According to Sir George Smart, “not much notice” was taken of the symphony, 31 though Felix proudly reported that the middle movements were encored. But the performance was significant for another reason. Felix had determined that the minuet was a dispensable “pleonasm,” and in its place he substituted an arrangement of the scherzo from the Octet, thereby injecting some whimsy into the dramatic C-minor composition 32 (curiously, when in 1834 Felix published the parts of the symphony in Germany, he reverted to the minuet). At the concert the movement, announced as an “intermezzo,” was performed “by only a limited number of violins, tenors, and basses, … and all the wind instruments,” 33 reinforcing its elfinlike character. In addition, Felix compressed the second half of the scherzo and retouched the scoring by adding delicate intrusions of winds and soft trumpet fanfares, and giving the final evanescent arpeggiation to the flute, to produce a “silly” but novel effect. The next day Felix presented the autograph of the symphony with a dedicatory letter in French to the Society, 34 and on June 10, at a concert of the flutist Charles Nicholson, the work received its second English performance.
Felix participated in four other public concerts. On May 30, he offered Weber’s Konzertstück , performed from “recollection” (i.e., memory), 35 and on June 15, his own Variations Op. 17 with the cellist Robert Lindley. Felix’s final appearances were considerably more elaborate affairs. For the benefit concert of the flutist Louis Drouet, which fell on Midsummer Day (June 24), Felix gave the English premieres of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. To the audience’s astonishment, he played the concerto from memory on an instrument from the London factory of Sébastien Erard, whom Felix compared to a sorrowful parody of Goethe’s Werther. 36 The overture posed new challenges: there were difficulties in securing a bass-horn player; and in the first measure the two flutes were not together, causing the audience to chuckle. At the “false” fortissimo ending in E major, the audience began to applaud, only to be surprised by the puckish epilogue of the work. At the end, though, there was sufficient clamor for the encore of the overture, through which the appreciative audience maintained a mouselike silence. 37
Felix’s final appearance occurred on July 13, at a benefit concert of Henriette Sontag for victims of flooding in Silesia. Abraham had received news from Nathan Mendelssohn about the widespread suffering, and Felix now resolved to promote a musical relief effort. Despite the lateness of the season, he was able to secure the Argyll Rooms gratis and organize a concert monstre 38 lasting over four hours, featuring Sontag, who sang six times, Malibran, Drouet, Moscheles, and himself, and raising some three hundred guineas. Felix and Moscheles performed the Concerto for two pianos in E, fitted with a new cadenza, 39 and once again Felix directed the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. A reviewer in the Harmonicon found the overture “sparkling with genius and rich in effect; some parts playful and sylph-like, others lofty and solid; the whole indicating that the musician has studied the poet, has entered into his thoughts, and even caught some of his imagination.” 40
Felix’s success generated new commissions, though most remained unfulfilled. Covent Garden suggested at least two opera libretti, while Drury Lane offered him three hundred guineas to set a book by James Robinson Planché (1796–1880), 41 librettist of Weber’s last opera, Oberon , which had premiered at Covent Garden in April 1826. Nothing came of the proposals or of a plan to invite Felix to conduct his choral music at the Birmingham Musical Festival of 1829. But most unusual of all was a commission in June to compose an anthem jointly commemorating the abolition of slavery in Ceylon and birthday of George IV. Sir Alexander Johnston, the former governor of the island, gave Felix some verses by the Scotsman Allan Cunningham, among which we read: “A two-fold joy is ours—this morn,/Our king, our freedom, both were born;/Great George, our isle’s and ocean’s lord,/A conqueror more with mind than sword.” 42 Felix viewed the task as something of a joke and signed himself “Composer to the Island of Ceylon.” No copy of the music has survived, although it was published in 1836 by the London firm of Paine & Hopkins and clearly pleased Johnston, who went so far as to claim, “This air will have more effect in India in the cause of humanity than all the philanthropic measures which have been adopted in different parts of Europe in favor of slaves.” 43
From Berlin Abraham grew concerned that his son appeared in the English newspapers not as Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but Mendelssohn. On July 8 the father chided Felix that a “Christian Mendelssohn is as impossible as a Jewish Confucius.” 44 The same day Fanny wrote to Felix about their father’s distress, even though she approved of his “intention to lay aside some day this name that we all dislike.” 45 In 1955 and 1963, Eric Werner interpreted Felix’s behavior as an “open contradiction to his father’s wishes,” and possibly an “act of hostility against his uncle Bartholdy.” 46 But Jeffrey Sposato’s reexamination of the evidence casts doubt on Werner’s conclusions. Felix received Abraham’s letter on July 14, after the final concert appearance at the Sontag benefit of July 13. In a reply of July 16 he explained that he had remonstrated with the English editors, but that they wished to underscore his relation to his grandfather. 47 Felix never dropped the surname Bartholdy, and, heeding his father’s wishes, he continued to sign himself formally Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
