Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Ex. 8.4a: Mendelssohn, Rondo Capriccioso , Op. 14 (1830)

  Ex. 8.4b: Mendelssohn, Rondo Capriccioso , Op. 14 (1830)

  First, Felix revived for her the Etude in E minor (1828) and added a nocturne-like introduction in E major to produce the Rondo capriccioso , Op. 14. 26 A slow movement linked to a bravura finale, this ebullient showpiece later served as a paradigm for Felix’s Capriccio brillant , Op. 22, and Serenade und Allegro giojoso , Op. 43, both for piano and orchestra. Felix diligently covered all traces of the recomposition, adding, as he put it, “sauce and mushrooms.” Thus, he assimilated the characteristic descending fourth of the elfin rondo (E–B) into the lyrical descending phrase of the Andante ( ex. 8.4a, b ), so that the rondo seemingly sprang from the slow movement. Delphine reciprocated by doting one night upon a Lied ohne Worte for Felix. 27 Not coincidentally, it is in E major, as if she intended to replicate the nocturne-like textures of Op. 14 ( ex. 8.5 ). Dated July 21, Delphine’s Lied was preserved by Felix in his autograph album. 28 Finally, early in August he read with her a new piano-duet arrangement of the String Quartet Op. 13.

  Ex. 8.5 : Delphine von Schauroth, Lied ohne Worte in E major

  As we shall see, from Italy Felix often thought of Delphine, and their relationship deepened upon his return to Munich in 1831.

  From Berlin, Felix received worrisome reports about Fanny’s health. Pregnant with Sebastian, she experienced an Unfall on May 24, 1830; 29 her concerned brother sent letters, including one to Lea, to be shared with Fanny if the baby survived. Resorting to music, he concluded a letter on June 14 with an Andante in A major, expressing what he prayed God would grant her. 30 Its dotted rhythms and key recall the style of Frage , Op. 9 No. 1, and a cadence near the end reproduces the close of Geständniss , Op. 9 No. 2; Felix endeavored from afar to comfort the bedridden Fanny with the familiar music of Der Jüngling . Sebastian was born prematurely on June 16, sickly and frail, and not expected to survive. He received the names Sebastian Ludwig Felix, after the three principal composers in Fanny’s pantheon, and at his christening the sculptor C. D. Rauch and Zelter, who stood in for Felix, served as godparents. 31 From Munich Felix sent a congratulatory Lied ohne Worte , an early version of his Op. 30 No. 2. 32 Its agitated opening in B ♭ minor, reflecting his sister’s tribulations, gives way to a joyous conclusion in the major. The infant gained weight and thrived, and even became a symbol of political sensibilities. Euphoric with republican sympathies following the July Revolution in Paris, Fanny sewed the French tricolors into Sebastian’s swaddling clothes, much to the dismay of her husband.

  During the last week of July, Marx joined Felix on an excursion to the Bavarian Alps. In Oberammergau they attended the Passion Play, performed every decade since the seventeenth century, and in Garmisch Felix sketched the Zugspitze. While Marx returned to Berlin, Felix proceeded to Austria and arrived on August 7 in Salzburg, where Metternich’s police seized a parcel of his music. In Linz four days later, Felix’s carriage passed one conveying Lea’s Viennese cousin, the Baroness Henriette von Pereira Arnstein; then, he changed mode of transportation. Forwarding his personal belongings to Vienna, he engaged a skiff with a gondolier’s deck, and “flew away … like an arrow at noon” down the Danube. 33 He detailed his impressions of the whirling eddies, the soft cacophony of church bells echoing from either bank, the nocturnal heavens illuminated by bursts of shooting stars, and the enveloping serenity, as if he “were eavesdropping on the music of the spheres.” 34 Near the middle of the month, he was in the Austrian capitol.

