Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Felix’s fifth English sojourn consolidated his remarkable popularity in the musical life of the British Isles. There were invitations to conduct St. Paul in Dublin and attend a festival in Edinburgh. The publisher William Chappell was prepared to offer Felix £300 for a new opera. 53 But on September 22, Felix’s principal thought was of Cécile. Arriving in London late that evening, he received a silver snuffbox from the Sacred Harmonic Society and then boarded the mail coach to Dover. The tempestuous crossing blew his steamer off course, so that he arrived in Boulogne instead of Calais. Composing a canon to pass the time, he continued in a rattling diligence to Brussels, Liège, and Cologne, and then up the Rhine by steamer, until it became fogbound near Horchheim. For the last leg, he hired a special coach and reached Cécile in Frankfurt the afternoon of September 27. They departed the next day for Leipzig and arrived October 1. Having traveled for nearly ten days, he had only a few hours to spare before conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the opening concert of the new season.

  III

  Waiting to move into a renovated apartment in Lurgensteins Garten, with views of the city walls, promenade, and J. S. Bach’s quarters near the Thomaskirche, 54 the couple resided near Julie Louisa Schunck, a greataunt of Cécile. Advanced in her pregnancy, Cécile was transported in a sedan chair. Between concerts, they entertained several visitors. First to appear were Fanny, Wilhelm, and Sebastian. Early in October, Fanny had written candidly to Cécile: “when anybody comes to talk to me about your beauty and your eyes, it makes me quite cross. I have had enough of hearsay, and beautiful eyes were not made to be heard.” 55 Two days after Cécile’s twentieth birthday (October 10), Fanny finally met her sister-in-law and was won over: “I consider Felix most fortunate,” she wrote Klingemann, “for though inexpressibly fond of him, she does not spoil him, but when he is capricious treats him with an equanimity which will in course of time most likely cure his fits of irritability altogether.” 56 And to her diary Fanny confided how happy she was that he had found a wife who exercised such an agreeable, calming influence on him. 57

  On October 23 the Novellos arrived—Vincent, his wife, Mary, and their daughters Emma and Clara. They had tea with Felix and Cécile, and heard Felix and Fanny play duets. Something of a prig, Clara found the Gewandhaus “small and frightfully painted in yellow, the benches arranged that one sits as if in an omnibus—and no lady and gentleman ever are allowed to sit together here or in their churches.” 58 Nevertheless, the soprano’s appearances, including her debut on November 2, with an aria from Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito and “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma , created a sensation. Felix praised her “purity of intonation” and “thoroughbred musical feeling.” 59 And two weeks later, Clara won acclaim as a soloist in Mozart’s arrangement of Handel’s Messiah , conducted by Felix in the Paulinerkirche.

  One week before (November 7), Charles and Adelaide Kemble paid Felix and Cécile a visit. Avoiding bankruptcy by promoting the acting career of his daughter Fanny—she married an American plantation owner in 1834—the celebrated Shakespearean now endeavored to launch a singing career for Adelaide. Felix judged her a dilettante but after an hour of singing was impressed by her passion and appearance (less charitable, Clara found her “like an Abbé in her black cassock dress—hair brushed away from thin face. All nose”). 60 But when Felix arranged a dinner party for thirty and prevailed upon the famous actor to recite Hamlet , Adelaide flung herself at her father’s feet and then insisted upon singing—in Cécile’s phrase, à casser les vitres (to break the windowpanes).

  During the winter of 1837 the Gewandhaus welcomed two other virtuosi of note. On November 13, the seventeen-year-old Henri Vieuxtemps performed a new violin concerto, 61 probably No. 2 in F# minor, Op. 19, designed to emulate Paganini’s technical brilliance. And on December 29, the pianist Adolf Henselt presented Weber’s Konzertstück and solo pieces. Subject to nervous anxiety, Henselt was known for the uncommonly wide span of his hands, which may explain his decision that day to perform Chopin’s first etude, Op. 10 No. 1, bristling with treacherously spaced arpeggiations that sometimes exceed a tenth. Felix found Henselt’s playing “exquisite” but doubted he would return to Leipzig; the moody pianist, who typically expended his energies the day of a concert in practicing, could not control his nerves. 62

