits and notes,” filled with “certain expressions and references that only we understood, musical passages, and a crazy quilt of fantastic pictures, for Felix drew assiduously.” 108 Felix candidly criticized Marx’s inept fugal setting of
Psalm 137, while Marx found Felix’s string symphonies technically proficient but lacking in depth. Marx thus joined Fanny as a musical intimate of Felix, and indeed helped shape some of Felix’s instrumental works. Above all, Marx encouraged Felix’s engagement with Beethoven, which reached a new level of intensity in 1824.

  During the first half of the year the journeyman Felix composed prolifically. Two sacred works bear the stylistic stamp of the eighteenth century. In Salve regina , for soprano solo and strings (April 1824), 109 Felix set the Marian antiphon in three parts (ABA), with pellucid, balanced phrases and supple melodic lines reminiscent of Mozart’s arias; the inclusion of coloratura cadenzas suggests he conceived the work for a particular soloist, perhaps Anna Milder-Hauptmann. The chorale motet Jesus, meine Zuversicht , presumably for the Singakademie, was dispatched quickly in June 1824. 110 Its five movements employ the Crüger chorale in the first three, all a cappella , where the cantus firmus appears in the soprano, then the second soprano and tenor. The fourth movement, a bass aria with organ accompaniment, proceeds directly to the finale, a stiff double fugue on “Halleluja” and “Amen.” Felix’s first extended sacred work to employ a chorale, Jesus, meine Zuversicht may reflect his study of the St. Matthew Passion. However, the migrating cantus firmus and bookish double fugue recall his exercises with Zelter.