Felix’s attraction to Don Quixote reflected a German fascination with Cervantes. In 1799 Ludwig Tieck had translated the novel, and Felix would have also been familiar with the criticism of his uncle, Friedrich Schlegel, who viewed Don Quixote as “the model of the novel, fantastic, poetic, humorous.” 16 No less enthusiastic was Friedrich’s brother August Wilhelm, among the first to defend Cervantes’s technique of inserting digressing stories (such as Camacho’s wedding) within the novel and to recognize the significance of its second part, in which the knight achieves an increasing independence from the chivalrous persona of the first part.
In transforming Cervantes’s tale (in which Carrasco attempts to marry off his daughter Quiteria, in love with the poor Basilio, to the wealthy landowner Camacho) into a romantic Singspiel, Felix had to contend with certain issues. For Devrient the story was suitable only for “a comic dénouement ,” and the librettist’s inability to develop dramatic contexts—Felix himself complained of the overused strophic settings that interrupted the dramatic flow 17 —was ultimately “paralyzing.” 18 Unlike the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, in which he could draw upon an entire play for a twelve-minute overture, he now had to produce several hours of music for a single episode from Cervantes’s epic. There is some evidence that, as in the concert overture, Felix considered deploying a network of motives throughout the opera; thus, as the Scotsman John Thomson observed, “each character has a language of its own, so that one can never mistake the strains of Sancho for those of his master….” 19 The Overture commences with a brass fanfare indelibly associated with the Don ( ex. 6.1 ), whose first entrance occurs with the fanfare near the end of Act I, when, imagining Quiteria to be his idealized Dulcinea del Toboso, he springs to her defense. Progressing from tonic to dominant, the motive is ultimately extended to form a complete cadence in the closing bars of the opera, so that the fanfare functions like a motto, framing the opera and renewing itself in the middle. The technique is thus not unlike the motto in the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, though now applied across a much larger temporal span. But the knight’s motto proved a miscalculation. Felix covered the Don with too much musical armor; if the nebulous wind chords of the concert overture effortlessly conjure up Oberon’s elves, the ponderous fanfares of Don Quixote fail to convey an “ironical sense of knight-errantry.” 20
Ex. 6.1 : Mendelssohn, Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1827), Overture
Curiously, in the Overture Felix avoided delineating the other principals with their own motives. Instead, for the second theme of the exposition, he utilized material from the ballet of Act 2, where the opposing forces of Cupid and Wealth clash; a tender phrase from the theme reappears just before the ballet, sung by a chorus to the text, “Love is all conquering, love triumphs in every contest” ( ex. 6.2 ). The ballet itself adheres closely to the novel. Cervantes describes a masquelike entertainment in which rows of nymphs, led by Cupid and Interest, endeavor to free a maiden imprisoned in a wooden castle. Accompanying Cupid’s forces are a flute and tambourine, employed by Felix in an exotic bolero ( ex. 6.3a ). On the other hand, Interest dances a fandango, in which Felix replaces the seductive tambourine with a shimmering triangle to suggest Camacho’s wealth ( ex. 6.3b ). The Spanish dances inject local color into Felix’s score and recall the precedent of Mozart and Weber, who incorporated a fandango and bolero in two operas set in Spain, The Marriage of Figaro and Preciosa (the latter based on a Cervantes novella ).
Ex. 6.2 : Mendelssohn, Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1827), Act II
Ex. 6.3a: Mendelssohn, Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1827), Act II, Bolero
Ex. 6.3b: Mendelssohn, Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1827), Act II, Fandango
Elsewhere, the Germanic quality of Felix’s music protrudes, especially in two numbers strongly reminiscent of Weber. In the finale of Act 1 (No. 11) Vivaldo sings off-stage to the jaunty strains of a Waldhorn , and in Act 2 (No. 16), a bridesmaids’ chorus replicates the key and style of the popular chorus from Der Freischütz . These concessions to Berlin taste could not conceal the libretto’s threadbare quality, and for Devrient, who played Carrasco, the score still represented the “musical thought” of Felix’s earlier Singspiele.
