Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Preceding the festivities was the premiere on June 23 of Albert Lortzing’s new comic Singspiel about the life of Hans Sachs, the legendary sixteenth-century Meistersänger from Nürnberg whom Richard Wagner repopularized in his music drama of 1868. Then, on June 24, the bustling Leipzig Marktplatz became the site of several ceremonies, including a church service, dedication of a new statue of Gutenberg, and speech by Raymund Härtel, who likened the inventor to the “John the Baptist of the Reformation.” 47 For the occasion, Felix composed a Festgesang for male chorus and double brass band (trumpets, horns, trombones, ophicleide, and timpani), spatially separated to generate echo effects in the square. Performed by a chorus of two hundred, with sixteen trumpets and twenty trombones, the composition made quite an impression; Felix assured Lea that not even Spontini, never one to resist fustian effects, would have been able to say, encore deux violins . 48 The text, by a Gymnasium teacher from Freiberg, Adolf Proelss, summarized in rather insipid verses the principal metaphors of the festival—Gutenberg as a German hero who had lit a symbolic torch, the victory of light over darkness through the dissemination of printing, and the role of the festival as a Lobgesang , or hymn of praise. While the Festgesang resounded over the square, members of the printing guild plied their trade, and printed copies of a Lied were distributed from a local press and sung as the new statue was unveiled. 49

  To underscore the ceremonial, quasi-sacred function of the Festgesang , Felix framed the work with well-known Lutheran chorales, Sei Lob und Ehr der höchsten Gut and Nun danket alle Gott , to which he fitted Proelss’s verses. The two internal movements included antiphonal effects for “The Lord spoke, let there be light!” (No. 3) and a Lied destined to become one of Felix’s most famous compositions (No. 2, ex. 12.1 ). Sung largely in unison to an accompaniment of brass chords, Felix’s melody extolled Gutenberg and the Vaterland . One year later the melody was pressed into service for the unveiling of a monument to Hermann, who centuries before had defeated the Romans in the Teutoburger forest. 50 Then, in 1843, Felix corresponded with Buxton about a suitable text for an English edition: “If the right [words] are hit at, I am sure that piece will be liked very much by the singers and the hearers, but it will never do to sacred words. There must be a national and merry subject found out, something to which the soldierlike and buxom motion of the piece has some relation….” 51 Felix never found a suitable English text, but in 1856, the young organist William H. Cummings discovered that the words of Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” readily fitted the melody. 52 By 1861, the new contrafactum had appeared in a hymnal, and begun its second life as a Christmas carol.

  Ex. 12.1 : Mendelssohn, Festgesang (1840), No. 2

  The culmination of the festival came on June 25, when Felix conducted three ceremonial works in a crowded Thomaskirche: Weber’s Jubel Overture, which cited the Saxon anthem Gott segne Sachsenland (to the melody of “God save the King”), Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum , and the premiere of the Lobgesang , published the following year as Op. 52. Employing biblical texts, principally from the psalms, the symphony tied together the principal threads of the festival into a patriotic offering of thanksgiving. The work, three orchestral movements chain-linked to a cantata of nine movements, traced the triumph of light over darkness and celebrated Gutenberg’s invention as the disseminator of God’s word through the printed Lutheran Bible. (For the first edition of the score, Felix appended as a motto a quotation from Luther’s sacred song book of 1525: “Rather I wished to see all the arts, especially music, serving Him who gave and created them.”) But though the initial response was overwhelmingly favorable, the composition would enjoy a curiously mixed reception—among the most popular of Felix’s works during his lifetime, it also prompted vigorous debate about its hybrid genre (part symphony, part cantata), insertion of chorales into the concert hall, and transparent reliance on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. 53

  Some of its detractors were not completely objective. In 1847 Felix’s estranged colleague A. B. Marx published a substantial essay in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in which he dismissed the work as an ill-conceived imitation of the Ninth. Whereas in his finale Beethoven had opposed instrumental and choral forces for different ends, in the Lobgesang Felix allied two statements of the same idea: an abstract, instrumental hymn of praise prepared a (redundant) vocal utterance of that praise. The result was a pale imitation of Beethoven that lacked inner necessity. 54 Punning on Felix’s name, Fétis rejected the Lobgesang as an “unhappy” conception, 55 while in the essay Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) Wagner mocked the “full-throated” choral hymn of praise as unoriginal and, without identifying Felix, derided him as an example of “this or that composer” emboldened to write a choral symphony.