  For some six weeks Felix resided in the Imperial City, unimpressed by its secret police and bureaucracy (most Viennese musicians, poets, and artists had government posts, confirming Metternich’s observation the city was administered, not ruled). In the few years since Beethoven’s death, Vienna had begun to stagnate in the arts; its chief musical products were light opera and uninspired piano music for middle-class households. At the court-controlled Kärtnerthortheater, where Beethoven’s Fidelio had been premiered, Felix found his friend Franz Hauser, the principal baritone, singing entrenched Italian opera (“until some fire falls from heaven, things will not mend,” Felix reported to Devrient 35 ). Matters did not improve when the theater’s director, Franz Lachner, asked Felix if the St. Matthew Passion was by Bach. Vestiges of Beethoven’s genius were difficult to discern (not a single pianist, Felix noted, played the master’s music), though Felix met several of the composer’s acquaintances who had served at his funeral: the poet Grillparzer, aging Bohemian composer Adalbert Gyrowetz, violinist Mayseder, piano manufacturer Streicher, music publishers Haslinger and Mechetti, Beethoven’s faithful acolyte Carl Czerny, and cellist Merk, with whom Felix played billiards. 36 Felix sent to Berlin distinctly uncomplimentary reports: Merk, smoking a cigar without exhaling, performed an Adagio, and the industrious Czerny was “like a tradesman on his day off,” churning out piano variations, arrangements, and salon pieces (among his hackwork was a revamping for sixteen pianos of the overture to Rossini’s Semiramide ). In short, the glories of Viennese classicism had passed: “Beethoven is no longer here, nor Mozart or Haydn either,” Felix wrote, and he took little solace when the octogenarian Abbé Stadler, musical confidante of Constanze Mozart, showed him the piano on which Haydn had composed The Seasons .

  With Simon Sechter, who had instructed Schubert in fugue just weeks before the composer’s death in 1828, Felix exchanged “sweet canonical phrases.” And, he found stimulation in the company of the music historian R. G. Kiesewetter, who had assembled an imposing library of early choral music and regularly performed Palestrina, Victoria, Carissimi, and J. S. Bach. 37 An especially warm friendship developed between Felix and Aloys Fuchs (1799–1853), a passionate collector of musical autographs. 38 Felix later acquired for Fuchs manuscripts of composers ranging from Durante and Paisiello in the eighteenth century to Clementi, Attwood, and Moscheles in the nineteenth. On September 16 Fuchs offered his new friend a priceless gift, the “Wittgenstein” sketchbook of Beethoven, filled with hieroglyphic-like drafts for three major late works, the Piano Sonata Op. 109, Missa solemnis , and Diabelli Variations. 39

  To promote his career, Felix sold Op. 11 and other works to Pietro Mechetti. Through Delphine, Felix met J. B. Streicher, who placed at the composer’s disposal a piano from his firm, with its characteristic light, bouncing action (Prellmechanik ). But apart from playing quartets with Mayseder, attending the Burgtheater, and conversing with musicians, Felix appears to have kept a low profile, by visiting his patrician relatives, the Eskeles in Hitzing, and the Arnsteins and Ephraims in Baden, where he performed on the parish church organ before a small circle of acquaintances. 40 Near the end of the Viennese sojourn, Felix traveled to Pressburg (Bratislava) to witness the coronation of the Crown Prince Ferdinand as king of Hungary, and was impressed by the colorful display of the Hungarian magnates, caparisoned horses of the nobility, and bands of gypsies and long-mustached commoners, all suggesting “oriental luxury, side by side with … barbarism.” 41

  Felix intended to remain in Vienna for only a few weeks, but when news arrived in mid-September of instability in financial markets, he procrastinated and awaited his father’s advice. 42 Counteracting the “frivolous dissipation” of the Viennese, Felix immersed himself in sacred music and conceived for the Singakademie a setting of the Ave Maria . His principal creative effort was a “grave, little sacred piece,” a cantata on O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden , the Passion chorale treated prominently in the St. Matthew Passion. But the immediate stimulus for the work was visual: at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Felix had viewed a painting attributed to the Spanish baroque artist Francisco de Zurbarán, showing John escorting Mary home from Calvary. 43

  Felix now explored the tonal ambiguity of Paul Gerhardt’s seventeenth-century chorale (based on a secular melody of Hans Leo Hassler) and admitted no one would be able to discern whether the cantata was in C minor or E ♭ major. 44 Thus, in the first movement, with the chorale as a cantus firmus
in the sopranos, the final choral strain reaches a cadence in E ♭ major, diverted by a few orchestral measures to an ambiguous half cadence in C minor. The lyrical middle movement, a freely composed aria in E ♭ major for Hauser, sets an unidentified text that elaborates Gerhardt’s poetry; glosslike, the music too occasionally alludes to the chorale ( ex. 8.6 ). The last movement, reviving the chorale to an accompaniment of pulsating string tremolos, adheres to C minor until the end, where the raised third (the tierce de Picardie of Baroque music) diverts the work to the major. By dividing the violas and cellos Felix gave the music an especially dark veneer, evidently to match the somber hues of the Munich painting. Musically the cantata is cut from a Bachian cloth; indeed, after examining the piece in 1841, the pedagogue Eduard Krüger assumed it was by Bach and caused a droll scene when Robert Schumann reported the misattribution to Felix. 45

