Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  For the festival Julius Rietz had amassed an amateur chorus of 364 musicians (106 sopranos, 60 altos, 90 tenors, and 108 bass). As in previous years, they arrived via diligences from neighboring communities and steamboats on the Rhine (at least one vessel from Cologne conveyed sixty members singing festive part-songs). The orchestra, 172 strong, also comprised chiefly amateurs, though the concertmaster was Ferdinand David, who followed Felix from Leipzig. David led a contingent of strings that included 72 violins, 24 violas, 24 celli, and 12 contrabass. 62 The combined forces totaled 536 performers, a significant increase over the 420 dilettantes Felix had directed in 1833 and an impressive, if unwieldy, symbol of the newly affluent, bourgeois mass music culture emerging in the Rhineland. 63 After Rietz oversaw the initial rehearsals, Felix supervised the first general rehearsal on May 19. When the festival opened on Whitsunday, an audience of over one thousand crammed into the Rittersaal. It included Ferdinand Hiller and three Londoners, among them Karl Klingemann and the young pianist/composer William Sterndale Bennett, whom Felix had met during the summer of 1833 at the Royal Academy of Music in London and invited to Germany. The third was the future music critic of the Times , J. W. Davison, at the time suffering from severe headaches. Compassionately stroking his forehead, Felix offered in sympathy, “Poor fallow, poor fallow,” and earned a friend for life. 64 From Berlin came Fanny, Paul, and his wife, Albertine. Lea, too, was eager to hear her son’s new oratorio, but Felix, concerned the strain might further injure her health, discouraged her from traveling. 65

  The version of Paulus premiered on Whitsunday 1836 differed considerably from the piano-vocal and full scores published later that year and in 1837 as Felix’s Op. 36. After sending his manuscript to Düsseldorf in April, the perfectionist had continued to polish the work, and, indeed, arrived from Leipzig with several new numbers for the soloists only days before the performance. 66 At least one freshly written tenor recitative for Ferdinand von Woringen prompted a humorous miscue in rehearsal. The text, probably an early version of No. 31, which relates Paul’s healing of the lame man of Lystra, read in part “When the heathen heard it they were glad.” But Woringen misread the German froh as frech , and inadvertently turned the elated into “saucy” Gentiles. 67

  Before leaving Leipzig, Felix had dispatched to Düsseldorf a pianovocal score for Rietz’s choral rehearsals. This hastily prepared manuscript survives with Rietz’s note certifying it as the only “exemplar” transmitting the version of the premiere. 68 A study of this neglected source awaits another occasion, but a cursory glance reveals some significant differences. Thus, the numbering of the movements originally ran from 1 to 25 in Part 1 and 26 to 46 in Part 2, instead of the nearly symmetrical 1 to 22 and 23 to 45 of the printed score. Part of the discrepancy concerns two solo numbers inserted in Part 1, then removed for the publication of the work, and eventually released by Simrock in 1868 as the Zwei geistliche Lieder , Op. 112 No. 2, “Der du die Menschen lässest sterben” in F major (Psalm 90), was a soprano arioso that followed the chorale Dir Herr, dir will ich mich ergeben after Stephen’s burial (between Nos. 9 and 10 of the printed score). For the fifth verse of the psalm (“Thou carriest them away as with a flood”) Felix inserted a meandering phrase that linked the arioso to the chorale ( ex. 10.4 ). No. 1, “Doch der Herr, er leitet die irrenden recht” (Psalm 25:8, “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore will he teach sinners in the way”), for alto solo, appeared after the recitative of No. 13, just before Saul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus. Felix replaced this arioso with a more compact setting of “Doch der Herr vergisst der Seinen nicht” (No. 13; Psalm 115:12, “The Lord hath been mindful of us”).

