Mendelssohn: A Life in Music
Page 29
The purpose of these subtle changes seems clear enough: Berliners were encouraged to discover in Bach’s cerebral masterpiece roots of their own spiritual experiences as German Protestants. The Singakademie now became a kind of musical sanctuary, as Bach’s score swept over the audience like a divine revelation. As conductor, Felix symbolically presided over the “congregation” and reaffirmed his ties to the leading Prussian theologian present at the performance—Schleiermacher. In 1830 Felix would disclose he had become a follower (Anhänger ) of Schleiermacher, 163 author of the Der Christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith , 1821–1822). Here Schleiermacher expounded his concept of Gemeindetheologie , which emphasized the collective fellowship of the congregation over the spirituality of the individual. Felix would have attended the theologian’s sermons in Trinity Church, and at the university would have had personal contact with him as well.
The reception accorded the Passion was nothing short of extraordinary. The Bachian mysteries of Zelter’s inner circle were now publicly revealed, in Ludwig Rellstab’s words, as the “most perfect creation of German art.” 164 Despite Spontini’s machinations, the crown prince authorized a second performance on Bach’s birthday, March 21, and after Felix had left for England, Zelter led a third performance on Good Friday, April 17, instead of Der Tod Jesu . The Bach Revival erupted in full force throughout Germany, where the St. Matthew Passion became the emblem of the ideal Protestant artwork. But in time Felix’s triumph was tarnished by voices seeking to minimize his contribution. In 1883 Eduard Grell, a Zelter pupil who had become the Singakademie director in 1853, claimed in a private letter that if someone had “excavated” the Passion, that individual was Zelter. Then, in 1929, on the bicentenary of the composition, Georg Schünemann put forward a similar view and designated Zelter, not the “genial” twenty-year-old, as the “leading head” of the revival, a position Schünemann disputed in print with the musicologist Friedrich Smend. 165 And, of course, the Nazi regime would summarily deny the signal contribution of the Neuchrist Felix, who had restored Bach’s music only eventually to fall victim himself to anti-Semitism.
The revival of the St. Matthew Passion was the culminating event of Felix’s youth. Through the public success he symbolically achieved full assimilation into Prussian culture and thus confirmed his Christian faith through Bach’s ineluctable Passion, a work that had frustrated Zelter’s timid efforts at rediscovery. This epoch-making composition had indeed risen phoenixlike from the ashes, and Fanny and Felix had lived to see great things. Once again Felix had come before the public eye—for the moment, in triumph. Now, at age twenty, the mature composer prepared to visit England in order to escape the stultifying atmosphere of Berlin, to experience a different musical culture, and to establish an international career.
Part II
The Road to Damascus
Chapter 7
1829
Amateur Gentleman
This prophet, too, is not honored in his own country; he must go elsewhere. 1
—Ignaz Moscheles
The idea of sending Felix abroad on an extended journey—the “grand tour” of European gentlemen—was Abraham’s. Never fully comfortable with his family’s position as integrated Berliners, he harbored a desire that Felix would escape to launch a career elsewhere. Though Abraham preferred cosmopolitan Paris, Felix had already formed in 1825 a decidedly contrary view. Abraham’s solution was to subsidize three years of travel to allow Felix to examine firsthand several European musical centers. And so, between 1829 and 1832 Felix visited England, Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France; his experiences, richly documented in letters, diaries, and drawings, and transformed into several major compositions, ultimately reinforced his identity as a German musician.