  Ex. 8.6 : Mendelssohn, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (1830), Second Movement

  II

  Shortly before Felix departed for Italy, Hauser gave him a volume of Lutheran hymns, a fresh incentive for ruminating about Bach. Felix promptly jotted down several melodies and set five during the next two years, Aus tiefer Noth , Vom Himmel hoch , Mitten wir im Leben sind , Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott , and Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh’ darein . From Graz he reported he was hard at work on his Hebrides Overture, now renamed Ouverture zur einsamen Insel (Overture to the Solitary Island ). 46 But a few days later, after reaching Mestre, his senses were challenged by another island, when, in the dead, nocturnal calm, he was rowed across the sea and entered the Grand Canal of Venice.

  La serenissima was a republic no longer, having been vanquished by Napoleon in 1797 and ceded to the Austrians, who administered it as a police state. Like Byron, Felix stood on the Bridge of Sighs and contemplated the history-laden edifices hovering on the water, rising “as from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , iv, 1), the remembrance of former glory. Truly alone, without acquaintances in the city, 47 Felix played the tourist, strolling on the Piazza San Marco, experiencing the bustling dockyards of the Arsenale, and visiting the Dominican (S. Giovanni e Paolo), Franciscan (Frari), and Jesuit (Gesuiti) churches, and, of course, San Marco, symbol of Venetian opulence and the meeting of Byzantium and the West. Above all, the city’s art enticed the composer, who spent hours in the Accademia, the Scuole di S. Rocco, and other sites pondering the sixteenth-century masterpieces of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. While Turner in 1819 had preferred the energetic brushwork of Tintoretto’s Miracle of St. Mark , Felix was drawn to Titian’s Assumption in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and marveled at its dynamic upward thrust, the figure of Mary floating on the cloud, her awe as she approaches God, the waving motion of the painting, and the angelic musicians greeting her ascent. 48

  Felix may have had Titian’s altarpiece in mind on October 16 as he put final touches on the motet Ave Maria , Op. 23 No. 2, drafted in Vienna. For eight-part chorus and organ continuo, the graceful Marian setting employs responses between a solo tenor and the choir and, in the middle section (Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis ), a Baroque walking bass line. “I cling to the ancient masters, and study how they worked,” Felix wrote of his veneration of Titian to Zelter; 49 the same sentiment applied to his musical models. The principal subject rises from a compact, four-note motive presented in three sequential transpositions, the second of which, the “Jupiter” motive ( ex. 8.7 ), is familiar from the opening of the Reformation Symphony. Stylistically and spiritually the music harks back to seventeenth-century Catholic sacred music, although Abraham later found some passages too intricate to “accord with the simple piety, and certainly genuine Catholic spirit, which pervades the rest of the music.” 50 But on October 18, Felix reasserted his faith by finishing a somber setting of Aus tiefer Noth , Op. 23 No. 1, Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 130. Cantata-like, the score has a symmetrical, five-movement plan, with two homophonic statements of the chorale forming the endpoints of the penitential psalm. In the center a tenor aria paraphrases the last two phrases of the chorale; and on either side are contrapuntal elaborations, a fugue built upon the first phrase, and a Bachian movement in imitative counterpoint with the chorale placed in the soprano.