II
When not appearing at concerts, Felix mixed in high society and attended fashionable balls (at one he encountered the prime minister, Wellington, and secretary of home affairs, Peel). With Lord Sandon, former Lord of the Admiralty, he visited the House of Commons, where he heard the Irish orator Daniel O’Connell, whose election to Parliament had precipitated a crisis that led to the Catholic Emancipation Act. 48 There were other adventures as well. At the Royal Music Library (then still housed in one of the royal residences) Felix pored over Handel’s autographs, and through some musicological sleuthing discovered the composer’s habit of reusing material, detailed in a report to Zelter. 49 Felix played the art connoisseur, admiring paintings of van Eyck, Titian, and Correggio owned by the Duke of Devonshire, and the sculpture gallery of the Marquis of Lansdowne. But at the Royal Academy of Art exhibition at Somerset House, he reacted viscerally to canvases of Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie, and William Turner, and dismissed Turner’s blurry art as “the most hideous smearing” (greulichste Schmierereien ). 50 Felix himself was the subject of a portrait taken during his sojourn and completed in 1830 by the English miniaturist James Warren Childe, which shows the twenty-year-old elegantly attired, with top hat in hand and wearing a cravat and gold watch chain, a somewhat dandified English gentleman. 51 Felix’s love of Shakespeare inevitably drew him to the theater, but he found performances corrupted by the “insertion of ridiculously bad arias and songs”; 52 one could make a tragedy of all the omissions from the plays, and the celebrated Kemble, who played Hamlet at Covent Garden with one yellow and one black leg “to indicate madness,” behaved more like a “John Bull Oxford student” than a tragic Danish prince. 53
As a sightseer Felix was awestruck by the Docks, which dwarfed the “mere pond” 54 of the Hamburg harbor. No less impressive was the subaqueous excavation undertaken in 1824 by Marc Isambard Brunel, the Rotherhithe-to-Wapping Tunnel under the Thames. In 1828 the project was halted about midway when the shaft flooded, drowning several workers (construction resumed in 1835, and the tunnel eventually opened in 1843). Probably through a letter from Alexander von Humboldt, who had visited Brunel in 1827, Felix met the French engineer and on June 13 toured the tunnel with his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who later built the Great Western Railway. 55
Felix’s colorful letters describe one other unusual London introduction. In May he called at the office of J. C. Spurzheim (1776–1832), founder of phrenology and author of Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (1817). When the Edinburgh Review pronounced his research “thorough quackery,” Spurzheim moved to Edinburgh to counter his critics. There, in 1828, Moscheles encountered hi
m and, without revealing his identity, asked for a reading of his skull. Spurzheim noted a “disposition for fine art,” and after Moscheles disclosed his name, continued with a disquisition about cranial bumps. 56 Presumably Moscheles encouraged Felix to visit the doctor’s London office, where, on May 8, a cast of Felix’s skull was made. But he was unconvinced by the scientific rigor of the discipline and doubted whether the genius of a composer such as Gluck could be precisely located, even though the “difference between Gluck’s brow and that of a parricide” was “probably beyond all doubt.” Palpation of Felix’s cranium revealed he was “rather greedy, loved order and small children, and liked to flirt—but music was supposedly the predominant characteristic.” 57
III
Implausibly enough, given his full social calendar, Felix found time for creative work. First, he acquainted Moscheles and Klingemann with recent compositions, among them a new cantata in A minor, Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten (based on the seventeenth-century chorale by Georg Neumark), which Klingemann found pale and almost sentimental. 58 No dated autograph survives, but the cantata presumably stems from the early months of 1829; in July, Felix gave a manuscript copy to Charles Neate. 59 Its four movements include a homophonic setting of the chorale; a polyphonic chorus with the melody placed as a cantusfirmus in the bass; a freely composed Andante for soprano solo (which Fanny found “overly simple,” even “childish”); 60 and a final statement of the chorale by the chorus in unison, accompanied by dissonant figuration in the strings. The cantata is unabashedly Bachian, though when it was composed, Felix did not yet know Bach’s cantata on the same chorale (BWV 93), to which Felix’s work nevertheless bore some affinities. 61
In London Felix dispatched several musical curiosities, including a miniature Scherzo in B minor for piano, characterized by delicate staccati and shifts from major to minor, all revisiting the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. 62 On May 24 he penned for the contralto Marian Cramer (daughter of Franz) a setting of Thomas Moore’s amorous poem The Garland , with a gently pulsating figure in the piano accompaniment for “my love shall twine thee round her brow.” But Felix had not yet forgotten Betty Pistor and planned to dedicate his major new work of the summer, the String Quartet in E ♭ , Op. 12, to her. By the beginning of July, he had progressed as far as the slow movement.
