Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Early reviewers 137 recognized immediately the weight of Felix’s debt to Bach, perhaps most evident in No. 1, in which an artful fugue culminates in a chorale with a “walking” bass line imitating an organ pedal part, and thus offers three allusions to the Thomaskantor. The fugue of No. 2, originally for organ, employs a subject that simplifies that of the more ornate Fugue in D from the Well-Tempered Clavier I ( ex. 10.7c, d ). No. 3 offers a learned fugue that presents a neo-baroque subject in its “prime” and inverted forms and then combines the two. And the poignant fifth Prelude, with its throbbing tremolo chords and surprise ending in F major (using the raised third), affords one more reference to the Bachian Baroque.

  But all this unabashed historicism represents one side of a dialectic that operates in the opus between the musical past and present. Thus,

  Ex. 10.7a: Mendelssohn, Prelude in A ♭ major, Op. 35 No. 4 (1836)

  Ex. 10.7b: Mendelssohn, Fugue in A ♭ major, Op. 35 No. 4 (1835)

  Ex. 10.7c: J. S. Bach, Fugue in D major, Well-Tempered Clavier I (1722)

  Ex. 10.7d: Mendelssohn, Fugue in D major, Op. 35 No. 2 (1835)

  Ex. 10.7e: Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A ♭ major, Op. 110 (1822), Finale

  Ex. 10.7f: Mendelssohn, Prelude in B ♭ major, Op. 35 No. 6 (1837)

  Ex. 10.7g: Fanny Hensel, Allegretto grazioso in B ♭ major (1836)

  Ex. 10.7h: Fanny Hensel, Andante in B ♭ major (1837)

  Ex. 10.7i: Mendelssohn, Prelude in E minor, Op. 35 No. 1 (1835)

  the fourth fugue, in A ♭ , draws upon a more recent memory than Bach by alluding to the fugal finale of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata. Op. 110 (1822), with which Felix’s fugue shares its key and the distinctive feature of an accelerating tempo ( ex. 10.7b and 10. 7e ). Moreover, the original pairing of fugues with etudes encouraged Felix to explore conspicuously “modern” keyboard idioms. For instance, the third prelude, a staccato study that mimics Felix’s trademark elfin style, ultimately evaporates in another pianissimo conclusion. The lyrical fourth prelude is a Duett ohne Worte stylistically akin to Felix’s Op. 38 No. 6. Similarly, the sixth prelude has songlike qualities that have more to do with the modern German Lied than Bach’s prelusive ruminations. Here Felix produced music rather close to an Allegretto grazioso by Fanny in the same key, composed in 1836 ( ex. 10.7f, g ). 138 Then, on Felix’s wedding day, March 28, 1837, Fanny composed an Andante, also in B ♭ major, with striking similarities to Felix’s prelude ( ex. 10.7h ). 139 In June, Felix was writing Fanny about the coincidental similarities between the two and thanking her for “your Prelude No. 6 in B ♭ major to my Fugue in B ♭ , for it really is the same inside and out, and delights me by the neat coincidence. Is it not strange that sometimes musical ideas seem to fly around in the air and come to earth here and there?” 140

  Felix’s engagement with contemporary piano styles is most evident in the first prelude, conceived as an etude in the so-called three-hand technique, in which he enveloped a melody, sculpted by the two thumbs in the middle register, by “all sorts of arpeggios and artful figurations in the same harmony” ( ex. 10.7i ). 141 The origins of this harplike device are unclear, but it became associated with the virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871), at the height of his career early in 1837, when he participated in a celebrated musical “duel” with Liszt in Paris. 142 The French cartoonist Jean-Pierre Dantan caricatured Thalberg as a superhuman apparition with ten hands; Thalberg’s novel device of thickening keyboard textures caught the fancy of Felix, who used it in an etude in B ♭ minor in June 1836 (Op. 104b No. 1), in the presumably contemporaneous E-minor Prelude, and in several other works. Op. 35 thus juxtaposed technical and contrapuntal studies that blended the new and old, and filtered the increasingly outmoded art of fugue through the prism of keyboard modernity and novelty. The goal was not a lifeless reenactment of an earlier age but a revitalization of modern music through exemplary historical models.

