Though Felix’s duties were ill-defined, the press readily publicized his call to Berlin. The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik reported his salary as 3000 thalers and convinced some he now enjoyed a cosseted existence as royal Kapellmeister. 3 As if justifying the effort to bring him to the capital, the king finally ordered in September a dramatic production shared by Felix and Ludwig Tieck. The aging poet, summoned from Dresden as the monarch’s Vorleser , or chief court reader, would undertake a revival of classical and Shakespearean drama, for which Felix would compose music. The collaboration began with the Antigone of Sophocles, available in a new, metrically reliable German translation by the Stuttgart Gymnasium-director J. J. C. Donner. For Tieck, the final play of the Oedipus trilogy was “nearer in feeling to modern Christian associations” 4 than any other Greek tragedy. A favorite in German letters, Antigone crystallized a fundamental issue confronting the new monarch’s vision of modern Prussia—the relationship between individual and state. The play treats the moral dilemma of Oedipus’s daughter, determined to provide a proper burial for her brother Polynices. He has led an insurrection against Thebes, and, in a double fratricide, died fighting against his brother. The regent Creon assumes power and decrees that Polynices’s corpse lie disgraced on the battlefield, without burial rites. Antigone disobeys the edict and is condemned to death. But her end precipitates further tragedies—the suicides of her betrothed, Haemon (Creon’s son), and Eurydice (his wife). Thus, Creon’s “high and mighty words and ways/are flogged to humbleness, till age,/beaten to its knees, at last is wise.” 5
Though Tieck was unconvinced by the wisdom of adding “autonomous” music to Sophocles, 6 Felix was eager to pursue the project and dispatched music for the choruses in less than three weeks. 7 Rehearsals began at the end of September for the private premiere before the court in Potsdam on the evening of October 28. Present were the royal family and other nobility, ministers, military officers, diplomats, clergy, and Berlin intelligentsia—some two hundred invited guests, including Fanny and Meyerbeer 8 (only a month before, he had left Berlin for a three-week cure in order to avoid encountering Felix). 9
Felix described the performance to his old friend, the philologist Droysen, as a “private amusement,” 10 but the play resonated with timeless themes relevant to Frederick William’s reign. Thus, the court, intent upon bolstering the post-Napoleonic Restoration and resisting constitutional reform, viewed sympathetically Creon, who upheld the legitimacy of the state and restored Thebes after Polynices’s insurrection. Whether, as Michael P. Steinberg has suggested, Felix’s score betrayed his identification with the Antigone-Creon, outsider vs. state conflict—his relationship to German Jewry, on the one hand, and state-validated Protestantism, on the other—remains open to debate, 11 but one point bears emphasis. Now essentially forgotten, Felix’s Antigone enjoyed extraordinary popularity during his lifetime. After a second Potsdam performance on November 6, the king authorized its public premiere at the Berlin Schauspielhaus on April 13, 1842—“thus long the authorities had hesitated to bring the work before the general public,” Devrient recalled in his memoirs of 1869. Within three weeks, a broad public enthusiastically received six more performances: the “solemn and religious tone” of Felix’s score “delighted and edified even the lower strata of the public,” 12 who no doubt sympathized with Antigone, not Creon. Frederick William had a medallion commemorating the production struck, 13 and performances burgeoned throughout Germany and abroad. In Leipzig, where Antigone reached the theater as early as March 5, 1842, a philhellenic craze took hold, parodied in Albert Lortzing’s comic opera Der Wildschütz (1842), in which the provincial schoolmaster Baculus masquerades as a classicist versed in Sophocles. By 1845 the English were mounting a production at Covent Garden, where forty-five consecutive performances occurred that year alone. One distinctive feature of the English version—the addition of “ballet girls” during the Dionysos chorus—must have exasperated Felix, though he found amusing two Antigone caricatures in an issue of Punch for January 18, 1845, one of which presented the “Chorus-master, with his plaid trousers shewing underneath.” 14
Along with Tieck, Felix conferred with the classicist P. A. Böckh, who rented rooms at Leipzigerstrasse No. 3 during the 1840s, and Eduard Devrient, who played Haemon. Modern music now engaged classical erudition, a rapprochement Felix found stimulating. With Böckh Felix reviewed the Greek prosody and retouched Donner’s translation. Felix himself rendered into German some choruses, including the first ode, sung to celebrate the end of the Theban civil war; and even after the premiere, Böckh continued tinkering with the German, to respect as precisely as possible Sophocles’s dactyls and internal choriambs. 15 The whole project must have seemed vaguely familiar: some fifteen years before, Felix had fidgeted over his translation of Terence’s Andria , though there was then no prospect of composing music for the Latin comedy.