His declared purpose was “not to appear in public, but … to consolidate my own taste.” 2 For advice Abraham turned to Moscheles, who recommended that the young “genius” be introduced “to the great London world” 3 around Easter, in the midst of the concert season. Largely on this counsel, Felix planned to travel to London in April, return to Berlin for Fanny’s wedding, and proceed to Munich, Vienna, and Rome. Zelter supported the leave-taking of the parental nest; 4 still, the old musician tried unsuccessfully to delay the journey until after the third performance of the St. Matthew Passion, scheduled for Good Friday, April 17. 5
Late March and early April were fraught with preparations for the departure. But Felix found time to play the organs at the Dreifaltigskeit (Trinity), Garnison (Garrison), and parish churches—to her diary Fanny confided that nothing was more fearful than Felix’s rendering of the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion. 6 There were conversations with Heinrich Heine, whom she found affected (still, “though for ten times you may be inclined to despise him, the eleventh time you cannot help confessing that he is a poet, a true poet!” 7 ) and Paganini, for whom Fanny played for hours. The family admired a new, three-quarter portrait by Wilhelm Hensel of Felix seated on a garden bench before lilac bushes, with his fingers expressively arched, his face turned, lost in thought. 8 Droysen captured the imminent departure in the short poem Wartend (Expecting ), set by Felix as a strophic Romanze and later incorporated into his second volume of songs as Op. 9 No. 3. The first verse reads: “She bore a falcon on her hand, and sent him across the ocean. Come soon, come soon!” In the second, the falcon returns with a traveler who expresses his pleasures and woes on a Waldhorn ; in the third, the young maiden awakens from her morning dream. Cast in a stark B minor, Felix’s setting approaches folksong, underscoring his intention, announced to Klingemann, to “rake together” Scottish folksongs during his journey. 9 Thus, there are hollow, open-fifth sonorities, a surprise pianissimo ending in B major, and high-pitched fanfares, like those in the Hebrides Overture, which Felix would conceive in August 1829.
Early on April 10, Felix departed with Abraham and Rebecka for Hamburg, where Salomon Heine regaled the trio with a formal dinner. Felix visited the violinist Leopold Lindenau and, at the local Singverein, heard some choral works of Spohr that did not please. (“They hang Jews for poisoning fountains,” he commented mordantly, “but music is just as valuable as a fountain, I hope, and therefore Spohr will have to die.” 10 ) At the Michaeliskirche, not far from his birthplace, he improvised on the organ. Then, after receiving from Berlin his copy of Jean Paul Richter’s Flegeljahre , he embarked on the steam packet Attwood on April 18.
Ironically enough, the vessel was named after a musician Felix would soon meet, Thomas Attwood, 11 Mozart’s celebrated English pupil. But this coincidence failed to secure a prosperous voyage; adversely affecting the three-day crossing were contrary winds, impenetrable fog, and a breakdown of the engine. On Easter morning a seasick Felix was experiencing fainting spells, and when, on the evening of April 20, the Attwood anchored at the mouth of the Thames in order to avoid collisions, he cursed his own Meeresstille . 12 Through the moonlight he could make out hundreds of “becalmed” vessels. The following day the Attwood steamed up the Thames, and for the first time he beheld “the awful mass of London,” 13 a sprawling metropolis of over one million.
I
When Felix reached the Customs House at noon, Klingemann took him to a coffee house where the two perused the Times . Rossini’s Otello with the celebrated Spanish mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran was announced for the evening, and the exhausted Felix borrowed Klingemann’s stockings and donned a black cravat so that he could appear in genteel society. In 1829 Italian opera in London was the monopoly of the King’s Theatre (near the bottom of the Haymarket), which depended upon a retinue of highly compensated opera stars and leasing boxes to an exclusive audience. Felix secured a seat in the pit, apart from the “six tiers of boxes with crimson curtains, out of which peep the ladies, bedecked with great white feathers, chains, jewels of all kinds.” Four years before, he had heard the Italian soprano Giuditta Pasta play Desdemona in Paris, and now he found the talented Malibran’s singing, if full of “clever embellishments of her own
invention,” occasionally hyperbolic and bordering on the “ridiculous and disagreeable.” Between the acts was a vacuous divertissement , with “gymnastics and absurdities just as with us,” so that only after midnight was Malibran-Desdemona dispatched, “panting and screaming disagreeably.” 14 When the opera then yielded to a ballet (appropriately enough, La Sonnambule ), the weary Felix retired to his lodgings.