  Ex. 10.4a: Mendelssohn, “Der du die Menschen lässest sterben,” Op. 112 No. 2 (ca. 1836)

  Ex. 10.4b: Mendelssohn, Paulus, Dir Herr, dir will ich mich ergeben (1836), No. 9

  From all accounts the premiere was a triumph for the twenty-seven-year-old composer, even though during much of it he was lost in thought about his father, and the performance was marred by one unexpected blemish. When a “false witness” lost his way during the “testimony” against Stephen (No. 3), Fanny, singing as an alto in the chorus, stepped forward to help cue the soloist and momentarily left her choral anonymity to enter the limelight of her brother’s public career. After the performance, Felix quipped, “I am so glad it was one of the false witnesses.” 69 The press quickly accorded the composition the status of a masterpiece: the Düsseldorfer Zeitung labeled it a klassisches Tonwerk , 70 and Klingemann, who wrote a review for The Musical World , applied Winckelmannian attributes of “calm grandeur and pure beauty,” and detected in the oratorio a certain timeless quality. 71 Paulus became Felix’s most popular work during his lifetime, a favorite of music festivals and oratorio societies that reverberated throughout Germany, and in Denmark, Holland, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and even the United States, where American audiences in Boston, New York, and Baltimore heard St. Paul between 1837 and 1839. We shall examine its music further when we consider the Leipzig premiere of the published version in March 1837.

  The second day of the festival (May 23) featured Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, still relatively unknown in Germany. Fanny described it as “a gigantic tragedy, with a conclusion meant to be dithyrambic, but falling into the opposite extreme—the height of burlesque.” 72 At the festival, controversy (and perhaps burlesque) visited the performance when the bass soloist, a Herr Fischer from Frankfurt, unilaterally elected to alter the epoch-making recitative in the finale and prompted a scathing rebuke from Anton Schindler in the Cologne Zeitung . Felix was implicated in this corruption of Beethoven’s text and assailed for his fast tempi (Schindler later recalled, Felix “would chase whole orchestras in double quickstep through a piece of music”). 73 Springing to his defense, a local music pedagogue and critic, L. F. C. Bischoff, challenged Schindler’s authority as Beethoven’s “alter ego” and placed the blame squarely on Fischer, who in rehearsal had not tampered with the recitative. 74 Schindler remained an outspoken opponent of Felix, and the criticism of fast tempi later returned to haunt discussions of his conducting.

  On balance, though, little detracted from Felix’s triumph. On May 24 he organized a third, impromptu concert that offered Mozart arias, Beethoven’s first two Leonore Overtures, and a reprise of several numbers from Paulus . When a soloist fell ill, Felix and David entertained the audience with Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Hiller reports that Felix was “in every way the center-point of the Festival, not only as composer, director, and pianist, but also as a lively and agreeable host.” 75 He even found time to offer Sterndale Bennett instruction gratis , and shortly before the talented young Englishman departed, prophesied to Attwood that “if he does not become a very great musician, it is not God’s will, but his own.” 76 A few days later, toasts were raised to Felix as the successor of Handel and Bach, and on June 3, his last evening in Düsseldorf, the festival committee alluded to a special gift in preparation. A year later, after publication of the oratorio, it was ready: a special exemplar of the score fitted with illustrations of the life of St. Paul by several Düsseldorf artists. 77

  Announcing to Lea that he was now fairly established in Germany, 78 Felix returned to Frankfurt on June 7. There, he rekindled his friendship with Veit and his aunt Dorothea, a septuagenarian intellectually alert though in her declining years, and encountered his cousin Alexander, with whom he visited Mainz. There were daily conversations with Hiller, though Felix found his musical tastes too dispersed between the grave works of Bach and Beethoven on the one hand, and the buoyant operas of Auber and Rossini on the other. As it happened, Rossini himself arrived with the Baron Lionel de Rothschild to attend his arranged wedding with his cousin Charlotte, 79 and for several days Frankfurt society lionized the maestro. Now in retirement, the pensioned composer of Guillaume Tell , whom Felix described as a lustiges Wundertier , 80 had lost some of his celebrated girth and was a respected man of the world who dispensed witticisms about music an
d professed to admire J. S. Bach. But when Felix played his Capriccio in F# minor, Op. 5 (perhaps at one of the sumptuous Rothschild wedding receptions), he overheard the novice Germanophile react to its capricious leaps under his breath, Ça sent la sonate de Scarlatti (“that smells like a Scarlatti sonata”); what is more, Rossini advised his young colleague to adopt a more popular style of writing. 81 Among Felix’s other musical diversions were a visit from the Swedish composer Lindblad, another concert by Guzikow, and an excursion to Offenbach to see the music publisher André.