According to Devrient, Felix seriously thought of approximating the putative musical practices of antiquity by restricting the chorus to singing in a chantlike unison or recitative and limiting the instruments to modern “counterparts” of the aulos, salpinx, and lyre—the flute, tuba, and harp. He soon abandoned the plan, as Devrient explains, lest the choral chant became “tedious and unmusical,” and the “accompaniments for so few instruments” made “the whole appear as a mere puerile imitation of the ancient music, about which after all we knew nothing.” 16 Instead, Felix scored for a modern orchestra (double winds, brass with paired horns and trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp, and strings) that could be applied in whole or in parts. 17 He assigned the choral odes to an ensemble of sixteen men (divisible into two groups of eight), of whom one served as the coryphaeus , or leader.
The actors delivered most of their lines without music; but a few passages, in which Sophocles specified interaction between the actors and chorus, required other solutions. Felix resorted here primarily to melodrama, in which a muted orchestral backdrop supported the spoken text. But in a few passages, he experimented with a novel form of rhythmic speech, by bending the musical accompaniment to the natural inflections of the text. Devrient reports the experiment may have been inspired by a technique in Prince Radziwill’s incidental music to Faust (1831). Felix intended a type of delivery in which the text approached musical expression, at least rhythmically. No. 4, which follows Haemon’s plea to Creon to spare Antigone’s life, illustrates the technique. The section begins with the third ode, in which the chorus sings in the style of a male part-song of “love untamed/lighting on largess/with spoils/all night upon a maiden’s cheek.” Guards now escort the condemned Antigone onstage, as the chorus turns from major to minor mode. The orchestra imitates its dirgelike strains ( ex. 13.1 a ) and pauses with sustained chords; then, Antigone declaims, “See me friends and citizens,/Look on this last walk.” For the lines, “No wedding march, no bridal song/Can cheer my way,/whom Hades Lord of the dark lake weds,” she shifts to rhythmic speech, softly supported by pianissimo winds ( ex. 13.1b ). In a letter to George Macfarren, Felix clarified that the winds were to follow Antigone, and not vice versa, in this eerie meeting of music and spoken text. 18
In contrast to musical concessions to modernity, Tieck and Böckh made efforts to replicate a historically “authentic” performance space. The Neues Palais theater was rebuilt according to theories of the neoclassical architect H. C. Genelli. The proscenium, the arena of the actors, was raised five feet above the orchestra, which, accommodating the musicians and the chorus, remained visible from every seat in the house. In the middle of the orchestra was the thymele , or Dionysian altar. Justified by Böckh as necessary for the sixth choral ode, the paean to Bacchus, the thymele was in fact ungriechish , for it concealed the anachronistic souffleur , or prompter. Connecting the stage to the orchestra were two descending sets of stairs. There was no curtain, so that the actors and chorus entered from the sides, and in lieu of sets a back wall to represent Creon’s palace (through a door, opened near the end of the play, the audie
nce could see soldiers bearing the body of Eurydice—for Böckh an incomparable image 19 ). In visual terms, the audience experienced a tragedy of antiquity; in musical terms, Felix’s score mediated between modern genres (e.g., the overture, the male part-song) and antique musical representations (e.g., metrical choral odes, and recitatives, familiar to audiences from an operatic tradition ultimately based on Greek drama).