Markedly in contrast to Felix’s public London life was Fanny’s domestic Berlin routine. There were continuing strains in her engagement to Wilhelm and delays in setting their wedding date. Fanny pined for Felix, noting even before he departed that his absence cast a “deep shadow on this sunny time of my life.” 63 Clearly the siblings’ separation undermined the fraternal support essential for Fanny’s creative world. And so she compared the brilliance of Felix’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion to Zelter’s inept performance on Good Friday: at a rehearsal “Zelter himself played, and you can well imagine what he created with his two fingers and his complete lack of knowledge of the score.” 64 During the performance of the recitative “Ach, Golgatha,” Milder remained a half bar behind; seldom had “such misery … been heard.”
To remember her brother, Fanny admired Hensel’s new portrait (see p. 202). And she was drawn to Felix’s music, in particular to the “Scottish” Sonata (Sonate écossaise ). Released in 1834 as the Phantasie in F# minor, Op. 28, this was one of the few large-scale piano works Felix published. In May 1829 Fanny acknowledged borrowing a melodic phrase Felix had used in the work the previous year. From this evidence we may date the sonata to 1828, though on July 7, 1829, Klingemann playfully asserted to Fanny that it still remained to be finished in England. 65 Like so many of Felix’s larger works, it continued to gestate long after its first draft.
The piece opens with a dreamy, Andante fantasia in the minor, followed by a lighter, major-keyed Allegro. The impetuous finale, again in the minor, erupts as a substantial sonata-form Presto that dramatically shifts the weight of the composition. Externally Felix modeled the composition upon Beethoven’s own three-movement hybrid of fantasy and sonata, the “Moonlight” Sonata, but Fanny was attracted to Felix’s music because of its evocation of Scotland in the first movement. As Roger Fiske observed, it “begins with some preluding meant to sound like a harp, presumably the Celtic sort, and this leads into a slow movement which might well have suggested an Ossianic melancholy in Berlin.” 66 Several stylistic features betray Felix’s attempt to capture a Scottish mood—there are widely spaced chords and open-fifth sonorities, turbulent crescendos, and misty applications of open pedal, as at the end of the first movement, where the brooding first theme echoes among vestigial wisps of arpeggiations, anticipating the magical close of the Hebrides Overture ( ex. 7.1 ).
Fanny herself coped with the separation through composition. The day Felix departed, April 10, Droysen brought her some verses, which by early June had expanded into a Liederkreis of six songs dedicated to Felix “during his first absence in England, 1829,” with illustrations drawn on the manuscript by Wilhelm Hensel. 67 The cycle shows a taut tonal plan favoring sharp minor keys and gives compelling evidence of Fanny’s lyrical gifts and her attempt to extend individual Lieder into a larger, cyclical work. Droysen’s poems continue in the same vein as Wartend , set by Felix one week before, but now the “dreaming maiden” is fully awake and acts out her fantasies about separation and reunion. In the first song, Lebewohl , she would steal into her brother’s dreams; in the second, spring tulips and clematis appear dreary to her; and in the third and fourth, she begins to think of his homecoming. No. 5, Hochland (Highlands ) stands by itself. Here Fanny imagines her brother roaming the Scottish highlands; she transplants herself from Berlin to join him on a secret island in the middle of a loch, probably an allusion to the second canto of Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake , in which Helen and her father Douglas seek refuge on an island in Loch Katrine. Cast in a volkstümlich style, Fanny’s Lied clearly imitates the inflections of Wartend , linking her style to her brother’s with jaunty dotted rhythms and the key of B minor, common to Wartend and the Hebrides Overture. The sixth, concluding song closes the cycle by treating the homecoming (Wiedersehen ), though in a surprise setting: the piano falls silent, and an a cappella trio sings of the joyful life the future holds. Here Fanny borrowed a phrase from Felix’s “Scottish” Sonata, again symbolically stressing the siblings’ bonds. 68 But the scoring, for two sopranos and a tenor, is enigmatic. Who is reunited? Certainly Felix and Fanny, but who is the third, feminine persona ? Is it Rebecka, or Lea, or did Fanny symbolize her divided loyalties as sister and fiancée?
