No sooner did Fanny premiere the Cholera Cantata on Abraham’s birthday in December 1831, 148 before she embraced dramatic composition and dispatched a setting of the mythological subject of Hero and Leander for soprano and orchestra. 149 The through-composed text, written by Wilhelm Hensel, divides into a recitative, aria, recitative, and finale. 150 The orchestra, bolstered by piccolo and serpent, revives the sound of Felix’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage , and indeed the basic conceptions of the two works are similar—both oppose tableaux-like visions of placid and dynamically charged, wind-swept seas. But the two psychological curves are reversed: in Felix’s overture the terror of becalmed sailors gives way to jubilation with the return of the winds; in Fanny’s scene, a peaceful, harmonious sea yields to a destructive storm, as Hero’s lover, Leander, attempts to swim the Hellespont at night. Believing he has drowned, Hero plunges into the enveloping waves. At the end, Fanny recalls the serene opening gesture, a descending C-major triadic figure. Like Calm Sea , Hero und Leander thus leaves us with an image of an all-encompassing ocean.
As if emboldened by her new-found voice, Fanny around this time composed her sole work for orchestra, the Overture in C major. 151 She conducted the undated autograph “after two years for the first time” in June 1834, which suggests it dates from 1832. 152 Its design simulates that of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage —a slow, static introduction proceeds through a transition to an animated fast movement in sonata form. An effectively scored, worthy effort for a novice orchestral composer, the Overture occasionally leans heavily on Felix’s Prosperous Voyage , as in the lyrical second theme, accompanied by wavelike gestures in the cello ( ex. 8.11 ). Evincing clear signs of Fanny’s talent, the Overture, cantatas, and Hero und Leander cap a remarkably productive period in her life. But outside the few private performances at her Berlin residence, Fanny’s music fell into oblivion until its revival late in the twentieth century. The private, personal character of these scores again contrasts with the public career of Felix, who in April 1832 prepared for his second English sojourn and the international visibility of the annual concert season in London.
Ex. 8.11 : Fanny Hensel, Overture in C (ca. 1832)
VIII
Felix was delayed by misfortune. What Klingemann had described as “humbug,” and what one German correspondent thought could be withstood by musical study 153 —cholera—now devastated Paris. By April grim press bulletins were reporting eight hundred daily fatalities. An attempt to curb the epidemic by reforming sanitation services led to an uprising of chiffoniers (ragpickers), while more destitute Parisians, convinced they were being poisoned by the well-to-do, committed grisly murders. 154 Described by Heine as a “masked executioner,” the scourge was a water-borne bacterium that killed its victims by acute dehydration. Felix contracted a relatively mild case but was compelled to remain in his room for days and have his back massaged and rubbed with vinegar by an old nurse. His thoughts turned to London, for in Paris the very social order was threatened, and one thought no longer of music, but of colic. 155
His strength sufficiently revived, he departed for Calais and arrived on April 22 in London, where Klingemann again greeted him. Taking up quarters at 103 Great Portland Street, Felix saw Moscheles and Rosen daily and picked up threads of conversations severed by his departure in 1829. Augmenting the circle was Meyerbeer, with whom Felix attended the opera, and the baritone Franz Hauser. At the Philharmonic, Felix was touched by an unexpected reception. Recognized at a rehearsal on May 5, he had to acknowledge an ovation from the orchestra. The spontaneous demonstration was “more precious … than any distinction,” as “it showed me that the musicians loved me, and rejoiced at my coming.” 156
For Moscheles Felix played recent compositions, among them the Lieder ohne Worte , Op. 19b, Die erste Walpurgisnacht , and new version of the Hebrides . Felix was confident enough of the overture to part with the original autograph, finished in Rome in 1830 (the proud recipient, Moscheles, could not understand why Felix had insisted on altering it). Partaking fully of the musical season, the two appeared at a variety of private functions. At one dinner party (May 7), when Felix declined to play, the Irishman John Field took his place. Suffering from alcoholism and cancer, the celebrated creator of the piano nocturne was a wraith and, Moscheles noted in his diary, a “poor substitute.” At another soirée Felix agreed to perform and improvised on a glee by William Horsley. But Felix could not excuse the “eternal mawkishness” of the violinist who had preceded him—Paganini. 157
