Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  From Freiburg Felix and Cécile proceeded to Heidelberg, where they spent a week (May 7–13) visiting the bride’s cousins, including the lawyer and amateur organist Fritz Schlemmer, who entertained Felix on the instrument in the Heiliggeistkirche. There were walks along the serpentine Philosophenweg across the Neckar River and a visit to the castle on the Königstuhl, partly in ruins from lightning and French efforts in the seventeenth century to blow it up. Felix rekindled his friendship with Justus Thibaut, whom he had met ten years before. With Schlemmer the newlyweds made an excursion to Mannheim, where the men seem to have overindulged in champagne. Then, heeding Elisabeth’s summons, they returned to Frankfurt on May 13.

  Ex. 11.2a: Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte , Op. 38 No. 5 (1837)

  Ex. 11.2b: Schubert, Erlkönig (1815)

  I

  Their social calendar was full. Alexander Mendelssohn and his family arrived from Berlin, and Felix conversed with the crown prince of Sweden, the future Oscar I, who later accepted the dedication of Felix’s Op. 44 string quartets. With Hiller, who performed Paulus twice at the Cäcilienverein in May, Felix resumed daily meetings. Verkenius arrived from Cologne, and from Leipzig Sterndale Bennett, who had just published his Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 13, dedicated to Felix. The eccentric Swiss composer Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee (1786–1868), accomplished on several instruments, including the glass harmonica, entertained the couple with mathematical magic squares. 21 Beethoven’s former pupil Ferdinand Ries, Felix’s rival in the Lower Rhine Music Festivals, read through his new oratorio, Die Könige in Israël , based upon the account of Saul and David in I Samuel. The newlyweds were not impressed: Cécile dismissed Ries as a “desiccated clover leaf.” 22

  Of his own work, Felix finished the String Quartet, Op. 44 No. 2, sketched Psalm 42, and began the String Quartet, Op. 44 No. 3. But the arrival of Cécile’s grandmother, the matronly Hélène Elisabeth Souchay, interrupted the halcyon days, for she decided to renovate the Fahrtor. The dust and noise disturbed Felix’s inspiration, which flagged in the middle of his new piano concerto for England; “it is a misery,” he informed Klingemann, “with the piano and its 100,000 little notes.” 23 Seeking escape, he returned with Cécile on June 7 to Krontal, the site of their engagement. Commemorating the visit, Cécile entered in the diary that “new, young life has come to the trees and meadows, and also to her who today stood beneath them,” 24 and confirmed she was pregnant. The couple determined that Felix would travel alone to England in August, though the death of William IV on June 20 initially jeopardized the festival.

  Meanwhile, Felix endeavored to deal with two sensitive family issues. The first concerned Fanny’s continuing aspirations to publish her music. On June 7 Lea pressed him for assistance: “For about a year she’s been composing many excellent works, especially for the piano…. That you haven’t requested and encouraged her to do it—this alone holds her back. Wouldn’t it therefore be appropriate for you to encourage her and help her find a publisher?” 25 But Felix replied firmly that authorship implied a “series of works, one after the other,” for which Fanny had “neither inclination nor vocation”; she was now too much the Hausfrau to justify exposing her to public scrutiny. If Fanny chose this course of her own volition, he of course would support her, but “to encourage something that I do not consider right, that I cannot do.” 26 Rather disingenuously—he had already sent positive comments to Fanny about her piano pieces—he asked Lea to share his views neither with his sister nor Wilhelm.

  Sebastian Hensel, ever the perfect bourgeois, later glossed over the issue in The Mendelssohn Family ; his mother, who “had herself no desire to appear in print, and had yielded only to please her husband, readily gave up the idea.” 27 But the evidence of her manuscripts does not necessarily support this assertion. At some point, probably during the winter of 1837, Fanny took the trouble to prepare a fair copy of ten piano pieces composed since the spring of 1836. 28 Not only does the revised order suggest a coordinated scheme of key relationships but the individual movements appear with numbers, as if she envisioned a coherent group of pieces. Moreover, the manuscript bears markings of staff and page breaks, as if an engraver tinkered with the manuscript to prepare it for publication. Possibly, Fanny intended to print privately some copies for her friends, but she may have responded to an initiative from Schlesinger, after the successful publication of her song Die Schiffende .