  V

  While the Jeanrenauds planned an elaborate Frankfurt wedding for March, a curious drama played out in Leipzig and Berlin as Felix endeavored to arrange for his mother to meet Cécile and her family. First he proposed the newlyweds travel to Berlin that summer, after the wedding. No doubt he was concerned about the strength of Lea’s constitution, but perhaps he also remembered her strong opinions about his siblings’ engagements. Meanwhile, on January 28 he met Elisabeth and Cécile in Weimar and escorted them back to Leipzig for a visit. Mother and daughter now planned to travel to Berlin, but on February 17 Elisabeth fell ill with influenza. Felix entertained his guests with part-songs written for the Leipzig Liedertafel; and he composed a tender Gondellied in A major for piano, with amorous duetlike thirds, presumably for Cécile. In 1841 Schumann published it in a supplement to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik .

  At the Gewandhaus, Cécile had ample opportunities to witness Felix in his element. According to Heinrich Brockhaus, her eyes “reflected her joy about the triumphs of her beloved,” then in possession of a “rich, great talent, and universally loved and honored.” 143 She likely attended a benefit concert on March 6 of the soprano Henriette Grabau, whom Felix accompanied in several of his own songs, Schubert’s Erlkönig , and Fanny’s Hölty setting, Die Schiffende . 144 Felix had requested a copy of the last for Cécile’s album, and Fanny had obliged. Without his encouragement, she had published the song under her name in an 1836 album 145 and thus embraced official authorship. Still, he thanked her “in the name of the public of Leipzig and elsewhere” for releasing the song “against my wish.” 146 The album also contained Felix’s duet “Wie kann ich froh und lustig sein?” on a poem by Philipp Kaufmann. Folksonglike, this setting treats a lovers’ separation from a feminine point of view: the unnamed protagonist (Cécile) yearns through the winter for her beloved to return during a springtime of renewal. Unlike Felix’s Opp. 8 and 9, which had silently assimilated six of Fanny’s Lieder under his authorship, the Schlesinger album marked the only occasion when the siblings’ music appeared together under their own names. 147

  By early March, Elisabeth had decided to attend the Leipzig premiere of Paulus (March 16) in the Paulinerkirche; reversing his earlier view, Felix now urged Lea to visit as soon as possible, before Elisabeth changed her mind and returned to Frankfurt. 148 Braving the winter, Lea arrived on March 8 and finally met Elisabeth and Cécile, whom Schumann described as a “blooming, highly exotic rose.” 149 We do not have Lea’s reaction to her new relatives, although she appears to have intimidated Elisabeth by looking at her in a “penetrating way.” 150 Overshadowing their forming relationship were the preparations for the oratorio, promoted to associate it with Handel’s Israel in Egypt , which Felix had performed in the same church only months before.

  On March 7, the successful London premiere of St. Paul under Joseph Surman had occurred at Exeter Hall; now it was Felix’s turn to introduce the revised, published version in Germany. Once again the brightly illuminated church filled to capacity as enormous forces presented the work in the spirit of a music festival. Among the three-hundred choristers was W. A. Lampadius, author of an early biography of the composer, who reminisced, “Mendelssohn understood as no other director has how to enlist his singers’ whole enthusiasm; it was owing to his splendid leading that we accomplished such marvels in the crescendo, diminuendo, whispered tones and the like.” 151 In the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Gottfried Fink published a glowing report and deferred a critical appraisal for later. 152 But in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , Robert Schumann went considerably further. 153 As it happened, a few weeks after the performance, on April 9, came the Leipzig premiere of Meyerbeer’s French grand opera Les Huguenots ; Schumann seized on the two works as the most significant of his time and illustrative of diametrically opposed tendencies. While the oratorio began with the chorale Wachet auf as a symbol of the apostle’s Christian awakening, Meyerbeer’s work opened with the Lutheran chorale Ein’ feste Burg (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God ) as the rallying call of the French Huguenots, persecuted by t
he Catholics during the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre (1572). But Meyerbeer’s colorful score earned Schumann’s reproving rebuke for what he regarded as crass musical sensationalism. The work played alternately “in the brothel and in church,” and the bloodiest episode in the history of Protestantism was “degraded to the level of a farce at a fair for the purpose of raising money and applause.” The consecration of the swords in the fourth act before the massacre amounted to a “revamped Marseillaise ” that confirmed Meyerbeer’s “motto”—“to strike dumb or to titillate.” 154