  Even some of Felix’s friends expressed public and private reservations. After comparing the soprano duet “Ich harrete des Herrn” (No. 5, “I waited for the Lord,” Psalm 40:1) to a glimpse of heaven adorned with Raphael’s Madonnas, Robert Schumann recommended the separation of the symphonic and choral movements, to their mutual advantage. 56 In a letter to Franz Hauser, Moritz Hauptmann wondered whether the symphonic movements were an “accessory” to the whole, and Hans von Bülow, who as a young boy had met Felix in April 1840 and later had piano instruction from him, found several parts pale and uninspired, though others not smudged by the stamp of genius. 57 The central issue concerned the work’s generic identity, and, indeed, the composer himself labored over this problem. Months before its premiere, Felix announced to Klingemann the work would probably be a small oratorio or large psalm setting. But the composer then quashed rumors that he was writing a major oratorio for the festival and labeled the work a symphony. After performing the Lobgesang at the Birmingham Musical Festival in September, self-doubt again tormented him, and, at Klingemann’s suggestion, Felix subtitled the work a Symphonie-Kantate . 58 By the end of November, he had finished revising the score, 59 which mainly involved adding three new solos to the cantata (Nos. 3, 6, and 9) and an organ part. In its final form the work then appeared from Breitkopf & Härtel in September 1841.

  If Beethoven emphasized in the Ninth the divide between the orchestral movements and choral finale (it begins, of course, by rejecting the themes of the three preceding movements), Felix aimed in the Lobgesang at a unified whole, in which the addition of text served to complement and explicate (but not disavow) the abstract symphonic form. Binding the binary complex together is the Ur -motive announced at the opening by the trombones ( ex. 12.2 ) and answered by the orchestra in ceremonial responsorial style. Related to the “Jupiter” motive and the intonation employed in Felix’s setting of Psalm 42, the figure is prominent throughout the first movement and anticipates the later addition of text. The symphonic movements contain other clear references to vocal models. Thus, a clarinet recitative links the first movement to the second, an expressive Allegretto in G minor, in the Trio of which Felix introduces a freely composed chorale melody in G major ( ex. 12.3 ). Intoned in the winds like a call to worship, the pseudochorale sounds vaguely familiar and prepares the third movement, in a devotional tempo marked Andante religioso . The cantata then begins by reasserting the intonation, to which the chorus adds the final verse of Psalm 150, “All that has life and breath, sing to the Lord.” Finally, the composition concludes with a recall of the motive, thus returning us to its opening and reaffirming its wholeness.

  Ex. 12.2 : Mendelssohn, Lobgesang Symphony, Op. 52 (1840), No. 1

  Ex. 12.3 : Mendelssohn, Lobgesang Symphony, Op. 52 (1840), Allegretto

  The formal designs of the wordless and vocal parts also reinforce that unity through a series of structural parallels, key relationships, and links between movements (diagram 12. 1 ). The three symphonic parts chart a tonal descent, from B ♭ major to G minor/major and D major. Similarly, the first half of the through-composed cantata (Nos. 2–5) unfolds a downward tonal spiral, this one by thirds (B ♭ –g–E ♭ –c), to suggest a symbolic plunge into dar
kness. The midpoint, No. 6 (“The sorrows of death had closed all around me,” Psalm 116:3), presents Felix’s most dissonant vein. In a tenor recitative based on Isaiah 21, the question “Watchman, will the night soon pass?” is posed three times, at successively higher pitch levels, in a dramatic technique reminiscent of Stephen’s recitative in Paulus . A soprano heralds the lifting of darkness, celebrated in the radiant D-major chorus, “The night is departing” (No. 7, Romans 13:12). Then the chorale Nun danket alle Gott appears in G major (No. 8, the very chorale and key Felix had employed in the Festgesang ) and gives meaning to the voiceless chorale in the Allegretto of the Sinfonia . The final two movements, which culminate in a celebratory fugue, return us to B ♭ major and thus reverse the tonal descent of the symphonic movements to suggest the triumph of light over darkness.