An audience filled with family friends greeted the premiere. But the chorus was unsteady, and an exasperated Felix fled before the conclusion of the opera, leaving Devrient to apologize for his friend’s absence. The second performance, scheduled for May 1, was abruptly canceled. 21 At once critics seized on the libretto’s weaknesses. Ludwig Rellstab reported the encouraging, if not deafening, applause, 22 and also the excessive length of the libretto. According to a Leipzig correspondent, the performance precipitated “stormy applause” but opposition to the partisan calls for the composer to appear. 23 Felix was guilty of “overstriving” for effect. The noisy overture was too bloated for the “romantic, idyllic” material; and the composer, known for serious instrumental compositions, was out of his element, so that Cervantes’s tale did not spring fully to life. Meanwhile, a French correspondent hinted that the production was owing to Abraham’s wealth and dismissed the libretto as perhaps the most “maladroit” opera book yet derived from Cervantes. 24 Most damning, the score was “completely Germanic”; ignoring the ballet, the reviewer found no evidence of couleur locale .
These critiques paled against invidious comments in a minor gossip column, the Berliner Schnellpost , edited by M. G. Saphir: “At the Wedding of Camacho a Sunday public [April 29 fell on a Sunday] danced a contra-dance with a Sabbath public. After both sides had been stood up in vain, they fainted.” 25 Felix was hurt when he learned the author of these anti-Semitic sentiments was a “highly gifted musical student, … who had witnessed and shared the excitement of the family during the preparation of the opera, and who knew the score well.” 26 Though Felix later referred to Camacho as “my old sin” 27 —even Zelter had acknowledged its libretto contained no gold 28 —Felix drew from the episode a lifelong distrust of journalism: the most lavish praise from demanding critics could not offset the most contemptible abuse of the tawdriest literary rags. He also developed a phobia of committing to another libretto and henceforth examined numerous subjects only scrupulously to reject them, one by one. (Thus, during the summer of 1828, he declined Eduard Devrient’s libretto on the legend of Hans Heiling, owing to its similarities to Der Freischütz , 29 and even before Camacho was staged, Felix was unable in 1826 to come to terms with Helmina von Chézy, who had proffered a libretto on a romantic Persian subject. 30 ) The brilliant composer of boyish Singspiele for his parent’s residence failed at age eighteen in the public opera house. Curiously enough, in 1828 the Berlin firm of Friedrich Laue issued a piano-vocal score of the opera in heavily revised form, even though Felix did little to encourage the work’s revival. 31 Almost certainly Abraham underwrote this publication, since it was clearly unviable commercially; indeed, a reviewer commented that its price was sehr hoch . 32
II
While readying Camacho , Felix passed the entrance examination to the University of Berlin. At Easter (April 15) Heyse ended his tutorship of Felix in order to pursue the Habilitation at the university; as a replacement, Abraham hired the student J. G. Droysen (1808–1884), who had arrived in 1826 to study with the philologist August Böckh. 33 The son of a Pomeranian minister, Droysen possessed “knowledge far above his age” 34 and became a lifelong friend of the Mendelssohns. Felix and Rebecka studied Greek with him “as far as Aeschylus,” 35 Droysen’s specialty. On May 8, 1827, Felix matriculated at the university, to obtain the Bildung “so often lacking in musicians.” 36 Founded in 1807, the institution attracted within twenty years a distinguished faculty that boasted Wilhelm von Humboldt as the first rector, and his brother, the natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the geographer Ritter, theologian Schleiermacher, philosophers Fichte and Hegel, astronomer J. F. Encke, Indo-Europeanist Franz Bopp, historian Ranke, jurists Savigny and Eduard Gans, and Böckh. Among its students were the future “Young Hegelian” Ludwig Feue
rbach (1824), and Heinrich Heine (1821–1822), who, like Felix, spent four semesters at the institution. Felix’s lecture notes in history and geography, 37 and matriculation records confirm he was a most diligent student, though evidently between classes he preferred to improvise on the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture on the piano of a “beautiful lady.” 38
Felix attended the lectures of the historian Leopold Ranke and zoologist M. H. K. Lichtenstein but was especially drawn to the offerings of the geographer Carl Ritter, 39 who in 1822 had begun to publish his magnum opus , the twenty-one-volume Erdkunde , destined to fill by 1859 some twenty thousand pages. Its full title (Geography in Relation to Nature and Human History, or General Comparative Geography as a Firm Foundation for the Study of and Instruction in Physical and Historical Disciplines ) reveals its daunting scope. For Ritter, the globe had “a life of its own—the winds, waters, and landmasses acting upon one another like animated organs, every region having its own function to perform, thus promoting the well-being of all the rest.” 40 It was probably this aspect of Ritter’s scholarship, stressing the “organic” connectedness of the natural world, which particularly impressed Felix, as he pondered “organic” thematic relations in his own instrumental compositions.
