V
For much of 1828 Felix’s studies kept him in Berlin. The holidays, though, permitted some travel. Around Pentecost in May he escorted his brother, Paul, and school friends on a walking tour of Eberswalde, a summer resort northeast of Berlin. There they visited modern factories and drank Bierkaltschale with Droysen and Ferdinand David. And in October, between the semesters, Felix traveled to Brandenburg, where he met Justizrat Steinbeck, director of the local Singverein. At the piano Felix rendered Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and at the local churches performed fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier and as many Bach organ works as Felix knew from memory. At a pastor’s behest, Felix even endeavored to explain to some military officers the mysteries of fugues. The pièce de résistance was his improvisation on Christe, Du Lamm Gottes , which, Felix explained to Lea, Fanny could play for her since Fanny already knew it by heart and understood thoroughly his “manner.” 122
Upon returning to Berlin, Felix celebrated Fanny’s and Zelter’s birthdays. For Fanny, he completed Hora est and some piano pieces, including examples of the new Lied ohne Worte . To Klingemann, Fanny divulged that Felix had “lately written several beautiful ones,” though only one from 1828, a Lied in E ♭ major recorded on her birthday, has survived. 123 Its lyrical melody and chordal accompaniment provided a prototype for several piano Lieder that followed; indeed, one passage, marked Grave , impresses as a sketch for the Lied ohne Worte Op. 19b No. 4 ( ex. 6.14a, b , 1829). Felix’s textless songs of 1828 may have been related to a musical game he had played as a child with his sister, in which they devised verses to fit to instrumental pieces. 124 If so, Fanny may have played a role in developing the new genre; the Lieder may have been a “means of communication for Felix and Fanny,” 125 though Charles Gounod’s assertion, that Felix published several of Fanny’s Lieder ohne Worte under his name, has never been proven. 126
On Zelter’s seventieth birthday (December 11, 1828) the Singakademie held a grand celebration. Goethe contributed verses symbolically uniting the arts of architecture, poetry, and singing, but this time the task of composing a festive cantata fell to Zelter’s assistant, C. F. Rungenhagen. 127 Was Felix asked to set the verses but declined? We do not know, though he did contribute a modest part-song for male voices, the Tischlied “Lasset heut am edlen Ort,” hastily set to verses Goethe dispatched to Berlin on December 6. 128
Ex. 6.14a: Mendelssohn, Grave (1828)
Ex. 6.14b: Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in A major, Op. 19b No. 4 (1829)
Hardly less festive were the Christmas celebrations in the Mendelssohn residence. Felix composed another toy symphony (lost), and the circle of friends expanded to greet new arrivals, including the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805–1859), whom Alexander von Humboldt introduced to the family. In Cologne, Dirichlet had studied with G. S. Ohm, formulator of the law of electric resistance (1827). When Dirichlet became enamored of Rebecka, Gans quarreled and fought with him “like a schoolboy” 129 and endeavored to win the prize by reading Plato in Greek with her (their relationship, Fanny noted wryly, remained Platonic). Dirichlet joined the faculty of the university in 1831, the year of his engagement to Rebecka. They married the next year and lived in Berlin until 1855, when he filled a vacancy at the University of Göttingen caused by the death of the century’s leading mathematician, Gauss. 130
In October another suitor, Wilhelm Hensel, arrived after five years in Italy. Since he had not been allowed to correspond with Fanny, they had grown apart. The old circle of friends had changed (according to Sebastian Hensel; the new circle practiced a “coterie-slang not intelligible to the uninitiated”); 131 Fanny had developed an intimate psychological dependence on Felix, through whom she sublimated her musical needs, arousing Wilhelm’s jealousy; and the family was pulled toward politically liberal views through their friendship with Gans. Meanwhile, Wilhelm had become more conservative and expressed royalist leanings. Nevertheless, Fanny and Wilhelm rekindled their relationship; on Christmas Eve, he gave her a miniature Florentine pocket album in the shape of a heart, with delicately scalloped, gilded pages, in which he inscribed, “This little book is very like the heart,/You write in it joy or sorrow.” 132 Here, through August 1833, Fanny recorded musical sketches, while her fiancé and, later, husband entered poems and drawings around events in the couple’s lives, including Fanny’s pregnancy and the birth of their son Sebastian in 1830, and the tragic delivery of a stillborn daughter in 1832.