  Diagram 12.1 : Mendelssohn, Lobgesang Symphony, Op. 52 (1840)

  Much of the debate that swirled around the Lobgesang concerned its relationship to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. For some critics, the Lobgesang failed because it imitated that colossus too directly; it flew, Icarus-like, too “close to the center of the musical solar system.” 60 But the response to Beethoven was only part of Felix’s strategy. Mark Evan Bonds has shown how Felix’s score invokes a variety of historical models, and “relativizes” the Ninth by incorporating references to other composers, including Handel (the anthem Zadok the Priest ) and Schubert (the “Great” Symphony). 61 We might note too that references to Beethoven are not limited to the Ninth; in the first movement, for example, the second theme is remarkably similar to one from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 22, in the same key ( ex. 12.4 ). And certainly the heralded chorales betray Felix’s urge to extend the symphonic tradition into the domain of Protestant church music. The result is a broad historical review that relates the German past to the present and summons various musical icons—symphony, cantata, oratorio elements, responsorial psalmody, and chorale—into the service of praising God. If the Lobgesang failed, it did so not by emulating the Ninth but by aspiring toward an unattainable comprehensiveness—a symphony-cum -cantata with the trappings of a sacred service, a concert piece created for a specific occasion but reaching toward musical universality.

  Ex. 12.4a: Mendelssohn, Lobgesang Symphony, Op. 52 (1840), No. 1

  Ex. 12.4b: Beethoven, Piano Sonata in B ♭ major, Op. 22 (1802), First Movement

  III

  Days after the Gutenberg Festival, Felix left Leipzig with David for Schwerin in Mecklenburg. At the Second North German Musical Festival (July 8–10, 1840), Felix directed Paulus and Haydn’s Die Schöpfung , and the two performed a piano and a violin concerto. On their return trip, they paused in Berlin and indulged in chamber music with Paul before reaching Leipzig on July 17. Seeing no rest in sight, Felix formally accepted the invitation to Birmingham in September and gave serious thought to a new concerto for David; to Chorley, Felix wrote he was now finishing the work, 62 though, in fact, the path to the Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, would prove circuitous indeed. By the end of the month, Felix was distracted by another project, an ambitious solo recital in the Thomaskirche of Bach organ works. To prepare he practiced for a week—so diligently, he reported to Lea, that on the streets of Leipzig his gait betrayed several awkward pedal passages. 63

  The goal of the concert (August 6, 1840) was to support Felix’s effort to place a new Bach monument near his residence adjacent to the Thomasschule. The program represented the primary genres associated with Bach’s organ music, the prelude and fugue (the “St. Anne” Fugue in E ♭ , BWV 552, and the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543), chorale setting (Schmücke dich, O liebe Seele , BWV 654), the rhapsodic toccata (BWV 565), the monumental Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582), and also the Pastorella in F major, BWV 590. 64 Framing the two parts of the program were two improvisations, Felix’s “modern” entry point into and departure from the baroque splendor of Bach’s music. While we know little about the first, labeled an “Introduction” to the Fugue in E=, Schumann identified the second as a Freie Phantasie . 65 Based on the Passion chorale O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden , the improvisation culminated in a fugal passage and included Bach’s musical signature, the motive B ♭ –A–C–B ♮ . The artful combination of these three elements impressed Schumann as a “finished composition.” Felix never published the improvisation, though he may have considered doing so: an undated autograph folio in the Bodleian Library transmits part of an organ composition that, after a harmonization of the chorale, leads to the beginning of a series of variations on the familiar melody. 66 The choice of key for the chorale, D minor, emphasizes the pitches B ♭ and A, the first two letters of Bach’s name, which appear no fewer than four times in the melody ( ex. 12.5 ). If the page represents Felix’s unfinished attempt to preserve the improvisation, only a small leap is needed to imagine how he would have insinuated the Thomascantor’s name into the music. Felix’s homage encouraged Robert Schumann’s own Bachian deliberations for organ: in 1845, he composed the Six Fugues on BACH, Op. 60, thus trying to perpetuate something of Felix’s “twofold mastery,” that of “one master emulating another.” 67

  Ex. 12.5 : Mendelssohn, Sketch of organ improvisation on O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (1840?)