  Ex. 8.7 : Mendelssohn, Ave Maria , Op. 23 No. 2 (1830)

  Memories of Delphine distracted Felix, and on October 16 he also composed two Lieder about their relationship. In the Reiselied , published as Op. 19a No. 6, a traveler bids the rushing waves to greet his beloved and to relate how he has lost all happiness since their parting. Probably not coincidentally, the song is in E major, the key of the Rondo capriccioso and Delphine’s Lied ohne Worte . The second song is a Lied ohne Worte for piano solo, textless though no less evocative. It is Felix’s first Venetian Gondellied (Op. 19b No. 6), invoking the genre of the barcarolle with lilting rhythms in for the lapping water, suffused in a muted G minor, with the melody doubled in thirds to suggest a love duet or, perhaps, a desired assignation among the canals. Felix dispatched the Lied to Munich, but Delphine never received it, for one night the police confiscated his manuscripts on suspicions they contained an encoded secret correspondence. Felix’s travel plans nearly went awry when his wealthy Viennese cousins failed to send an avviso to Venetian bankers; Felix had to borrow 100 florins from a German acquaintance in order to continue the Grand Tour. 51

  From Bologna he crossed the Apennines in an open carriage and approached Florence on October 22, observing Brunelleschi’s dome looming out of a blue mist suspended between the girding hills. During the next week he devoted himself to the city’s art treasures in the Pitti and Uffizi, and compared the Medici Venus and Titian’s seductively recumbent Venus of Urbino (“divinely beautiful,” he wrote Paul, though “we can’t speak of it in front of the ladies” 52 ). Without succumbing to stendhalismo , the fainting spells that overwhelmed the French novelist when he visited the city, Felix explored the sixteenth-century Boboli Gardens and fled to the hills to take in the sweeping views from Bellosguardo and visit the Torre de Gallo, the Ghibelline tower from which Galileo reportedly made astronomical observations.

  Felix arrived in Rome on November 1. Uncannily enough, his initial experiences paralleled those of Goethe, who had reached the Eternal City exactly forty-four years before. Felix first heard a requiem in the Quirinal and then experienced the “tranquil, … solid spirit” 53 in the Vatican described in Goethe’s Italienische Reise . Eagerly Felix sought out Raphael’s final masterpiece, the Transfiguration , meticulously copied by Hensel during his Roman sojourn, and assured his brother-in-law the original was no more powerful than the copy. But before Felix’s first reports could reach Berlin, Zelter was writing Goethe about his pupil, privately venting some anti-Semitic spleen: “Felix is probably now in Rome, which makes me quite happy, since his mother has always been against Italy, where she perhaps fears he will shed the last skin of his Jewishness.” 54

  Avoiding the cold air of the Capitoline, Felix secured lodgings at Piazza di Spagna No. 5, flooded with morning sunlight and furnished with a Viennese grand and scores of Palestrina, Allegri, and other Italian composers. Nearby was that smoky haunt of artists, the Café Greco, and the pensione by the one-hundred-and-thirty rococo Spanish Steps, where Keats had succumbed to consumption in 1821. From the Piazza, Rome lay “in all her vast dimensions” before Felix “like an interesting problem to enjoy.” 55 He found several solutions: exploring the Colosseum and the ruins, losing all sense of proportion in St. Peter’s, and experiencing the incense and dim lighting of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the twelve oversized, baroque Apostles in the nave of San Giovanni in Laterano. There were relaxing walks in the Borghese Gardens and stunning views of the Campagna from the Aqua Paola, the early Baroque fountain on the Janiculum. And the chameleon hues of the Alban hills and fountains of Tivoli offered alluring respites.

  If Felix had lived largely incognito in Florence and Venice, he now joined a circle of German and Italian officials, musicians, and artists. His ci
cerone was the Prussian minister, C. K. J. Bunsen, a friend of the Mendelssohns who had assisted Hensel in Rome. An avid musical amateur, Bunsen regularly performed Palestrina in his residence with members of the Papal Choir, led by their camerlegno , the priest Giuseppe Baini, who in 1828 had published the first substantial biography of the leading composer of the Counter-Reformation and “savior” of church polyphony. 56 Baini devoted himself to editing Palestrina’s music but was unequivocally opposed to modern instrumental music. Another priest, the bibliophile Fortunato Santini, struck up a warm friendship with Felix, whom Santini dubbed a faultless wonder (monstrum sine vitio ). 57 For some thirty years Santini had faithfully scored Renaissance and Baroque Italian polyphony from parts and amassed a library of over a thousand items, to which Felix had free access. To Felix’s amazement, the gregarious Abbate was interested in German music, translated into Italian the text of Der Tod Jesu , and arranged for the Passion cantata of the “infidel” Graun, as Felix called him, to be performed in Naples. Santini inquired too about the St. Matthew Passion, listened to Felix play Bach, and provided a copy of Handel’s Solomon for his young friend, who began an arrangement of the oratorio.