  Felix himself appeared as soloist on October 19 to introduce the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor to a German audience. After returning from Birmingham, he fussed over the score before dispatching it to Breitkopf & Härtel in December. Its three connected movements replicate the external stylistic features of the G-minor Piano Concerto—in the first movement, the early entrance of the piano and telescoped orchestral tutti , in the second, a quiescent, nocturne-like Lied ohne Worte , and in the third, brilliant “piano fireworks” illuminating a scherzo-like rondo. 63 The outer movements balance the demands of virtuosity and the artistic integrity of the work. Thus, the piano initially enters with a series of cadenza-like passages that interrupt the orchestra as it attempts to “discover” the principal theme—a conceit later exploited powerfully by Liszt in his first piano concerto (1849). The head motive of Felix’s first theme later reemerges in a canonic elaboration in the development, a bit of counterpoint that suggests almost a symphonic elaboration. On the other hand, Felix’s concessions to virtuosity include a “three-hand,” Thalbergian second theme ( ex. 11.4a ), and a related texture in the finale, where the second theme appears in the soprano (fourth and fifth fingers of the right hand), beneath which the two hands divide a stream of harplike arpeggiations, while the left provides a bass line in octaves ( ex. 11.4b ).

  From Cologne, Felix received an invitation to direct the 1838 Lower Rhine festival; from Vienna, a diploma citing him as an honorary member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music). 64 Tending to Cécile, arranging his wine cellar, and reading Dickens’s new novel Pickwick Papers , Felix relaxed in his comfortable surroundings. The birth of Rebecka’s second son, Felix Dirichlet, reinforced his contentment, and his domestic bliss found expression in several minor works, including the sentimental love song Im Kahn , sent to Charlotte Moscheles on December 12. 65 The intimate genre of the part-song stimulated his creativity, as he readied his first volume, the Sechs Lieder im Freien zu singen (Six Songs for Singing Outdoors, Op. 41) for publication. 66 But the principal new work of the winter was Psalm 42, Op. 42, sketched during the honeymoon. In October, Felix gathered some friends (Cécile took a soprano part and Felix the alto), 67 who, fortified by Rheinwein, made a “wondrous bellowing” as they read the manuscript. He recast the work in December and premiered it on New Year’s Day 1838, with Clara Novello as the soprano soloist.

  Ex. 11.4a: Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40 (1837), First Movement

  Ex. 11.4b: Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40 (1837), Finale

  During his lifetime Op. 42 became one of his most popular sacred choral works. For Robert Schumann, it attained the “highest summit” available to “modern church music,” 68 but the twentieth century criticized the composition for excessive sentimentality. Philip Radcliffe found the restrained chordal accompaniment of the opening chorus “dangerously near that of a slow waltz,” 69 and Eric Werner attributed to the concluding fugue, on a doxology added by Felix, an “unpleasantly unctuous character which reminds us of bad preachers.” 70 Early on, Ferdinand Hiller recognized that the work’s “tender and longing pathos … is based on a foundation of perfect trust in God, and the subdued sentiment … may well harmonize with the blissful feelings of deep happiness which penetrated him at the time.” 71 In its revised form the work achieved a symmetry that indeed seems to mirror his marital harmony: seven movements, anchored by choruses at the end and midpoints (Nos. 1, 4, and 7), and balanced by soprano recitatives and solos (Nos. 2–3 and 5–6), supported by female and male choruses (Nos. 3 and 6). Tying the euphonious complex together is the unifying head motive of the opening chorus ( ex. 11.5a ). Its gentle s
tepwise motion and ascending fourth are reworked in No. 4 ( ex. 11.5b ), where the rising figure is reversed downward to adumbrate the fugal subject of No. 7.

  Ex. 11.5a: Mendelssohn, Psalm 42, Op. 42 (1837), First Movement

  Ex. 11.5b: Mendelssohn, Psalm 42, Op. 42 (1837), No. 4

  Rather than depicting a soul in distress, the serene beginning (“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God”) projects an idealized approach to God through carefully regulated dissonances. The aria “My soul thirsteth for God” individualizes the struggle through alternating phrases in the oboe and soprano and suggests a “religious drama expressed in music.” 72 But the addition of female and male choruses and return of the full chorus for the refrainlike fifth and eleventh verses (“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why are thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God”) expands the scope from the particular to the general. The composition ends with a broadening, universal song of praise—an addition buttressed by trombones and the organ—that traces, as in St. Paul , a course of emotional and spiritual Steigerung .