  Many of Fanny’s pieces replicate unabashedly the refined lyricism of Felix’s Lieder ohne Worte , but there are also supple, original turns of phrase and adventuresome harmonic progressions that move effortlessly between sharp and flat keys. Cantilena -like treble lines predominate, though a few technically more demanding pieces impress as etudes. And the collection ends with a spirited Capriccio in F# minor, the only titled work of the set. Its principal subject patently derives from Felix’s Scherzo a capriccio in the same key ( ex. 11.3a, b ). For some reason, Fanny abandoned the project of publishing her work until 1846, when she elected to release only the second piece, an Andante in G major, as the first of the four piano Lieder, Op. 2. In 1837, she was not yet ready to break free of Felix’s “demonic” influence.

  From Alexander Mendelssohn Felix learned of a second family issue, the hurt he had caused his sisters by not bringing his bride to Berlin to meet them. To repair the damage, he sent mollifying letters to Rebecka and Fanny but a few days later received Fanny’s regrets that it was “no longer possible to see Cécile as a girl.” 29 Matters were not helped by Felix’s decision, after some seven weeks in Frankfurt, to accompany Elisabeth, Cécile, and her sister Julie on an extended summer holiday to Bingen before he departed for England and returned to the Gewandhaus in the fall, which effectively barred Cécile from meeting her relatives that year.

  Ex. 11.3a: Fanny Hensel, Capriccio in F# minor (1837)

  Ex. 11.3b: Mendelssohn, Scherzo a capriccio in F# minor (1835)

  For nearly a month (July 5 through August 2) the four tourists explored the environs of Bingen, where the cloistered twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard had recorded her mystical prophecies and produced hagiographic and scientific tracts, poetry, and monophony. At Eibingen near Rüdesheim, Felix sketched the ruins of a convent founded by Hildegard and encountered an old nun caring for the moldering graves. The Mäuseturm (Mouse Tower), on an island in the Rhine just north of Bingen, prompted another, fanciful drawing, this one of Hatto, tenth-century Bishop of Mainz, being devoured by mice after he had imprisoned the destitute during a famine in a barn and set it afire. 30 West of Bingen Felix and Cécile followed a challenging path to the pilgrimage site of the Rochuskapelle, where, in 1820, the boy Felix had played the organ inside the chapel. Morning sickness restricted Cécile’s activities; the athletic Felix swam across the Rhine, but on one occasion evidently suffered cramps and had to be rescued by boatmen. 31 Felix and Cécile socialized with Gottfried and Wilhelm Schadow and attended a ball at Bad Kreuznach with Franz Bernus, a wealthy Frankfurt senator and merchant, and his wife, Marie. For her birthday (July 13) Cécile made a floral garland, and Felix composed the tender song Die Freundin , on verses ascribed to Goethe but in fact by Marianne von Willemer. 32 Felix may have intended the Capriccio for piano in E minor, Op. 118, finished on July 11, 33 for Franz Bernus; it comprises a nocturne-like Andante in E major coupled to an energetic, masculine sonata-form movement in the minor.

  More imposing projects now stimulated Felix’s imagination. Since breaking off work on Pervonte in 1835, he had continued to search for an opera libretto; he corresponded with J. P. Lyser, the Frankfurt Theaterrepetitor Karl Gollmick and the light dramatist Karl von Holtei, who determined that Felix’s judgment was “much too acute” for him ever to secure a libretto. 34 In February 1837 Felix had asked Klingemann to prepare a libretto for a new oratorio about Elijah. 35 But impatient by July, Felix turned to Schubring for assistance with a new oratorio for the Lower Rhine Music Festival at Düsseldorf, scheduled for Pentecost 1839. Felix envisioned coupling St. Paul wi
th a pendant work about St. Peter, so as to “bring the two chief apostles and pillars of the Christian Church side by side in oratorios,” and again focus on the “outpouring of the Holy Ghost, which must form the central point, or chief object.” 36

  Early in August 1837 Felix’s party proceeded to Coblenz, at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel. Near St. Goarshausen upstream, they marveled at the echo effects of the Lorelei and took in the scenic views of the Rhine, its surrounding hills articulated by a patchwork of vineyards and studded with medieval castles. By crossing a bridge of boats at Coblenz, they reached Ehrenbreitstein, where they stayed at the Weisses Ross (White Steed). 37 From there they traversed the short distance to Horchheim and made nearly daily visits to the estate of Felix’s uncle and aunt, Joseph and Henriette Mendelssohn. On Joseph’s birthday (August 15), Felix played a river god in a dramatic skit. He now found leisure time to finish the orchestral score of his new piano concerto and the motet Laudate pueri , completing Op. 39, which appeared in 1838.