Moscheles had secured rooms for his young friend at 103 Great Portland Street, the residence of Friedrich Heinke, a German ironmonger in the fashionable West End. Here, in sitting rooms on the second floor, Felix had the use of two grand pianos (one from the firm of Muzio Clementi) and could practice as well on a “dumb” keyboard. 15 His only complaint was the expense; for half the cost, rooms were available on the third floor, but Moscheles and Klingemann insisted he remain on the second, to accommodate the social calls he would doubtless receive. Other adjustments had to be made: Felix’s visiting cards lacked the English “Mr.,” and Moscheles recommended new cards be engraved, lest Felix appear unmodisch whenever he offered his card to a duke or minister. 16
Felix’s London circle included several transplanted Germans. In addition to Klingemann, Moscheles and his wife, Charlotte, with whom Felix went riding in Hyde Park, there was Neukomm, in whose music Moscheles had found a “pitiful lack of Attic salt.” 17 Felix also renewed his friendship with Wilhelm Horn, son of a German physician, and Adolphe d’Eichthal, son of a wealthy Parisian banker, whose Jewish family had converted to Catholicism in 1817 (Sebastian Hensel deleted references to the d’Eichthals in Die Familie Mendelssohn , owing to the “excesses” of Adolphe’s brother Gustave, a disciple of the positivist Auguste Comte, who later joined the radical Saint-Simonians in Paris). And finally, there were two Germans who held appointments at the new University of London: a new acquaintance, Ludwig von Mühlenfels (1798–1861), professor of German and Nordic literature, who had fled Prussia owing to his activities in the student movement; 18 and a Berlin friend, the brilliant Sanskrit scholar Friedrich Rosen (1805–1837), who at twenty-two had become a professor of Oriental literature.
Assisted by Moscheles, Felix easily mingled with English musicians: the music publisher Vincent Novello and his daughter, the soprano Clara; the glee composer William Horsley; the critic and Beethoven devotee T. M. Alsager; 19 the impresario William Ayrton, former manager of the King’s Theatre and editor of the musical periodical The Harmonicon , founded in 1823; and Sir George Smart. The two leading English pianists, Charles Neate and Cipriani Potter, had met Beethoven in Vienna in 1815 and 1818. In London they often concertized with the Cramer brothers, the violinist Franz, concertmaster of the Philharmonic, and the pianist-composer Johann Baptist, who, Felix reported, usually appeared inebriated. When, during a visit to 103 Great Portland Street, Johann Baptist began to improvise on the piano, Felix recorded his own perfect pitch by charting Cramer’s perambulating modulations in a letter to Berlin. 20 Eager to meet Muzio Clementi, Felix had come to London with a letter from Clementi’s former pupil Ludwig Berger. But by 1829 the septuagenarian had retired and moved to central England, and Felix contented himself with playing instruments from the virtuoso’s firm.
An especially warm friendship developed between Felix and Thomas Attwood (1765–1838). Sent in 1785 by the Prince of Wales to Vienna, Attwood had studied for a year and a half with Mozart; Attwood’s exercises, blending species counterpoint and “free” composition, form an invaluable record of Mozart’s didactic method. In 1796 Attwood was appointed organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and through him Felix gained access to its organ and impressed the Englishman with improvisations and performances of Bach. On June 2 Felix witnessed an imposing spectacle in the cathedral: on an immense scaffold erected beneath the dome, several thousand orphans sang Psalm 100 under Attwood’s direction. But St. Paul’s was also the site of musical controversy. On May 14, anniversary of the charitable institution for the Sons of the Clergy, anthems by Boyce, Handel, and Attwood, and Henry Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate in D were performed. Felix attended with the Belgian critic F.-J. Fétis, editor of the Revue musicale , who had offered to arrange a Parisian performance of the Symphony Op. 11. In a letter dispatched to Paris on June 5 and translated in the Atlas on July 12, Fétis reproved Purcell’s composition for its “long succession of insignificant phrases, ill-connected modulations, and incorrect, albeit pretending, harmonies,” 21 and mischievously added that “a young and highly distinguished German composer … received precisely the same impressions” and was so nonplused by the Purcell that he left before the Jubilate . A minor controversy now erupted in the press, with one irate English music lover dubbing Felix the “unhappy [infelix ] Mendelssohn” and treating him with “that kind of disdain which liberal critics seldom feel, and discreet people never express.” Appalled that his private comments were bruited about, Felix drafted a reply, published in German in Marx’s journal, 22 and in English (presumably with Klingemann’s assistance) in the Britannia and Harmonicon . 23 The Britannia issued an apology, but the rift with Fétis was never healed.