  Under less than ideal conditions Op. 42 received its premiere. Clara Novello was suffering from a severe cold, as was Felix, who lost hearing in one ear for several days. But he maintained the concert schedule (at least five appearances in January alone) and presided over Novello’s farewell concert on January 8, when he performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. As the time for Cécile’s confinement approached, Felix remained immersed in professional concerns. He reviewed four potential opera subjects, reacted with alarm when he received an unsolicited text for Elijah from the Reverend J. Barry, 73 published two Lieder in a supplement to Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , 74 and released the six part-songs Op. 41 to Breitkopf & Härtel.

  Designed for performance outdoors, the choral songs fall into two groups. The first four are strophic and reuse music for successive verses. Only the last two songs introduce contrasting music for internal stanzas. Throughout the opus the music aspires toward folksong; indeed, Felix sequestered the three Heine settings (Nos. 2–4) as Drei Volkslieder . The texts celebrate nature as a colorful canopy that envelops human realms, and the music responds by suggesting a communion with the natural world: in No. 1 (Im Walde ), twittering birds are oblivious to human sorrows; in No. 4 (Auf ihrem Grab ), a linden tree grows above the grave of deceased lovers; in No. 5 (Mailied ), spring erupts in May; and in No. 6 (Auf dem See ), a traveler finds nourishment and new blood in the “free” world. We are to imagine the music as a spontaneous reaction triggered by various naturalistic settings. There is a freshness about these compositions and at times a sweetness (e.g., reliance on subdominant harmonies) that some twentieth-century commentators found maudlin.

  Shortly after celebrating his twenty-ninth birthday, Felix finished the String Quartet in E ♭ major, Op. 44 No. 3. The following day, February 7, Cécile gave birth to their first child, Carl Wolfgang Paul, named after Zelter and Klingemann (Carl), Goethe (Wolfgang), and St. Paul. The proud father described his son as a strong, stout child who had his mother’s blue eyes and snub nose. 75 Now Felix eagerly invited Lea to attend the baptism, scheduled for her birthday, March 15. But Lea remained in Berlin, as did Rebecka and Fanny, and Paul and Albertine made the twelve-hour journey to Leipzig and stood as godparents. Instead, Fanny represented her brother’s interests by attending the rehearsals for a Singakademie performance of Paulus (she was appalled to find a tuba had replaced the organ part). And she performed Felix’s Piano Concerto in G minor at a charity concert on February 19—one of her few documented public appearances as a pianist. 76 A critic for the English Athenaeum found her playing “bore a strong family resemblance to her brother’s in its fire, neatness, and solidity,” and opined that had she “been a poor man’s daughter, she would have been known throughout the world … as a female pianist of the highest order.” 77

  In February and March Felix directed a series of historical concerts, arranged according to the “succession of the most famous masters from one hundred or more years ago up to the present time.” The impetus for this musicological programming may have been an ambitious concept the Dresden musician Carl Kloss had shared with Felix during the summer of 1835 78 —a plan for concert cycles encompassing pre-Christian and Christian eras. Kloss contemplated reviving Egyptian, Hebraic, Greek, and Roman music (how is not clear), and then, after leaping over the Middle Ages and Renaissance, examining baroque music of early eighteenth-century composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Durante. Bach was positioned as the culmination of the fugal style; Chopin, the epitome of the new romantic school. Far more circumscribed, Felix’s series began with Bach and continued through Beethoven. On the first concert (February 15), Felix directed Bach’s orchestral Suite in D (BWV 1068) and performed the Violin Sonata in E (BWV 1016) with David. The balance of the program included Handel’s Zadok the Priest , an overture and scene of Gluck, and a violin concerto by Viotti. The second program (February 22), built around Haydn, offered a piano trio, selections from The Creation , and a “curiously melancholy piece” in which the musicians finished by extinguishing the candles on their stands—the Farewell Symphony. The third concert (March 1) featured works by Mozart (among them the Piano Concerto in C minor, K. 491, for which Felix crafted a brilliant cadenza in the first movement), his “nemesis” Salieri, and the Frenchman E. N. Méhul, composer of the dark, exotic Ossianic opera Uthal (1806). And the fourth (March 8), introduced by compositions of Abbé Vogler and Carl Maria von Weber, culminated with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Pastoral Symphony. Felix then devoted the last two subscription concerts of the season (March 22 and 29) to “all possible modernities,” 79 chiefly selections from Italian operas of Bellini, Rossini, and Mercadante, but, significantly, no works by himself.