Ex. 13.1a: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), No. 4
Ex. 13.1b: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), No. 4
Felix’s score comprises a short orchestral overture and seven numbers—the first choral stasimon , or ode, in which the chorus enters the orchestra, five additional stasima that articulate the dramatic segments of the tragedy, and the concluding lines, in which the chorus exits. Instead of a full overture, Felix wrote a compact, bipartite introduction to establish the conflict between Creon and Antigone. We hear first ceremonial music in majestic dotted rhythms ( ex. 13.2 a ) and imitative counterpoint, symbols of the Theban state. As this solemn exordium approaches a cadence, the music swerves to a passionate Allegro, harmonically unstable, and featuring a widely flung, agitated melody in the violins, evidently Felix’s depiction of Antigone, who does not bow to Creon’s edict ( ex. 13.2b ). The choral odes follow more predictable plans; strophically organized, they observe Sophocles’s regular division between strophes and antistrophes. Conceiving the music for the odes to highlight the shifting responses of the chorus to the unfolding drama, Felix identified seven Stimmungen : “victory and the dawn of day, restful contemplation, melancholy, love, mourning, song to Bacchus, and, at the end, serious warning.” 20
Ex. 13.2a: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), Overture
Ex. 13.2b: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), Overture
The music ranges from the celebratory entrance ode, with rising, optimistic triadic figures, to No. 2, a calming, pastoral reflection about the nature of man; No. 3, a melancholy comment, alternating between a soloist and the chorus, on the house of Labdacus, beset by calamity; and No. 4, an ode to love, scored for alternating brass choir and chorus in block chords. In No. 5, the chorus recounts in unison other Greek figures who shared Antigone’s fate. In No. 6, encored at the Potsdam premiere, the chorus begins its appeal to Bacchus in a festive mood that becomes more desperate, with pleas to the divinity to save his favorite city, “shadowed by plague,” from impending calamity ( ex. 13.3 ). The final number, which commences as Creon’s lament before turning to the choral admonition against “high and mighty words,” ends in C minor, reviving the key of the orchestral introduction and thus completing the tragic circle. But the sobering pedal points and inexorably descending lines of the closing seem to recall the poignancy of another final chorus. Was Felix alluding to the last movement of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion ( ex. 13.4 ), also in C minor, and a powerful link to the German past and Christian adumbrations Tieck detected in Sophocles? It seems plausible that Felix used modern means not to reclothe a timeless drama in modernity but to reconcile what Franz Brendel in 1845 described as the “most extreme antitheses, the inwardness of Christian music and the ‘externality’ of the Greek-plastic principle.” 21
Ex. 13.3a: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), No. 6
Ex. 13.3b: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), No. 6
Ex. 13.4a: Mendelssohn, Antigone , Op. 55 (1841), No. 7
Ex. 13.4b: J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion (1727), “Wir setzen uns mit Thränen”
I
On October 13, 1841, three days after the completion of Antigone , the king appointed Felix royal Prussian Kapellmeister 22 but issued no other musical commissions. Instead, Felix worked on a piano arrangement of the Lobgesang for the queen and began to realize a symphonic project that had haunted him for years—the Scottish Symphony. 23 He also continued the search for a suitable opera libretto. Early in 1841 Felix had received a proposal that he write a new opera with Eugène Scribe for the Paris Opéra but declined, unable to meet the condition that Felix attend the premiere; 24 when pressed by the Mainz music publisher Schott, eager to secure the rights to the collaboration, Felix replied that he would write for the German, not the French stage. 25 From England the chemist, amateur musician, and floral illustrator William Bartholomew (1793–1867) sent two libretti. Titania, or the Christmas Night’s Dream was an attempt to inspire the creator of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture to conceive “similar picturesque strains.” 26 Unconvinced, Klingemann found the piece lacked “dramatic interest” and suggested “the time for fairy-operas is gone” 27 ; Felix believed the fairies “would come out much better if a real earthly life would have been opposed to their fanciful one.” 28 Undeterred, Bartholomew then sent Felix a manuscript for an opera on Sappho, not “as the lascivious creature she is said to have been, but rather a noble soul struggling with a passion working strongly upon her too sensitive mind, until reason fails, wrought upon by superstition, and in the frenzy self destruction by ‘the lover’s leap’ ensues.” 29 The work would begin with a “choral symphony,” and Bartholomew imagined that the English text Felix would set would readily adapt to German without the need to alter much of the music. 30 Though nothing came of the plan—in June 1842 Felix replied that the text was more suitable for melodrama than opera 31 —the correspondence marked the beginning of a significant friendship: Bartholomew provided the translations for several of Felix’s major choral works, including Elijah . Yet another potential librettist emerged in the poet Adolf Böttger, who proposed the legend of St. Genoveva. Here too Felix chose to avoid the subject, for “our interest in Genoveva arises more from what she suffers … than from what she does, or from any dramatic business or action on her part.” 32 In this case, his instincts were justified; when Robert Schumann produced his Genoveva at mid-century, it enjoyed only a succès d’estime .