From Italy Hensel had brought his imposing canvas Christ and the Samaritan Woman by the Well and the copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration . Viewing the paintings at the Academy of Art, the king noted that the artist had “not used his time in Rome unproductively.” 133 In January 1829 the academy nominated Hensel for membership, clearing the way for his appointment as court painter. His improving prospects overcame Lea’s lingering reservations, and on January 22 Fanny and Wilhelm were engaged. In a poem for the occasion, Hensel contrasted the cold Berlin winter with the rejuvenating springtime within his breast. 134 On February 2 the lovers resumed corresponding, and the next day they were alone together for the first time. 135 Through Wilhelm’s servant, they exchanged daily letters. Twenty-one have survived (February–October 1829), including thirteen by Fanny available to Sebastian but suppressed in Die Familie Mendelssohn , where he alluded only to their “truly pathetic, heart-moving beauty.” 136 With filial devotion Sebastian strove to preserve the harmonious image of his parents’ relationship; still, reading between the lines of his account suggests the engagement was anything but smooth. Thus, Fanny’s “constant task” was “to shape two natures into one harmonious integrity.” 137 Indeed, the letters, published only in 1995, 138 reveal a troubled engagement, as do several elliptical entries in Fanny’s diary. In January, Fanny took exception to one of Wilhelm’s drawings of her; on February 4 there was controversy about one of his letters; on February 17 he had a fit of jealousy; and on March 1 there was a dramatic scene with Lea about the wedding. Only on March 19 did Fanny feel “truly engaged”; yet, at the end of September, just days before the wedding, she noted another Streit . Through all this, Wilhelm impresses as an emotionally distraught, insecure man of thirty-five; Fanny, at twenty-three, as a woman bent on mollifying her fiancé, while becoming increasingly anxious herself about Felix’s impending departure for England.
VI
The early weeks of the engagement coincided with the intensifying rehearsals of the St. Matthew Passion, in which Fanny was intimately involved, even though her role was subordinate: while Felix conducted Bach’s masterpiece before the social elite of Berlin, Fanny sang as an alto in the chorus, reinforcing the gender divide between public and private. Eyewitness accounts of Eduard and Therese Devrient, Marx, Fanny, Schubring, and Zelter, among others, document the preparations for the event, Felix’s two performances in March, and their enthusiastic reception. 139 But the primary sources contain inconsistencies, and the significance of the revival—the prime mover in the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Bach—has provoked no little controversy.
The revival began as a private initiative at the Mendelssohn residence, where Felix assembled a small chorus of friends to rehearse portions of the Passion. Schubring informs us that the devotees numbered only about sixteen, including the Devrients, Schubring, his theology classmate E. F. A. Bauer, and the painter and art historian Franz Bugler. At this stage Felix merely intended to explore the Passion to disprove Schubring’s skeptical assertion that Bach’s music offered only a “dry arithmetical sum.” 140 But another incentive may have been Marx’s announcement in April 1828 of Schlesinger’s decision to publish the work. Appearing in 1830, Marx’s piano-vocal score of the Passion was an important by-product of Felix’s performances; indeed, Marx used his journal to wage a “press campaign” for the work and issued a stream of reports before and after the performances in March and April 1829. 141
Exactly when the rehearsals at Leipzigerstrasse No. 3 began remains unclear. Eduard Devrient claims they
were underway by the winter of 1827, while his wife Therese dates the first meetings from October 1828. 142 Initially, like Zelter, Felix had no thought of a public revival; rather, the rehearsals were intended for the private edification of his circle. To venture before the public was to raise formidable obstacles: largely ignorant of Bach’s music, Berlin audiences would not tolerate the complexities of the Passion, and its unusual scoring—requiring two orchestras and two choruses—offered another hindrance. But as the rehearsals advanced, a new musical world opened to Felix. In particular, the “impersonation of the several characters of the Gospel by different voices” impressed Eduard Devrient as the “pith of the work,” a practice “long forgotten” in old church music. 143 Devrient yearned to sing the role of Christ and to realize through performance the dramatic continuity of the Passion.