As in 1829, Felix restricted his public performances to appearances at the Philharmonic and benefits for his friends. His music figured in three successive Philharmonic concerts, now at the King’s Theatre: on May 14, Felix directed the premiere of the Hebrides , titled The Isles of Fingal ; on May 28 he was the soloist in his Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 25; and on June 18 he encored the concerto and led the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. 158 For concerts of the flutist Sedlatzek and violinist Nicolas Mori (May 21 and 25), Felix performed the Hummel Septet and premiered the Capriccio brillant , Op. 22. A few days later, on June 1, he participated fully in Moscheles’s concert, by directing the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and hearing Sir George Smart conduct the Hebrides Overture, performing with Moscheles Mozart’s Concerto for two pianos, K. 365 (for which Felix designed new cadenzas), and even playing the bass drum in Moscheles’s overture The Fall of Paris . 159 Through all these appearances, Felix maintained his dubious status as a musical amateur. Thus, in lieu of a fee from the Philharmonic he received a piece of silver, and when he departed from London, a silver inkwell and candelabra, presented by the Society in “admiration of his talents as a composer and performer, and their esteem for him as a Man.” 160
Apart from concert engagements, another venue enabled English music-lovers to witness Felix’s extraordinary musicianship. At Attwood’s invitation, he began to appear at St. Paul’s, initially to offer the closing organ voluntaries for services but then to extemporize; Felix also tried the organs in Westminster Abbey; St. John’s Chapel, Paddington; and St. John’s, Waterloo. 161 In particular, his performances of J. S. Bach, which required a more extensive pedal board than that to which English organists were accustomed, was later credited by W. S. Rockstro with causing a “complete revolution in the style of English organ-playing.” 162 (In 1832, the St. Paul’s organ was the only London instrument that could accommodate the pedal parts of Bach’s organ works “without destructive changes.”)
Of Felix’s “new” compositions, the Capriccio brillant was an orchestration of the solo piece written in Munich the previous year. Initially, Felix labeled it a rondo, leading to some confusion between the Capriccio and the Rondo brillant , Op. 29 of 1834. The telescoped design of the Capriccio , which links a slow introduction via a transition to a fast finale, recalls the Rondo capriccioso but ultimately derives from Weber’s Konzertstück . Weberesque, too, are the opening of the introduction, where rolled chords accompany a sustained treble melody, and the second theme of the Allegro, a jaunty, marchlike theme that revives the third movement of the Konzertstück .
With The Isles of Fingal Felix brought to closure nearly three years of revision plagued by his perpetual self-doubts. The premiere on May 14 took place during a heady time in English politics, the crisis surrounding the Reform Bill, which encountered stiff opposition from the Tory party. The week before the premiere, Prime Minister Grey and his Whig cabinet abruptly resigned. When meetings were hastily convened at Guildhall (including one the day of the Philharmonic concert) to convince King William to overcome the resistance by creating a body of new peers, Felix attended. 163 Perhaps the politically charged atmosphere affected English musical sensibilities: Moscheles recorded that no one “seemed to understand” the overture, and the Athenaeum reported that, “as descriptive music, it was decidedly a failure.” 164 Surely the title, The Isles of Fingal , caused some confusion, and the work’s somber hues and dark melancholy were vitiated by its placement after an aria from Ro
ssini’s Barber of Seville . Nevertheless, William Ayrton cited Felix as one “of the most original geniuses of the age” and likened the music to an “angel’s visits.” 165
Just a week before the premiere Felix was busily revising one of his most celebrated scores. 166 Capturing the desolate, remote Scottish seascape, he had crafted music well “removed” from the conventions of European art music. Thus, the opening, three-tiered theme is built upon a simple rocking motive, extended through repetition and sequential transposition, that in turn spawns its own accompaniment and the lyrical second theme ( ex. 8.12a , b ). The Ur -motive seems to simulate Scottish folksong and its gapped scales. Felix’s treatment of sonata form is flexible: the exposition elides directly with the development, near the middle of which a static passage interrupts the thematic working-out, and the composition ends with a hushed recall of the first and second themes, giving the score a timeless circularity. Much of the overture is veiled in muted undertones. There are only three climactic forte passages, delayed until the ends of the exposition and development, and the coda; in each, a militaristic fanfare briefly conjures up some Ossianic saga but then disappears, as if a Hebridean mist has cloaked the music. The caliginous, indistinct orchestration led the Debussy scholar Edward Lockspeiser to compare the overture to Turner’s Staffa and to label the work “one of the first examples of musical Impressionism”; 167 for Wagner, the music was the “masterpiece” of a “landscape-painter of the first order.” 168