  In contrast, Paulus offered a “verdant landscape” of palm trees, where one could turn to “faith and hope” and once more “love mankind.” Schumann recognized the oratorio was the effort of a “young master,” and he alluded to certain controversial issues—e.g., the use of chorales, the revelation of Christ to Saul on the road to Damascus by a female choir, the concentration of the dramatic action in the first part, and the depiction of Paul as a “convert rather than a converter.” 155 But he left no doubt about his positive judgment of the work, and praised it in an overflowing sentence for its “deep religious feeling,” its “masterly musical perfection, its prevailing lyricism of the most noble kind, the marriage of word and tone, of language and music, which cause the depths to wax eloquent—the charming grouping of figures, the grace that seems to have been breathed over the work, the freshness, the indelible colorfulness of the instrumentation, the perfectly articulate style, not to mention the masterly play with all forms of composition.” 156 Felix was the prophet of a “glorious future”; his path led to happiness, that of Meyerbeer, to evil.

  VI

  In 1836 and 1837 Paulus entered a crowded field. The production of nineteenth-century German oratorios was at its zenith, with manifold examples by Friedrich Schneider (Das Weltgericht , The Last Judgment , 1819), Louis Spohr (Die letzten Dinge , The Last Judgment , 1826; and Des Heilands letzte Stunden , The Savior’s Last Hours , 1835), Carl Loewe (several, including Die Zerstörung von Jerusalem , The Destruction of Jerusalem , 1829), and others disseminated through burgeoning, popular choral societies. 157 Between 1824 and 1835, three German composers—Eduard Grell, Heinrich Elkamp, and Carl Loewe—fabricated oratorios about St. Paul. Though they rapidly fell into oblivion, Felix’s first oratorio quickly became an international symbol of the revival of the genre. A host of factors explains its extraordinary popularity, ultimately eclipsed only by Elijah . First of all, oratorios were compatible with Restoration politics: they supported the new social stability after Napoleon and the emergence of a new German nationalism. As we have seen, Felix was centrally involved with the revival of Bach and Handel, and Paulus was understood to descend from these authoritative staples of the old musical order: “The work is so manifestly Handelian, Bachian, and Mendelssohnian,” G. W. Fink wrote, “that it appears as if it really exists to facilitate our contemporaries’ receptivity to the profundities of these recognized tone-heroes….” 158 In effect, Felix’s oratorio offered a blend of historicism and contemporary musical idioms, of baroque chorales and fugues with modern orchestration suffused with a Lied-like lyricism, that popularized the complexities and severities of Bach and Handel for a newly empowered, middle-class musical culture. Paulus was a concerted attempt to solve, in Abraham’s words, the “problem of combining ancient conceptions with modern appliances.” 159

  By performing the work in St. Paul’s (University) Church, Felix underscored the distinctly Christian message of his oratorio. The story of the apostate Saul turned apostle Paul and his miraculous conversion from Judaism to Christianity had appealed to Abraham, intent upon distancing his family from his father’s faith. By heeding Abraham’s encouragement to complete the oratorio, Felix fell into the position of embracing scriptures harshly critical of traditional Judaism. In a painstaking analysis of Felix’s libretto drafts, Jeffrey Sposato has shown how the composer did little to soften the negative, stereotypical depiction of the Jews in his first oratorio (ten years later, in Elijah , his theological stance would change considerably). 160 Of several examples we can adduce, three stand out. In No. 4, 161 for the false testimony against Stephen (Acts 6:11), Felix devised a wooden imitative passage that mimicked the mocking counterpoint of the false witnesses against Jesus in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion ( ex. 10.8 ). In both works the Jews appear bound by strictures rather than the spirit of their laws. Similarly, the turba (crowd) scenes surrounding the stoning of Stephen (Nos. 5, 6, and 8) and in Part II the persecution of Paul (Nos. 28 and 29) recall the highly charged, dissonant choruses in Bach’s Passions before the Crucifixion. And finally, in Stephen’s impassioned speech to the Sanhedrin (Acts 7), the martyr’s recitative spills over into a turbulent Allegro for “Ye hard of heart! Ye always do resist the Holy Ghost.”