The rest of Devrient’s entertaining account is well known: how, one day in January 1829, he roused Felix from his slumber to convince him to perform the work, how the two set off to Zelter, how Zelter demurred, comparing the venture to the brazen child’s play of two “snot-nosed brats” (Rotznasen ), how Devrient held firm and overcame Zelter’s resistance, and how the two—dressed in a Passionsuniform of blue coats, white waistcoats, black neckties and trousers, and yellow leather gloves—enlisted the vocal soloists from the Royal opera and secured the approval of the Singakademie management. Finally, Felix captured the significance of the undertaking with the observation, “And to think that it has to be an actor and a young Jew who return to the people the greatest Christian music!” 144
Other documents encourage us to refine Devrient’s account. First, the issue of the performance was raised not in January but a few weeks earlier: on December 13 Felix and Eduard petitioned the Singakademie to use the hall for the performance, which was granted in exchange for a fee of fifty thalers. 145 Around this time, the two friends must have come to terms with Zelter, for on December 27 Fanny was able to report to Klingemann about another “special” condition not mentioned by Devrient: “[Felix] has many different projects before him, and is arranging for the Academy Handel’s cantata Acis and Galatea , in return for which the Academy will sing for him and Devrient the Passion, to be performed during the winter for a charitable cause….” 146 Felix sent his arrangement to Zelter on January 8 and promised to begin work on another one, of a Handel Te Deum . 147
We can identify three other concurrent “projects.” From Fanny’s diary, we know Felix was absorbed in a “heavenly symphony”; indeed, on January 3, Fanny recorded in her heart-shaped diary a few bars from the finale of the Reformation Symphony, proving her brother was already pondering that composition early in 1829. 148 Then, at the end of the month, he dated the autograph of the Andante con variazioni for cello and piano, 149 published in 1830 as the Variations concertantes Op. 17. Built upon a graceful D-major theme, the work comprises eight variations, of which the first six adhere closely to the theme. But in the turbulent seventh variation in D minor, the piano part erupts in a martellato octave passage that disrupts the symmetry of the theme. In the final variation, the theme returns, only to undergo expansion in a free, stretto-like coda before the composition comes to a tranquil close. Dedicated to the composer’s brother, the variations reveal Paul to have been an amateur cellist of considerable ability.
Felix’s third project from this period proved more burdensome: on February 23 he completed a recitative and aria for soprano and orchestra, “respectfully dedicated” to Anna Milder-Hauptmann—one might speculate, in exchange for her agreement to sing one of the soprano roles in the Passion. Only a few pages of the score survive, revealing a fairly conventional recitative with agitated string tremolos (Tutto è silenzio ), in which we learn that the unidentified character has been accused of murdering her husband, and the beginning of a soothing Handelian aria (Dei clementi , “Merciful gods”). 150 In April, after Felix departed for England, Fanny rehearsed this piece with the prima donna, who insisted Fanny phrase the vocal part, a request she considered ridiculous but agreed to oblige, as she realized how “thoroughly sick” Felix had become of the composition. 151
On February 2 choral rehearsals of the Passion began in the Singakademie, one day before Felix’s twentieth birthday, when wind musicians serenaded him with arrangements of the Doberan Harmoniemusik and Overture to Camacho . Joining the celebration, Ludwig Robert contributed a poem inspired by the piano fugue for Hanstein (see p. 172), and Wilhelm gave Felix Jean Paul’s serendipitous novel of adolescent awakening, Flegeljahre (Fledgling Years ; 152 two years later the novel’s twins, Walt and Vult, would inspire Robert Schumann to compose the piano cycle Papillons ). As the rehearsals continued, additional members of the Singakademie augmented the chorus. Felix rehearsed from the piano until the orchestra joined the chorus on March 6. The dress rehearsal was held on March 10, and the following evening he presented Bach’s masterpiece publicly for the first time in one hundred years.