Ex. 8.12a: Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, Op. 26 (ca. 1832)
Ex. 8.12b: Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, Op. 26 (ca. 1832)
Reading the overture as a musical landscape painting gained currency early on and remains attractive. The juxtaposition of Felix’s 1829 drawing of Dunollie Castle and musical sketch of the opening (see p. 215) reveal the composer as a musical draughtsman translating Hebridean scenery into sonorous images. But broadening the avenue of critical inquiry admits other interpretations—for example, the overture as evincing Felix’s Ossianic manner, a style manifest in works including the Scottish Symphony, Scottish Fantasy Op. 28, and concert scene On Lena’s Gloomy Heath . 169 Most recently, Thomas Grey has proposed that the overture begins as musical landscape, before the second, cantabile theme injects a human element, a “viewer,” like the Rückenfiguren (human figures seen from behind) of German romantic landscape paintings, who invite “us to imagine ourselves similarly inhabiting the depicted landscape and meditating on it from ‘within’ the scene.” 170 For Grey the Rückenfigur contemplates not just a seascape but also Ossian’s Dream, a topos established in early nineteenth-century French painting and music to support Napoleon’s interest in Ossianic literature. The development of Felix’s overture becomes a kind of dream sequence, in which the slumbering, blind bard conjures up visions of Fingal and his heroes (thus the emergence of the fanfares) that ultimately recede and vanish in the closing, crepuscular bars of the work. In a creative interpretation, Grey relates the phantasmagoric quality of Felix’s music to the French vogue of fantasmagorie , a “magic lantern” technique that projected images appearing to hover in midair.
One other new composition that preoccupied Felix in London—the Lieder ohne Worte , Op. 19b—broached in a different way the ability of music to convey extramusical ideas. A few weeks before in Paris, he had arranged for Schlesinger and Simrock to publish the French and German editions, and now he sought an English firm. Of the six pieces, four had been composed between September 1829 and September 1831. 171 By January 1832 they were coalescing into a collection of Lieder paralleling the “texted” Lieder of Op. 19a. By mid-June Felix composed the missing two members, Nos. 3 and 5, and arranged the order of all six. The result balanced major- and minor-keyed pieces, and offered simulations of three vocal types, the solo Lied (Nos. 1 and 2), duet (No. 6), and partsong (Nos. 3 and 4). Felix conceived two more elaborate pieces (Nos. 3 and 5) as keyboard pieces in sonata form. Only one (No. 6), the Venetianisches Gondellied , bore a title, though No. 3, with its imitative writing and resounding horn calls, impresses as a Jagdlied (Hunting Song), and No. 4, which shares thematic material and the key of A major, as a Jägerlied (Hunters’ Song; ex. 8.13 ). Whether Felix had in mind specific texts for individual Lieder is unclear; Robert Schumann later imagined that the Lieder ohne Worte originated as songs, the texts of which were then suppressed. 172 More likely, Felix intended the pieces as abstractions of the art song, though he left tantalizing clues to encourage listeners to make the leap between the autonomous domain of piano music and German lyrical poetry.
Ex. 8.13a: Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in A major, Op. 19b No. 3 (1832)
Ex. 8.13b: Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in A major, Op. 19b No. 4 (1832)
The new genre, which blurred the lines between the song and character piece, later enjoyed great success and became synonymous with Mendelssohnism. But in 1832 the first volume had a difficult birth. Failing to place it with an English firm, Felix left the manuscript with Moscheles, who arranged for Vincent Novello, a choral-music publisher for whom Felix had promised to compose an Anglican Morning and Evening service, to print one hundred and fifty copies in August 1832. Curiously enough, the pieces appeared not as Songs without Words (a term Felix never used in English editions) but Original Melodies for the Pianoforte . 173 Moscheles himself corrected proof and paid the engraving expenses, for which Felix later reimbursed him. Though Novello added his imprint on the title page, he thus assumed no financial risk for the pieces, which were initially a dismal failure in England and sold only forty-eight copies by June 1833. In Paris the pieces appeared as Romances sans paroles and in Bonn, late in 1833, as Lieder ohne Worte , the official debut of the new term. But despite the initially tepid response to the new genre, Felix aligned his muse sufficiently with the character pieces to “sign” a pencil portrait, taken by Eduard Bendemann in 1832, with an incipit from Op. 19b. 174 Here he appears in an informal pose, his hair somewhat disheveled and eyes slightly askance, as he ponders the lyrical melody of the “first” Lied ohne Worte , Op. 19b No. 1, in E major.