Moscheles did all he could to facilitate Felix’s entrance into English musical society. Thus, the choice of Felix’s lodgings on Great Portland Street was not arbitrary; Sir George Smart lived on the same street, and nearby were the Hanover Square and Argyll Rooms, the preferred venues for concerts. During the 1820s the character of English concert life changed, as the tastes of the upper middle class impinged more and more on the musical domain of the aristocracy. Two institutions which Felix observed firsthand show this development compellingly. The Ancient Concerts, founded by peers in the eighteenth century, were held at Hanover Square Rooms, where Haydn’s London Symphonies had been premiered during the 1790s. Directed by aristocratic amateurs, the Ancient Concerts programmed music at least twenty years old and favored works of Handel. In contrast, the Argyll Rooms, on Regent Street near Oxford Circus, became the venue of the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1813 and emerging a few years later as a professional orchestra devoted to modern music, including Beethoven’s symphonies. Here Spohr led the orchestra in 1820 with a baton, challenging the English custom of dual directorship, a “conductor” at the piano and the first violinist as a “leader.” Here Smart gave the English premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1825, albeit with mixed results (William Ayrton, for one, observed that Beethoven had “drawn out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument”). 24 Here, finally, Carl Maria von Weber conducted the ensemble only ten days before his death in 1826.
Each year the Philharmonic performed eight concerts between February and June, timed to coincide with the annual calendar of “high society.” Around Christmas, before Parliament convened, the nobility and gentry began to arrive in sumptuous West End residences from their country estates. After the Easter recess, the season commenced in earnest, “a three-month whirlwind of parties, balls, and sporting events,” 25 the chief purpose of which was to marry off eligible young ladies. The height of the concert season fell in May, June, and July, with the continuation of subscription concerts, a rash of “benefit” concerts for individual performers, Italian opera at the King’s Theatre, and “English opera” (usually severely truncated reworkings of continental operas) at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Then, in August, Parliament adjourned, and the elite returned to the country to pursue their favorite avocations—grouse, partridge, pheasant, and fox hunting—before the cycle renewed itself.
True to his declared aim, Felix became thoroughly acquainted with English musical institutions and was most partial to the Philharmonic Concerts, which offered a mixture of new and recent orchestral, chamber, and solo works. Programs always fell into two “acts,” often in a nearly symmetrical pattern: a symphony, aria, chamber work, vocal ensemble, and overture for the first, and a symphony, vocal work, concerto, aria, and overture for the second. 26 Though Felix was not uncritical of the organization—Smart, Felix noted, simply sat at the piano and turned pages—he discovered a positive artistic
environment in the Argyll Rooms. The audience, drawn largely from a newly affluent upper middle class distinct from the nobility, easily related to Felix, who performed without compensation and thus observed the code of the amateur, was from a prosperous but not noble German family and, of course, was a musical talent of the first magnitude.
Not surprisingly, Felix abstained from public appearances until the Philharmonic performed one of his compositions. Instead, he participated in private gatherings and, on May 8, joined the orchestra at King’s Theatre as a violinist or violist for Moscheles’s “morning concert,” which featured appearances by Malibran and the German soprano Henriette Sontag. Near the end of April, the secretary of the Philharmonic, William Watts, asked to examine Felix’s compositions, and he submitted his three concert overtures (Opp. 21, 27, and 101) and First Symphony. But confusion about Felix’s status delayed the decision, for Smart had told the directors that Felix was a “gentleman,” not a “professor.” 27 And the selection of his debut composition proved somewhat problematic: Calm Sea was ruled out because the three-stringed instrument of the principal contrabassist, Dragonetti, could not accommodate the low F# of the opening motive. 28 The final choice was the First Symphony. On May 25, at the seventh concert, the “conductor” J. B. Cramer escorted Felix “like a young lady” to the piano in the Argyll Rooms. From there he directed with a new baton, still such a novelty that its English maker had mistaken Felix for an alderman and insisted on “decorating it with a crown.” 29 The occasion marked one of Felix’s first public appearances with a baton; Schubring later reminisced that Felix “had hitherto modestly stated his opinion, from the piano or the desk of the tenor [i.e., viola].” 30