The soloists were the sopranos Anna Milder-Hauptmann and seventeen-year-old Pauline von Schätzel, alto Auguste Türrschmidt, tenors Heinrich Stümer (Evangelist) and Carl Adam Bader (Peter), baritone Eduard Devrient (Christ), and basses J. E. Busolt (High Priest and Governor) and Weppler (Judas). The chorus was 158 strong (47 sopranos, 36 altos, 34 tenors, and 41 basses), nowhere near the 300 to 400 mentioned in Devrient’s account. 153 Most of the orchestral personnel were amateurs from the Philharmonische Gesellschaft founded by Eduard Rietz in 1826 (the first chairs of the strings and the winds were members of the royal Kapelle). Using a baton, Felix conducted from a piano placed diagonally on the stage, with the first chorus behind and second chorus and orchestra before him. According to Devrient, instead of continually beating time, Felix occasionally lowered his baton, so as to “influence without obtruding himself.” 154 Therese Devrient reported that the familiar Protestant chorales were sung a cappella , though Marx, contradicting her claim, maintained the orchestra accompanied all the chorales except Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden . 155
By the day of the concert the tickets were oversubscribed, necessitating the turning away of a thousand Berliners. Attending were the king and his retinue, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Rahel von Varnhagen, Spontini, and Zelter, who, after participating in the early rehearsals, took his place with “exemplary resignation” in the audience. 156 There a visiting Italian violinist may have joined him. Nicolò Paganini had arrived early in March and played in Berlin eleven times to rave reviews. After hearing his first concert, Fanny confided “he had the look of an insane murderer and the gesticulations of a monkey.” 157 Only months before, Paganini had undergone a painful operation to remove his teeth, after which his countenance assumed a macabre, sunken quality. The Mendelssohns received the edentulous musician on March 12, when Wilhelm drew his portrait. 158 His acrobatic virtuosity—playing the violin on one string or upside down, and executing unfathomable trills and multiple stops—must have been seen as a complete contrast to the spiritual solemnity of the St. Matthew Passion, a stark juxtaposition of the new and old, the secular and religious sublime.
To render Bach’s colossal work accessible to Berlin audiences—there was no question of performing it in toto—Felix made cuts and revisions, all entered into his score. The excisions included ten arias, four recitatives, and six chorales. 159 The question of how Felix deleted material has recently sparked controversy. In 1993 Michael Marissen proposed that the cuts partly reflected Felix’s desire to de-emphasize anti-Semitic passages in the text, 160 but in 2000 Jeffrey Sposato drew another conclusion. Felix acted “as he perceived any other Lutheran conductor would,” for he “must have been aware that the idea of a Mendelssohn bringing forth this ‘greatest Christian musical work’ would be viewed with skepticism and subjected to microscopic scrutiny.” 161 Sposato argued that many cuts were intended to remove passages deemed textually or musically redundant; in addition, Felix’s abridged version won wide acceptance in subsequent performances of the Passion throughout Germany.
His treat
ment of the chorale O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden , occurring no fewer than six times in the Passion, seems to support Sposato’s conclusions. In Part 1 Bach juxtaposed two statements of the melody (No. 21, “Erkenne mich, mein Hüter” in E major and No. 23, “Ich will hier bei dir stehen” in E ♭ ), separating them only by a brief recitative. In Part 2 the chorale recurred in No. 53, “Befiehl du deine Wege,” D major; in No. 63, where two verses, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” and “O Haupt zu Spott gebunden” are sung in F major; and finally in No. 72, “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden” in A minor, sung after Jesus expires on the Cross. Of the six Felix retained only the first, fourth, and sixth, thereby removing three repetitions, though also disturbing Bach’s use of the chorale as a unifying device, with its chromatic tonal descent (E major, E ♭ major, and D major) giving way to an ascending trajectory (F major and A minor). Of course, this particular chorale was well known to Berliners; Graun had featured it in his Passion cantata Der Tod Jesu , frequently performed by Zelter on Good Friday. Felix was cognizant of the chorale’s popularity, for he took the trouble to alter the text of “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” to make it conform to the Berlin version. 162 Thus, in the third phrase, the reference to Christ’s “adorned” (gezieret ) head was modified to “crowned” (gekrönet ), and in the fourth “mocked” (verhöhnet ) was exchanged for “insulted” (schimpfieret ).
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 28