  Physically depleted by the full summer schedule, Felix sought respite by visiting art galleries in Dresden with Cécile. But on his return he fell violently ill while swimming in a cold river and possibly suffered a stroke. Unconscious and in convulsions for hours, he was confined to his bedroom and endured debilitating headaches for two weeks. His trip to England in doubt, Felix conceded he understood what it meant to be seriously ill. 68 He recovered his strength and on September 6 joyfully welcomed the Hensels, returning from their yearlong Italian sojourn. Fanny found her brother weakened and pale but in good spirits. 69

  After departing from Leipzig in September 1839, Fanny and Wilhelm had met in Munich Felix’s old flame Delphine von Schauroth, now Delphine Hill Handley. Fanny found her improvisations and performance of one of Felix’s piano concertos especially impressive. 70 At Lake Como, where the snow-encrusted Alps yielded to a botanical paradise of aloes and figs, Fanny beheld Italy in all its beauty. By October they had reached Venice, ten years after Felix’s visit there, and followed his advice to contemplate Titian’s Assumption . Arriving in Rome on November 26, they found an apartment near the Monte Pincio and settled in for a six-month residence. Their connections gained them access to the private apartments, appointed in red damask and green curtains, of Pope Gregory XVI. But at the Sistine Chapel, Fanny was obliged to sit behind a grate with other women and, because of her astigmatism, could not see much of the services. Still, her acute ear compensated. Drawing on perfect pitch, as had Felix, she recorded portions of Allegri’s Miserere during Holy Week but was appalled at the quality of the singing. Formerly eighty strong, the papal choir now had shriveled to only nineteen voices that could not stay in tune; with each verset of the Miserere they dropped about a third of a pitch, so that the composition began in B major but sank to G. 71

  At the Villa Medici, the Hensels met the old and new directors of the French Academy, Horace Vernet, attired in Arabian dress, and the painter J.-A.-D. Ingres, an amateur violinist who knew Fanny’s brother Paul as a cellist, 72 and now played piano trios with her. A group of artists formed around Wilhelm, including the Prussians F. A. Elsasser, A. T. Kaselowsky, and Eduard Magnus, who later painted Felix’s portrait (see p. 500), and Ingres’s pupil Charles Dugasseau. Two young recipients of the Prix de Rome, Georges Bousquet and Charles Gounod, completed the circle. The impressionable Gounod, contemplating the priesthood and drawn to the liberal theology of the Dominican Père Lacordaire, was overwhelmed by Fanny’s talents. She seems to have inculcated him with a heavy dose of German music, including Bach concerti, Felix’s piano works, and the sonatas of Beethoven (Beethoven est un polisson —“Beethoven is a rascal”—Gounod exclaimed 73 after hearing Fanny play parts of Fidelio and a sonata, probably the Waldstein ). Armed with a letter o
f introduction from Fanny, Gounod later visited Felix in Leipzig and emulated his style in several works, including the vivacious First Symphony (1855).

  Continuing south in June 1840 the Hensels visited Naples, where they encountered the singer Pauline Viardot, sister of Marie Malibran. After exploring the Sorrentine coast, the Hensels made a fatiguing excursion to Vesuvius on Sebastian’s tenth birthday. By horseback they reached lava flows, still warm from the eruption of the preceding year; then, for the final ascent, Fanny was carried up one of the cones to “Satan’s headquarters.” After Wilhelm visited Sicily in July, the family proceeded to Genoa and Milan, and met Ferdinand Hiller near Lake Como before their reunion with Felix. Fanny shared her musical impressions of Italy, some of which were recorded in her piano cycle of 1841, Das Jahr ; Felix reciprocated by playing the Lobgesang . He announced his intention to spend a year in Italy after the end of the next concert season, when his contract expired. On September 10 Felix “signed” a newly drawn portrait by Hensel that revealed a slender, pensive composer with thinning hair and, perhaps, traces of his recent illness. 74 The following day, he left for England, while the Hensels departed for Berlin.

  One week later, Felix reported his safe arrival in London; happily, he had not succumbed to seasickness during the crossing from Calais. 75 After a day in London, he traveled with Moscheles via the new train service to Birmingham, where Joseph Moore again greeted him as an honored guest. In the three years since Felix’s last visit, the pace of industrialization had accelerated, and he now recorded a view of the city dominated by smokestacks (plate 14 ), like so many harbingers of Dickens’s Coketown, that town of “tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever.” 76 During the four-day festival (September 22–25), Felix made several appearances. He conducted the Lobgesang , in which the aging tenor John Braham sang, performed the Piano Concerto in G minor, and offered works by Bach and an improvisation on the new organ in Town Hall. Between concerts Felix also regaled a smaller group of friends with private demonstrations of his organ playing. The Lobgesang did not fail to impress Victorian tastes; Moscheles reported that at the entrance of Nun danket alle Gott the audience “rose involuntarily from their seats—a custom usually confined in England to the performance of the Hallelujah Chorus.” 77 After spending an extra day in Birmingham so as not to offend his host, Felix returned to London on September 26.