After two months in London, on June 22, 1832, Felix departed for the Continent. Once again the “smoky nest” had restored his spirits and validated his standing as a significant new musical voice. His pocket diary and letters reveal a hectic social calendar and even plans to have another cast made of his skull, in order to examine whether the cranial bumps associated with his creativity had evolved during the past two years. 175 But the death of Zelter in Berlin on May 15 darkened the carefree happiness of his English interlude. When Felix received the news one week later, 176 he consoled himself by visiting Norwood to see Thomas Attwood, who, at age sixty-six, stood as another musical father figure. The question of Zelter’s successor now weighed heavily upon Abraham in Berlin and upon his son returning from abroad, having reached a critical crossroads, the end of the Grand Tour.
Chapter 9
1832–1835
Düsseldorf Beginnings
You see I am thought infinitely more precious when I am a little way from home.
—Felix to Berlin, October 26, 1833 1
Even before enduring a second turbulent crossing of the English Channel and reaching Berlin late in June 1832, Felix was conflicted about his homecoming. Abraham had urged his son to begin positioning himself for the Singakademie directorship. 2 Felix was disinclined but regarded it a solemn duty if Zelter “expressed this wish.” Now, after his teacher’s death, Felix’s reluctance stiffened. Recalling that a director, Lichtenstein, had already promised him the post, Felix saw no need to apply. Rather, as if foreseeing the imbroglio that would stretch into the early months of 1833, he sequestered himself from the petty maneuvering that enveloped the choice of Zelter’s successor.
The primary sources are silent about Felix’s conversation with Lichtenstein, but presumably it had occurred in 1829, during the afterglow of the St. Matthew Passion revival. By June 1832 Felix had been away from Berlin for more than two years; in this period, Zelter had re
lied upon a deputy assistant whose “creative gifts rarely rose above mediocrity,” 3 C. F. Rungenhagen (1778–1851). Fifty-four at the time, Rungenhagen argued that his seniority entitled him to the position (he had faithfully belonged to the Singakademie since 1801, for nearly Zelter’s entire tenure). Felix, in contrast, appeared to some an arrogant youngster. In August the society debated the issue of succession, but according to Eduard Devrient, an “animated knot” of members objected “it was an unheard-of thing to … thrust a Jewish lad upon them for their conductor.” 4
After Devrient proposed a joint conductorship of Felix and Rungenhagen, a committee that included Devrient and Schleiermacher thrashed out the details. Rungenhagen would serve as managing director, while Felix would have authority over musical decisions. Felix worked behind the scenes to promote the plan, as a note to Devrient (omitted from his published memoirs) reveals. 5 Here Felix urged Devrient to conceal that the committee’s plan was advanced without a vote, lest Rungenhagen demand a ballot with absentee votes (i.e., proxies for his cause). But by October Rungenhagen rejected the proposal and called for an election. In the ensuing months he outflanked Felix, “too diffident and too proud” to canvass for votes. At the election on January 22, 1833, Felix was soundly defeated, with 148 votes for Rungenhagen, 88 for Felix, and 4 for Zelter’s pupil Eduard Grell. According to Devrient, while Rungenhagen’s majority accumulated during the tallying, there were outbursts of laughter as the clerk adopted an increasingly deprecating tone toward the Mendelssohn name. After the election, the directors endeavored to pacify Felix with the post of deputy director, but he “diplomatically” replied “they could go hang themselves,” 6 and Grell assumed the assistantship. Thus the Singakademie followed a “long course of mediocrity,” and the Mendelssohn family, arch supporters of the institution for decades, resigned in protest. 7
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 37