During the spring of 1827 the death of a friend, August Hanstein, shook Felix. He sought refuge in counterpoint, and by the invalid’s bedside conceived an unusual piano fugue in E minor, completed on June 16 along with a second fugue. 41 Later Felix coupled the two with preludes and published them as the Prelude and Fugue, Op. 35 No. 1 (1837) and a contribution to the album Notre temps (1842). These dissonant compositions, featuring subjects rent by angular sevenths and tritones ( ex. 6.4a, b ), were meant to depict his friend’s illness; in the “accelerando” fugue of Op. 35 No. 1, the increasingly agitated counterpoint symbolized for Schubring the “progress of the disease as it gradually destroyed the sufferer.” Climaxing with stentorian octaves, the fugue culminates with a “chorale of release,” 42 a freely composed hymn in E major in which soothing conjunct motion smoothes out the jarring fugal contours. A quiet epilogue, rather like a devotional organ postlude, brings the composition to a hushed close. Schubring took this “specifically church coloring” as evidence of Felix’s fundamental spirituality and noted that his friend habitually began his autographs by inscribing an abbreviated prayer (Lea identified two recurring throughout Felix’s manuscripts: H.D.m ., for Hilf Du mir , “Help me, [O Lord],” possibly from Jeremiah 17:14, and L.e.g.G , for Laß es gelingen, Gott , “Let it succeed, O Lord” 43 ). But this religiosity later exposed Felix to charges of excessive sentimentality; for Charles Rosen, who has regarded Op. 35 No. 1 as “unequivocally a masterpiece,” Felix was essentially the “inventor of religious kitsch in music,” substituting the “emotional shell of religion” for religion itself, 44 and spawning a strain of musical piety that ran through the nineteenth century.
Ex. 6.4a: Mendelssohn, Fugue in E minor, Op. 35 No. 1 (1827)
Contemporaneous with the E-minor fugues is the Piano Sonata in B ♭ major, finished in May 1827, perhaps in response to Beethoven’s death on March 26. When the sonata appeared posthumously in 1868, it received the opus number 106, linking it to Beethoven’s magisterial Op. 106, the Hammerklavier Sonata, with which Felix’s sonata shares its key and several features. The two begin with similar ascending figures and explore the submediant G major in their first movements. Felix’s second movement is a scherzo in B ♭ minor, not unlike the middle of Beethoven’s scherzo, though here again the young composer invokes the elfin imagery of the Octet and eventually disperses his scherzo in another evaporating puff. Considerably less Beethovenian is the Andante in E major, which impresses as an improvisation on the concluding pages of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. But this nocturne-like trance concludes with a dramatic gesture: transitional horn calls that introduce the sprightly, widely spaced Weberesque subject of the finale. Near its midpoint the scherzo suddenly returns, injecting minor-hued shades into an otherwise carefree finale. Unlike the recall of the scherzo in the Octet, though, the technique here flags, and when at the end Felix sums up with a cadential figure, it too sounds somewhat lame, a weak reminiscence of a familiar idea from the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture.
Around the beginning of May 1827 Schlesinger brought out the twelve Gesänge , Op. 8 (the first six had already appeared at the end of 1826). Scholarship has not viewed them as among Felix’s strongest efforts. Admittedly, Op. 8 exudes a certain comfortable domesticity; indeed, several of the texts are by intimates of Felix’s circle, including the poets Karl von Holtei and Friederike Robert, and Droysen, who masqueraded behind the pseudonym of J. N. Voss. Friederike commissioned at least one, No. 6 (the Frühlingslied in Swabian dialect) and specified for its accompaniment a chamber ensemble instead of piano. The song was performed with one flute, one clarinet, two horns, and cello at a Sunday musicale in 1824; later Felix reworked the colorful birdcalls of the flute and clarinet into a piano accompaniment. 45
In a review greeting Op. 8, Marx distributed the songs into groups of courtly love (Minne ), desire (Verlangen ), deep thought (Sinniges ), and contemplation (Anschauung ). 46 Many employ simple strophic settings with repeated music and unobtrusive piano parts. In some, Felix opts for modified-strophic arrangements, with alterations in the vocal line and accompaniment. One example is the operatic Romanze (No. 10), ambiguously labeled aus dem Spanischen , a clue that it was a rejected number from Camacho . 47 Another is the Hexenlied (No. 8), in which Holtei’s image of the Brocken inspired another version of Felix’s supernatural G minor. The most ambitious of the twelve, Hexenlied falls into three sections, of which the first two are identical, while the third takes on its own life and transforms the mischievous staccato work and horn calls of the witches’ dance into blurry piano tremolos and a turn to the major ( ex. 6.5 ).