  Abandoning plans for a Swiss and Italian vacation, Felix replaced Schelble, who attempted to convalesce in the country. For some six weeks, Felix resided in his friend’s Frankfurt residence that afforded a picturesque view of the Main River and its bustling traffic. On Wednesday evenings Felix fed the Cäcilienverein a traditional diet of Handel and Bach. The Lieblingsstück that summer was Bach’s Cantata No. 106, the Actus tragicus , which, published in 1830, had been a favorite of Felix’s father during his last years. Contrasting the certainty of death (“For the ancient sentence stands: You shall die,” Sirach 14:17) and its transformation through Christ (“Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” Revelation 22:20), the cantata now became a kind of requiem for Abraham. Though pressed again to accept the directorship of the Cäcilienverein, Felix declined, for he had already decided to accept another year at the Gewandhaus.

  Laboring to revise his oratorio, Felix was able to finish the pianovocal score in late July; but his “awful reverence for print” necessitated so many changes that the choral parts, prematurely printed for the Düsseldorf premiere, had to be re-engraved. 82 He spent more and more time visiting Cécile Jeanrenaud and her family, who resided in a mansion known as Am Fahrtor, after an adjacent gatehouse on the Main. Initially, Felix was quite discreet in displaying his affection; indeed, Cécile herself imagined that the object of his attention was her mother Elisabeth, an attractive forty-year-old who conducted vivacious conversations in an elegant Frankfurt patois. But as he relaxed on Ferdinand Hiller’s couch, Felix poured out his heart about the “chosen one” in the “most charmingly frank and artless way,” without, Hiller assures us, any “exaggerated sentimentality or uncontrolled passion.” 83 Meanwhile, Felix maintained his reserve to his family and tantalized Lea, Fanny, and Rebecka in July by referring to a wunderschönes Mädchen , and admitting that he was “dreadfully in love.” 84

  Not long after Felix arrived in Frankfurt, Cécile left to visit relatives in Heidelberg; during a two-week separation, she haunted his mind, for on June 27, he composed an endearing piano piece, a Duett ohne Worte in A ♭ major, that he later inserted into her autograph album. 85 When this nocturne-like composition appeared in 1837 as the sixth of the Lieder ohne Worte Op. 38, Felix appended the instruction, “N.B .: Both voices must always be brought out clearly,” underscoring again its function as a duet. Undoubtedly, he conceived the piece as an instrumental love duet. Its meter and delicate, lapping accompaniment conjured up the barcarolle, though Frankfurt and the Main replaced Venetian lagoons as the locus of this idealized assignation. Felix enriched the texture of the music to accommodate four distinct elements: two melodic strands in the soprano and tenor parts, separated by triplet arpeggiations and supported by a bass line ( ex. 10.5 ). In the first two thirds of the composition the lyrical melody unfolds as a dialogue between the soprano and tenor, before the two, united, sing together. The conceit was familiar enough; Felix would have known precedents in Mozart’s duettino “Là ci darem la mano” in Don Giovanni , in which the Don seduces Zerlina, and in Carl Maria von Weber’s (text-less) depiction of courtship through the medium of the waltz in the piano composition Aufforderung zum Tanze (1819).

  Ex. 10.5 : Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in A ♭ major, Op. 38 No. 6 (1836)

  Felix’s euphonious Lied could almost stand as a musical metaphor for his idyllic courtship of Cécile, and for what traditional biographers, following Sebastian Hensel, have depicted as a stable, blissfully happy marriage. In a similar way, Cécile herself appears in idealized tones in nineteenth-century accounts. Thus, according to Sebastian Hensel she exercised an “influence as soothing and refreshing as that of the open sky or running water.” 86 And for Eduard Devrient, “Cecilia was one of those sweet, womanly natures, whose gentle simplicity, whose mere presence, soothed and pleased. She was slight, with features of striking beauty and delicacy; her hair was between brown and gold; but the transcendent luster of her great blue eyes, and the brilliant roses of her cheeks, were sad harbingers of early death. She spoke little, and never with animation, in a low, soft voice. Shakespeare’s words, ‘My gracious silence,’ applied to her no less than to the wife of Coriolanus.” 87

  For Devrient, Cécile thus played to Felix’s Coriolanus the minor role of Virgilia, the doting wife who brought out the tender side of the patrician general as he plotted to lead the Volsci against the early Roman Republic. Taciturn and “unable to express all she felt,” Cécile became known as the “Goddess of Silence” next to Felix, who “never could be silent, but was always bubbling over like champagne in a small glass.” 88 Though Cécile sang in Schelble’s chorus, she was not especially gifted musically and indeed was reluctant to play the piano for Felix, whom she had imagined as a “stiff, disagreeable, jealous old man, who played dull fugues with a velvet cap on his head.” 89 But she was quite skilled in drawing and painting, and during the summer of 1836 her favorite pastimes provided pretexts for social engagements with Felix. Thus, on July 9 he recorded in his diary a gift from Cécile, an album he was soon filling with drawings taken in her company, including views of the river from her residence.