After the second Potsdam performance of Antigone , Felix escaped the royal indecision for a few weeks by visiting Leipzig, where he arrived on November 12 and was joined by Cécile, Paul, and Albertine on the 21st. Greeting Felix were David, the Dutch composer Johannes Verhulst, and Robert and Clara Schumann, among the first to hear the composer render the Scottish Symphony at the piano. 33 At the Gewandhaus Felix conducted two subscription concerts (November 13 and 25) and a benefit concert for the orchestral pension fund (November 22), and appeared on one of David’s Abendunterhaltungen (November 27). The major works performed were the Overtures to Weber’s Oberon and Cherubini’s Wasserträger , Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, and Violin Sonata in C minor, and Felix’s own Op. 51, selections from Op. 53, the revised version of Op. 46, Opp. 54 and 49, and selections from the first part of Paulus . On the 29th he returned to Berlin, to await the king’s pleasure. An invitation to direct the Lower Rhine Musical Festival in Düsseldorf in May 1842 stimulated correspondence with Julius Rietz, but otherwise the quietude of domestic life momentarily contrasted with the usually frenetic pace of his professional affairs.
As it happened, in December Felix found Fanny finishing a substantial composition, Das Jahr , piano character pieces on the twelve months, thirty-five years before Tchaikovsky completed a similar project in Les saisons . Composed between August 28 and December 23, 1841, Fanny’s cycle remained all but forgotten until late in the twentieth century. 34 Fanny herself saw through the press only one of the twelve, September (subtitled Am Flusse , By the Stream ), which she incorporated into her Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte , Op. 2 (1846), without reference to its temporal or aquatic imagery. A triplet figure, introduced in the middle register and flowing throughout the composition, provides the essential musical metaphor. Blended between it and a simple bass line is a haunting, meandering melody apportioned between the hands, an application of Thalberg’s three-hand technique ( ex. 13.5 a ). Songlike, the piece has several imaginative harmonic turns, as it flows and ebbs effortlessly from B minor to B major and back, and remains among Fanny’s most inspired creations.
Ex. 13.5a: Fanny Hensel, Das Jahr (1841),
September , published as Lied, Op. 2 No. 2 (1846)
Ex. 13.5b: J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion (1727), “Kommt, ihr Töchter”
Ex. 13.5c: Fanny Hensel, Das Jahr (1841), Nachspiel
Ex. 13.5d: Fanny Hensel, Das Jahr (1841), März
Ex. 13.5e: Mendelssohn, Serenade und Allegro giojoso , Op. 43 (1838)
Ex. 13.5f: Fanny Hensel, Das Jahr (1841), April
Ex. 13.5g: Mendelssohn, Capriccio brillant , Op. 22 (1832)
Whether she envisioned publishing the entire Das Jahr is unknown, although the manuscripts clearly reflect her aspirations to produce an estimable cycle transcending the limitations of the short character piece. Thus, she revised the work and prepared a handsome Reinschrift in which she recast June and tightened the cycle considerably through excisions and a bridge connecting April and May . 35 Her husband illustrated each month with a vignette, and together the couple provided descriptive verses that offer clues about the programmatic contents of the music. Thus, March , retitled Präludium und Choral , begins with muffled bells anticipating Easter, while October , resounding with horn calls, celebrates the hunt. Instead of twelve unrelated pieces we find a tautly organized collection with a clear key sequence (proceeding from sharp to flat keys, and concluding in the “neutral” C major and A minor), the use of thematic links (the dreamlike sequence January foreshadows material from February , May , June , and August ), and an overarching programmatic design organized around the Protestant calendar. Anchoring the cycle are March and December—Easter and Christmas—with chorales treating Christ’s resurrection and birth, Christ ist erstanden and Vom Himmel hoch . In addition, Fanny appended a short postlude (Nachspiel ) in A minor that cites the chorale Das alte Jahr vergangen ist and thus reflects on the “year” that has transpired. But between the subdued chorale phrases we hear a rising soprano figure and chromatically descending bass line, emblem of a lament. The forceful contrary motion and surprise turn to the major for the final cadence unmistakably betray their origins in the monumental opening of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” (“Come, ye daughters, help me lament,” ex. 13.5b, c ). Fanny’s cycle thus ends by looking ahead to Christ’s Passion, and the repetition of the cycle.
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