  Felix’s party proceeded by steamer on August 16 to Bonn, where he read through Czerny’s duet arrangements of the Lieder ohne Worte and learned of Schelble’s death. The next day the travelers visited the Cologne Cathedral, unfinished after construction had ceased in the sixteenth century and yet an enduring symbol of the Gothic Revival. Pausing for a week in Düsseldorf, they enjoyed an exhibition of the Akademie painters, and Felix received from Julius Rietz the exemplar of St. Paul illustrated by his friends. Eduard Steinbrück drew Felix’s portrait, and Felix read the Kreutzer Sonata with Rietz; an inquisitive creature, either a mouse or spider, joined the spellbound audience and somewhat upstaged Beethoven’s dramatic music. 38 From the deck of a steamer bound for Nijmegen on August 24, Felix watched Cécile wave goodbye from the dock, then saw only her white handkerchief, and finally “nothing more.”

  II

  At Rotterdam on the morning of August 26 he embarked on the Attwood , the vessel that had conveyed him to London in 1829, but now “unloved by all on account of its decrepitude.” 39 There was the same steward with whom he had practiced English for the first time, and another uncomfortable thirty-hour crossing that left him seasick. When he arrived at the Custom’s House near the Tower of London, he spied Klingemann approaching in a small rowboat. Klingemann’s residence in Eaton Square became the base of Felix’s fifth London sojourn. There, on August 30 and 31, the two began to draft an outline of Elijah . In the original conception, the oratorio began with a chorus on verses from Jeremiah (48:33): “And joy and gladness is taken from the plentiful field, and from the land of Moab.” 40

  Though he missed Moscheles, then on holiday in Hamburg, Felix visited his many London friends, including Rosen, the Horsleys, Alexanders, and Taylors, the engineer I. K. Brunel (recently wedded to Mary Horsley), George Hogarth, William Ayrton, and Charles Neate. Through Sir George Smart, Felix met an “attractive slim lady,” 41 the contralto Mary Shaw, who had sung in the Liverpool premiere of St. Paul and would appear at the Gewandhaus during the 1838–1839 season. He was less impressed with the soprano Clara Novello, and when he sought to sell to her brother, the publisher J. Alfred Novello, the new piano concerto, Psalm 42, and the organ preludes and fugues for £40, Felix found his reluctance “churlish.”

  Since the concert season had ended, Felix discovered another outlet in several churches. On September 8 he offered organ fugues of J. S. Bach on a two-manual instrument in St. John, Paddington. Two days later, after evensong in St. Paul’s, he threaded his way through worshipers to the organ and attacked Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543. In order to disperse the thronging crowd, a Dickensian beadle excused the organ blower, so that at the climactic pedal passage near the end of the fugue the instrument gave out, leaving Felix to “exhibit the glorious ideas of Bach in all the dignity of dumb action” 42 and nearly precipitating a riot among the exasperated audience. On September 12 Felix was able to perform the complete work on a three-manual instrument at Christ Church, Newgate Street and improvised several fantasias.