  At Christmas 1835, Felix had promised Fanny he would look for a bride that summer and put to rest Abraham’s concern that his son’s “censoriousness” (Mäkelei ) would prevent him from finding a wife or an opera libretto. 90 As the last of his siblings to marry, Felix probably did not imagine he would choose someone whose family bore certain striking resemblances to his own. Like Lea, Cécile’s mother, Elisabeth Souchay (1796–1871) belonged to a patrician family. Her father, Cornelius Carl Souchay (1768–1838), had amassed a fortune of two million florins from an import-export firm dealing in English wares, with principal offices in Frankfurt, London, and Manchester. 91 During the Continental Blockade, Souchay profited from smuggling activities and speculating, and, like the Mendelssohns, seems to have run afoul of the French authorities. Then, during the Restoration, he expanded his business, Schunck, Souchay & Co., into the most successful German merchant house in England. Although a highly successful capitalist, Souchay was also a music lover somewhat oblivious to the “spirit of capitalism” his famous great-grandson, Max Weber, would formulate in 1905 when he traced the rise of capitalism to the Protestant work ethic. Weber’s wife, Marianne, characterized Souchay as a “cheerful, amiable and cultured man, who by his own efforts and marriage acquired considerable wealth, which he spent generously” 92 —a description just as easily applicable to Felix’s father.

  Through intermarriages with other prominent families the Souchays rose to the highest social levels of the Frankfurt patriciate. The center of German-English trade, Frankfurt reemerged as a city-republic after its brief, forced realignment as a Napoleonic duchy and flourished independently until annexation by Prussia in 1866. An unabashed Anglophile, Souchay favored the marriage in 1826 of his daughter Henriette to Friedrich Wilhelm Benecke (1802–1865), who in 1813, two years after the Mendelssohns had surreptitiously left Hamburg, fled that city and arrived in England, where he later managed a successful chemical enterprise. During the summer of 1836, Felix came to know the Beneckes well and even composed for Friedrich Wilhelm an Allegro in E minor for piano, 93 published posthumously in 1859 and then incorporated into the composer’s catalogue as Op. 117. Like Op. 38 No. 6, the Allegro is nocturne-like and animated by an accompaniment of flowing arpeggiations. But its opening thematic idea is now angular, dissonant, and masculine. Only the central part in the major inclines toward the Duetto
, with murmuring arpeggiations and the suggestion of a soprano-tenor duet.

  Cécile Jeanrenaud’s paternal side was of more modest means. Her father, Auguste (1788–1819), was a French Huguenot minister whose ancestors, like the Souchays, had emigrated in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and settled in Switzerland, near Neuchâtel, where they were goldsmiths. At his ordination in 1808 Auguste promised to “further the honor and glory of God,” and to “eschew schism, dissensions and plots.” 94 Two years later, he moved to Frankfurt, succeeded Pastor Jean-Daniel Souchay (Cécile’s great-grandfather) as the minister of the French Reformed Church, and married Elisabeth Souchay in 1814. The issue of religious tolerance loomed large in their families, even in Frankfurt, where with their fellow Huguenots they congregated on “an island of Calvinism in the very heart of the Lutheran country.” 95 Indeed, before the French Revolution the Huguenots were compelled to worship outside the city walls of Frankfurt, and full equality with other citizens came only in 1806. Thus, like the Mendelssohns, Cécile’s relatives remembered their identity as a distinct class of citizens not yet fully assimilated in German culture.

  In the marble-appointed Reformed Church on the Goetheplatz, where Felix and Cécile would wed in 1837, Jeanrenaud preached French sermons for a few years before declining health compelled him to seek more moderate climates in Lyon. There, in 1817, Cécile-Sophie-Charlotte Jeanrenaud was born. The next year the family returned to Frankfurt, but within a year the pastor died of consumption, leaving a widow of twenty-two to support four children. Elisabeth moved her family from the pastor’s apartment above the sanctuary to the elegant, quayside mansion of the Souchays in the Louis XVI style, Am Fahrtor, where Felix courted Cécile during the summer of 1836.