Ex. 7.1 : Mendelssohn, Phantasie in F# minor, Op. 28 (1834)
Significantly, the trio excludes Wilhelm (Fanny could have added a bass to achieve a quartet). Instead, Wilhelm participated by embellishing the first page of the manuscript with illustrations, including one of Felix and Fanny sailing in a vessel toward some auspicious future. On Midsummer Day, a few weeks after Fanny sent the cycle to England, Wilhelm designed a circular drawing to accompany the “circle of songs.” In Das Rad (The Wheel ) he symbolized the hierarchy of the Mendelssohn siblings and friends. Felix appears in the hub, playing a wind instrument and attired in “an English tailcoat with Scottish accessories,” while a dolphin nibbles at some music in his pocket. Revolving around the composer, like so many spokes of the wheel, are his siblings and several friends, including Albert Heydemann, Droysen, and Albertine Heine, who later married Paul. But Wilhelm, tethered by a chain to Fanny and Rebecka, appears as a brake shoe on the wheel. The droll symbolism is clear enough: by August 1829, when Felix received the drawing in Scotland, 69 he was still Fanny’s “alpha and omega and everything in between.” 70
IV
With the end of the “season” Felix and Klingemann planned a walking tour of Scotland. They intended to travel by coach to Edinburgh and then by various means across the Highlands to Oban and the Isle of Mull. From Sir Alexander Johnston, Felix received a walking stick and introduction to Sir Walter Campbell, the “tyrant” of the
Isle of Islay; there was also discussion of crossing the Irish Sea to Dublin, but these two destinations fell from the itinerary. Dining with Sir George Smart on July 21, Felix made an uneven musical exchange—a copy of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture for a canonic drinking song; Oberon’s sprightly elves encountered vapid images of “pretty warblers” and “gay larks,” reconfirming Felix’s earlier impression of the English glee as a “horribly infamous thing” (höchst infames Ding ). 71 The next morning Felix and Klingemann departed by coach from Charing Cross and reached Durham on the 24th. Felix had brought an album for sketching, and while he drew memorable points along the way, Klingemann added verses on interleaved tissues, blending the visual and poetic. One of the first and most striking scenes was of Durham Cathedral, which Felix viewed from the far bank of the Wear River, and framed with a border of trees and lush vegetation (plate 9 ). Klingemann’s verses contrasted the serenity of the sanctuary with the politics of the day:
Two days later, they were in Edinburgh. Their first act was to climb the volcanic outcropping of Arthur’s Seat and, at eight hundred feet, take in the stunning view of the castle, the sea, and Firth of Forth, studded with white sails and smokestacks, and the distant outlines of Stirling Castle and obscure “shadow” of Ben Lomond (“When God in heaven takes up panorama painting, you can expect something terrific,” Felix wrote 73 ). The next day Felix heard Scottish folk music; escorted by George Hogarth, a Lothian barrister and music critic who became Charles Dickens’ father-in-law in 1836, Felix attended a bagpipe competition at the Highland games. Intrigued, he sent his card to a piper staying in the same hotel and was able to study the instrument at close range, putting to rest Leigh Hunt’s “idea of martyrdom,” to be “tied to a post within a few yards of a stout-lunged piper.” 74 But the deepest impression was made during the twilight of July 30, when Felix visited Holyrood Palace, where Mary Queen of Scots had reigned and, in 1566, witnessed the murder of her secretary, Rizzio. At the roofless ruins of the adjacent abbey, Felix found everything “broken and moldering” and overgrown with grass and ivy. There too he discovered the haunting beginning of his Scottish Symphony. 75
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