Other Gesänge aspire toward the artful simplicity of folksong, perhaps none more than the Erntelied (Harvest Song , No. 4), described as an “old church song” and set with austere modal harmonies to convey the grim image of Death the Reaper. Pilgerspruch (Pilgrim’s Saying , No. 5) seeks comfort in the devotional poetry of the seventeenth-century lyricist Paul Fleming. The same verses had inspired Fanny to write a part-song in 1823, 48 and Felix later reused the opening phrase of his Pilgerspruch in the Lied ohne Worte , Op. 38 No. 4 ( ex. 6.6 a, b ). Fanny chided her brother for faulty voice leading in Pilgerspruch , where she uncovered an awkward set of parallel octaves. 49 No innocent bystander, Fanny played a special role in the opus, to which Marx teasingly alluded. No. 12, a setting of Suleika and Hatem’s duet from Goethe’s Westöstlicher Divan , portrayed a “sweet, inward, most pure” form of love, so that one was inclined to label the Lied weiblich (“feminine”), “if there were female composers, and if ladies could absorb such profound music.” Similarly No. 2 (Das Heimweh , “Homesickness”) expressed a certain feminine, languishing quality. As Marx knew, Fanny had composed both, as well as No. 3, Italien , in which she again gave voice to her yearning for southern climes.
Ex. 6.5a: Mendelssohn, Hexenlied , Op. 8 No. 8 (1827)
Ex. 6.5b: Mendelssohn, Hexenlied , Op. 8 No. 8 (1827)
Ex. 6.6a: Mendelssohn, Pilgerspruch , Op. 8 No. 5 (1827)
Ex. 6.6b: Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in A major, Op. 38 No. 4 (1837)
Italien became one of “Felix’s” most popular songs and enjoyed an unusual afterlife. During the 1840s, it inspired A. H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem Sehnsucht , which appeared in 1848 with Fanny’s music. The sensuous quatrains of Italien were drawn from a poem of the Austrian Franz Grillparzer that had appeared in 1820. 50 Here the poet transports us from the onerous world of prose into a magical Italy of poetry, fragrant olives, cypresses, and murmuring seas, all captured by Fanny’s lilting melody and light chordal accompaniment. When, in 1842, Felix visited Buckingham Palace (see p. 439), Queen Victoria chose to sing Italien and executed its climactic high G as skillfully as any dilettante. 51 After admitting Fan
ny’s authorship of the song, Felix persuaded Prince Albert to render the Erntelied , whereupon the composer wove motives from both into an improvisation and thus united the feminine and masculine.
Why did Felix subsume three of Fanny’s songs into his own opus? Postmodern standards might vilify his action as artistic theft. But Fanny’s anonymity reflected her time, when many women writers and artists (e.g., the Brontës, George Sand, and George Eliot) adopted masculine pseudonyms to circumvent societal restrictions; indeed, Felix’s aunt Dorothea had published several articles under Friedrich Schlegel’s name. No less meaningful for Fanny than the gender divide was the class divide, which restricted ladies of leisure from pursuing “public” professions. Perhaps for that reason, when Fanny’s first publication, the Lied Die Schwalbe , appeared in an album in 1825, her name was suppressed. 52 In Fanny’s case, her creative voice occasionally merged with that of Felix, a credible stratagem since her compositional style had developed in tandem with his. A balanced view might see Felix’s decision as a compromise, allowing her a public outlet without violating the family’s privacy. Felix’s mantle and Marx’s veiled comments thus offered a limited means of “legitimizing” Fanny’s authorship without exposing her to public scrutiny in the press, all the while preserving lines between the private and public so scrupulously observed in Restoration Berlin. But even this subterfuge was soon enough exposed; John Thomson, after visiting Berlin in 1829, reported about Op. 8 to English music lovers: “three of the best songs,” he wrote, “are by his sister…. I cannot refrain from mentioning Miss Mendelssohn’s name in connection with these songs, more particularly, when I see so many ladies without one atom of genius coming forward to the public with their musical crudities, and, because these are printed, holding up their heads as if they were finished musicians.” 53
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