  Today these concerts seem utterly naive—Handel and Bach challenged by Viotti, Haydn by Righini, Mozart by Salieri, and Beethoven by the eccentric, (perhaps) charlatan, Vogler. The coupling of musical giants and now largely forgotten figures as “the most famous masters” in fact betrays the beginnings of European canon formation in music. Discernible in Felix’s programming is a main line of German music descending from Bach and Handel through Mozart and Haydn to Weber and Beethoven. Also implicit is the recognition of distinct historical styles—the baroque, classical, and modern (romantic), and, further, the notion of a classic-romantic dialectic, under development in the intellectual discourse of the 1830s before it became a conceptual commonplace.

  IV

  Felix’s own muse remained restless in the early months of 1838. He procured from Droysen a text on the subject of the Nausicaa episode in The Odyssey (Book VI), but feared its length approached an oratorio rather than the shorter choral work he envisioned. 80 Meanwhile, in London, the librettist of Weber’s Oberon , J. R. Planché, agreed to write an opera libretto for Felix, and the two began a correspondence. 81 Felix preferred a serious opera in two or three acts (not the five of French grand opera) on a historical subject, with contrasting light roles and many choruses. Planché was to avoid subjects drawn from current popular operas; Felix suggested the ideal lay somewhere between Beethoven’s Fidelio , centered on a “virtuous, heroical deed,” and Cherubini’s Les deux journées , with the sinister figure of Cardinal Mazarin, who could “remind us of history… and … of our present time.” Planché thought a suitable topic was Edward III’s Siege of Calais in 1347 and forwarded a sketch in April. But Felix’s characteristic captiousness now prevailed: his probing uncovered problems with the plot, and the principal characters seemed to act as men bound by the action rather than “their own human feeling, as real living people do.” By October 1839, the project had run aground.

  Felix closed the winter 1838 season with a special appearance. When the Bohemian contralto Caroline Botgorschek implored him to perform on her benefit concert (April 2), he conceived in two days the Serenade und Allegro giojoso for piano and orchestra, Op. 43, and left fifteen bars in the piano blank, for completion during
the performance. 82 Introduced by a plaintive piano solo in B minor, this work joins a pensive Lied ohne Worte to a festive rondo in D major built around two alternating subjects, a staccato, scherzando figure and a contrasting lyrical theme supported by rippling arpeggiations. The ease with which Felix dispatched this bravura piece is underscored by another remarkable deed: he also composed at this time a Festgesang for chorus and piano, commissioned in the middle of March by the Tyrolean music dilettante Anton Christanell for the birthday of the Austrian emperor Ferdinand I (April 19). Discovered in a Russian archive by Christoph Hellmundt in 1996, 83 the Festgesang was finished on March 30, 1838, amid work on the Serenade . Though a minor occasional piece, the Festgesang bears scrutiny: Felix later recast its ceremonial subject ( ex. 11.6 ) in the opening of the Lobgesang Symphony of 1840 (see ex. 12.2 , p. 398).

  Early in April, he finished a setting of Psalm 95, revised in 1839 and 1841 and released in 1842 as Op. 46. Then, bowing to family pressure, he escorted Cécile and Carl to Berlin, so that Rebecka at last could meet his wife. For several weeks, the family enjoyed a happy reunion (only Paul, pursuing business in Hamburg, was away). Felix and Cécile indulged in what Fanny described as a “double counterpoint” of music and painting, imitating her own lifestyle with Wilhelm. 84 Felix brought Bach cantatas to share with Fanny and prepared for the twentieth Lower Rhine Music Festival in Cologne, where he arrived on May 25. After negotiations with the festival committee, he succeeded in introducing Bach’s music on the program for the first time. The two-day Pentecost festival (June 3–4, 1838) began with a symphony by Ferdinand Ries, followed by the obligatory Handel oratorio, in this case, Joshua . On the second day Felix performed a Mozart symphony, an overture by Cherubini, Beethoven’s patriotic cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick , and what Felix billed as an Ascension Day cantata by J. S. Bach. This work was in fact a fabrication consisting of movements chosen from the Ascension Cantata No. 43 (Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen ), an aria and chorale from No. 25 (Es ist nichts gesundes an meinem Leibe ), and the opening double chorus from No. 50 (Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft ). Insisting on using organ for the Handel and Bach, Felix prepared parts for the oratorio and cantata. The orchestral and choral forces for this gargantuan spectacle totaled some seven hundred musicians.