  Ex. 10.8a: J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion, Part II, No. 39 (1729)

  Ex. 10.8b: Mendelssohn, Paulus , Op. 36 (1836), No. 4

  From the earliest stages of work on Paulus , Felix seems to have regarded it as confirming his own Protestant faith; in 1831, he announced to Klingemann that the work would form a sermon (Predigt ). 162 The completion of the oratorio and its successful reception were critical steps toward achieving Abraham’s cherished agendum—full assimilation of his family into Prussian society. But ironically the very success of the oratorio—Lampadius, commenting on its rapid recognition, labeled 1837 and 1838 the Paulusjahre in music history 163 —was met with prejudice at mid-century from those prepared neither to recognize Felix’s conversion nor to accept him as standing at the forefront of German music. Thus, the Christian Felix fell victim to anti-Semitism, even though he “was willing to pay the price of assimilation.” 164

  The overarching theme of the oratorio—the Christian awakening of Paul and his missionary work—plays out in a series of crescendo-like intensifications operating throughout the composition. We can identify as examples four broadly applied styles and techniques, two of which, the chorale and fugue, emerge already in the overture as unifying structural devices. The five chorales Felix selected, all familiar emblems of collective Protestant worship from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enhance the sermonlike quality of the work and articulate its essential dramatic segments. According to Klingemann, the chorales serve as “resting points” and remind us of the Greek chorus, “pointing … from the individual occurrence to the general law, and diffusing a calmness through the whole.” 165 They include, in Part 1, Wachet auf (Overture), Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr (No. 3), Dir, Herr, dir will ich mich ergeben (No. 9), a repetition of Wachet auf (No. 16), and, in Part 2, O Jesu Christe, wahres Licht (No. 29) and Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott (No. 36). Notably, the chorales appear in scorings and settings designed to reinforce the idea of Steigerung (intensification). Thus, they range from the wordless, instrumental chorale of the Overture, which uses only part of the melody of Wachet auf , to homophonic choral settings, more complex settings with instrumental interludes (the return of Wachet auf in No. 16, now complete with text and intervening, bright brass fanfares anticipating the return of Saul’s sight; and No. 29, fitted with instrumental interludes in imitative style), and, finally, as the climactic culmination, the Lutheran Credo Wir glauben all’ (No. 36) to suggest the Paulinian doctrine of justification by faith alone, which Felix presents as part of a complex chorale fugue.

  Steigerung informs too his use of fugues and fugal passages, a factor in eight of the forty-five numbers of the oratorio. The partial presentation of Wachet auf in the Overture gives way to an energetic four-part fugue in A minor on a subject derived from the opening of the chorale ( ex. 10.9a, b ). Dissonant in character, the fugue symbolizes Saul’s struggle for spiritual reawakening, leading to a culminating juxtaposition of the fugue and chorale. In Nos. 2 and 15 fugal passages accompany verses from Acts (“The Heathen furiously rage, Lord”) and Isaiah (“Behold, now, total darkness covereth the kingdoms”), while in No. 20 Saul’s aria (“I praise Thee, O Lord, my God,” Psalm 86) introduces a choral fugue that suggests a m
editative recasting of the fugal subject from the overture ( ex. 10.10 ). Then, in the concluding number of Part 1, Felix intensifies his fugal applications by crafting a double fugue on verses from Romans. The protracted “Amen,” which introduces the second subject, and the uplifting, compact entries of the first (“Sing His glory for evermore”) betray the influence of Handel, as do word paintings for “O great is the depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge of the Father,” the expansive exordium that prefaces the fugue. A final stage of contrapuntal intensification is achieved in Part 2, which begins and ends with fugues (Nos. 23 and 45), and includes two five-part double fugues (Nos. 23 and 36). Of these, No. 36 combines five-part counterpoint with the Lutheran chorale Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott , and thus returns us to the genre of the chorale fugue, with which the oratorio begins.

  Ex. 10.9a: Mendelssohn, Paulus , Op. 36 (1836), Overture

  Ex. 10.9b: Mendelssohn, Paulus , Op. 36 (1836), Overture

  Ex. 10.10 : Mendelssohn, Paulus , Op. 36 (1836), No. 20

  Two other techniques—the accelerando and crescendo—support the effect of intensification in directly perceptible ways. Several numbers employ shifts toward faster tempi, including the Overture and No. 22, cast as accelerando fugues. No. 6, Stephen’s defense, progresses from Andante sostenuto to Andante , Allegro , and Allegro molto . Preparing these shifts is a refrainlike phrase sung by Stephen at progressively higher transpositions ( ex. 10.11 ). Similarly, several numbers employ dramatic crescendi, as in the broad orchestral passages that introduce the chorus “Rise up! Arise! Rise and shine!” (No. 15) and the soprano recitative “And there fell from his eyes like as though it were scales” (No. 21) that announces the restoration of Saul’s sight. In a related technique, Felix augments the orchestra with the organ at crucial structural points to suggest crescendo-like expansions.