  Henry John Gauntlett, who witnessed the event, reported that in the Bach prelude Felix “amplified and extended the idea of the author, in a manner so in keeping and natural, that those unacquainted with its details could not by any possibility have discovered the departure from the text.” 43 An accomplished organist (Gauntlett was Felix’s choice to play the organ part at the premiere of Elijah in 1846), Gauntlett recorded several comments that testify to Felix’s mastery on the instrument. Thus, Felix was unfazed when he had to adapt Bach’s demanding pedal part to “suit the scale of an ordinary English pedal board.” And Felix’s touch was “so even and firm, so delicate and volant , that no difficulties, however appalling, either impede or disturb his equanimity.” Another witness was the septuagenarian Samuel Wesley, nephew of the founder of Methodism and a devoté of Bach’s music, who had just composed for Felix a fugue on the subject of a canon written for Wesley’s daughter Eliza. 44 Suffering from depression, Wesley had not played in public in years, but Felix now convinced the “trembling and bent” musician to extemporize. His daughter was so overcome with emotion that she fainted, and when Felix praised Wesley’s efforts, he replied, “Oh, Sir, you have not heard me play; you should have heard me forty years ago.” 45 He died one month later.

  Upon arriving in London, Felix was drawn into a controversy attending the performance of St. Paul by the Sacred Harmonic Society on September 12. Joseph Moore, benefactor and organizer of the Birmingham Musical Festival, was displeased that Felix intended to conduct the performance and protested through the organizing committee in the strongest terms. Felix withdrew from the performance but attended the rehearsals; when he ventured to correct one of the parts, the musicians recognized him and broke into spontaneous cheers. But this joyful recognition was offset by the suddenly deteriorating health of Rosen, who was suffering from a malignant tumor. Between engagements, Felix hastened to his friend, who urged him on September 11 not to visit, for there was “no joy to be gained from me.” The next day the Alexanders escorted Felix to Exeter Hall in the Strand to hear Joseph Surman perform St. Paul with the amateur chorus and orchestra of the Sacred Harmonic Society. When Felix took his place in the gallery, he found Julius Benedict and the scrupulous Sir George Smart, prepared to time the performance with his watch. Also in the audience was the American hymnodist Lowell Mason, author of “Nearer My God to Thee,” who left an ambivalent judgment in his journal: “There is too much narrative—and recitative—Choruses are good—some magnificent.” 46 Still, between the two parts, Felix had to acknowledge a prolonged ovation, and several numbers were encored. After the performance, he reached Rosen’s residence at midnight. But he was too late; his friend had passed away in Klingemann’s arms during the oratorio. 47

  Having experienced “one of those days in the world, with its mysterious, incomprehensible ways,” 48 Felix left the next morning by coach for Birmingham. His host, Joseph Moore (1766–1851), who owned a die-sinking business, was the driving force behind the triennial festival and had promoted the construction of its site, the new Town Hall, modeled on a Greek temple. Here Felix tried out an imposing four-manual organ and also a piano sent by the London firm of Broadwood (in the end, Felix elected to play on an Erard). The festival committee had collapsed seven performances into four days (September 19–22) but incredibly scheduled only one day for rehearsals. “That is how calves are led to the slaughterhouse,” Felix noted in his diary. 49 At the rehearsal for St. Paul , part of which was allotted to Sigismund Neukomm’s Ascension oratorio Christi Himmelfahrt , Felix offered trilingual curses in English, French, and German. Somewhat more successful was the preliminary reading of the new piano concerto, which prompted a bidding contest for its rights between J. Alfred Novello and Nicolas Mori of Mori & Lavenu.

  At the second concert (September 19), Felix directed the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture without rehearsal and improvised an organ “concerto” on themes from Handel’s Solomon and a Mozart symphony pe
rformed on the same concert. 50 There were considerable difficulties with St. Paul , presented the morning of the 20th before an audience that included Klingemann and several of the Souchays and Beneckes, among them Cécile’s grandfather, who had arrived from Manchester. Clara Novello sang the aria “Jerusalem” “atrociously,” in the middle of which the organist (James Turle of Westminster Abbey) “groped around on full organ, and created a devilish noise,” instead of the pianissimo pedal entrance. And the length of the program caused the curtailment of at least three numbers. 51 Still, the oratorio enjoyed an enthusiastic reception, as did the Piano Concerto No. 2, premiered the evening of September 21. Having balked at paying £40 for Opp. 37, 40, and 42, Novello now paid £42 for the concerto alone. 52 By then, Felix was packing for his return to Frankfurt. On the final day of the festival, he began the seventh concert with J. S. Bach’s “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue in E ♭ (BWV 552) before departing in a coach waiting at the door, as members of the audience waved their handkerchiefs.