The powerful Bachian allusion links Das Jahr to Felix’s youthful deed, the 1829 revival of Bach’s masterpiece. 36 The cycle also betrays other ties to her brother. On one level are allusions to styles and genres associated with Felix, including the Lied ohne Worte (most notably June , subtitled Serenade , which imitates the Venetian Gondellieder ), part-song (May , subtitled Frühlingslied ), and elfin scherzo (February and the first part of December , where a blurry sixteenth-note figure creates the impression of a snowstorm). Then there are specific quotations and transformations of themes from Felix’s music, which occasionally intrude into the private, diarylike utterances of Fanny’s cycle. In March Fanny prepares the Easter chorale Christ ist erstanden by a dissonant phrase drawn from the Serenade und Allegro giojoso , Op. 43 ( ex. 13.5d, e ), while in April she reworks the second theme from the Capriccio brillant , Op. 22 ( ex. 13.5f, g ). Even the culminating variations on Vom Himmel hoch in December, which extend the chorale into a freely composed coda, recall similar techniques in Felix’s effulgent cantata on the same chorale (1831).
Some scholars have read Das Jahr as a musical travelogue, in which Fanny recorded experiences from her Italian sojourn of 1839–1840. 37 But in contrast to Felix’s Italian Symphony, little in Das Jahr is specifically Italianate, unless we hear the frolicsome February as carnival-like, 38 or the wistful June as depicting a Venetian lagoon. Like Felix, Fanny had attended services at St. Peter’s and was an acute student of Catholic monophony and polyphony; yet, she chose not to incorporate her impressions into Das Jahr . Thus, there is no chantlike procession, as in the slow movement of Felix’s symphony. Indeed, as if to affirm Fanny’s Lutheran faith, Protestant chorales identify Easter and Christmas. A thoroughly Germanic spirit permeates Das Jahr , which conjures up idealized images of Fanny’s spiritual and musical identities, as a fully assimilated Protestant and aspiring member of Felix’s musical confraternity. The musical memories of this annual cycle, related through the feminine perspective of a talented composer seeking increasingly challenging creative outlets, inevitably bring us back to Berlin.
II
Before the old year expired, Berlin was gripped by Lisztian frenzy late in December 1841. Since his Leipzig visit in March 1840, the virtuoso had traveled to England (where he introduced the term “recital” to describe his solo concerts) and performed for the ducal nobility of Weimar, where in 1848 he eventually would settle, ending his peripatetic concert life. Before departing Berlin early in March 1842, Liszt concertized at a marathon rate, performing some eighty compositions in twenty-one appearances, 39 initially at the Singakademie, and then, to accommodate the swelling audiences, at the Schauspielhaus. Felix, Spontini, and Meyerbeer greeted Liszt when he arrived in Berlin, and at his first concert (December 27), he used an English piano “owned by a famous composer resident in Berlin, himself a great pianist”—in other words, Felix. 40
In contrast to the Leipzigers, who had to be won over to Liszt, stolid Berliners readily succumbed to the mass hysteria Heinrich Heine dubbed Lisztmanie . A faddish cult surrounded the pianist, with female admirers swooning before him and collecting his personal effects like so many relics, and the Prussian court treating him as an Ersatz -nobleman. But privately, Felix vented his rage at Liszt’s musical licenses: “… Liszt pleases me here not half as much as in other locales, and has forfeited a good deal of my deep respect through all the silly tomfoolery he perpetrates not only on the public (which doesn’t hurt) but on the music itself. Here he has played pieces of Beethoven, Bach, Handel and Weber so wretchedly and inadequately, … that renditions by average performers would have given me much greater pleasure. Here he added six bars, there omitted seven; here he made false harmonies, and later introduced other similar corruptions, and there in the most gentle passages made a dreadful fortissimo , and, for what I know, all pathetic nonsense.” 41 Not surprisingly, when Liszt again asked to use Felix’s piano, he declined. 42 Still, the Hungarian’s triumph was complete: the Berlin Academy of Arts elected him a member, and later Frederick William awarded the pianist the Ordre pour le mérite , a new class of civilian distinction also conferred upon Felix and Meyerbeer. When Liszt left the Prussian capital on March 3, he departed in a carriage drawn by six white horses, accompanied by thousands of well-wishers.
Though upstaged by the virtuoso, Felix performed Paulus by royal command on January 10 in the Schauspielhaus, with soloists from the royal opera; the chorus, two hundred strong, included amateurs and members of the Singakademie, selected by a committee appointed by the king. 43 The receipts went to charity, and a newly composed sonnet commemorated Felix’s “magical waves of sound” that summoned the audience to a second (Christian) life. 44 The success was great enough to justify a second performance at the Singakademie on February 17, though the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung alluded to a division among that institution’s ranks, and Devrient reported that “some disagreeables” and sarcastic comments had emerged during the rehearsals that further embittered Felix. 45 Even his reception as an honorary member of the Singakademie on March 15 46 did not assuage the strained relationship to the academy.
On January 15, Felix completed a minor work for another society, Die Stiftungsfeier , a part-song for male chorus. More or less neglected in the literature, the work calls upon the society’s members to perpetuate the memory of those who established an “asylum of friendship” ( ex. 13.6 ). From the correspondence of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who also contributed to the undertaking, we learn the purpose—to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Society of Friends (Gesellschaft der Freunde ), 47 which Joseph Mendelssohn and other liberal Jews had founded in 1792 to promote mutual toleration and respect, and challenge Orthodox Judaism. “Though many have already departed,” the text reads, “their great, beautiful work endures. Let us lean on their teachings, that their work never perishes.”
Ex. 13.6 : Mendelssohn, Die Stiftungsfeier (1842)
Somehow the return to Berlin brought closure to the Scottish Symphony, Op. 56, which Felix dated on January 20, 1842, 48 and played through at the piano several times to Sterndale Bennett, who arrived in the Prussian capital the following day. 49 Felix decided to premiere it in Leipzig, and dispatched a score to the city on February 13. 50 Two days later, the two friends embarked on the eight-and-a-half-hour train ride to Leipzig. On February 28, Felix presided over the Gewandhaus concert of the English harpist Elias Parish-Alvars, sometimes credited with developing layered tissues of sound that anticipated Thalberg’s harplike, “three-hand” technique on the piano. 51 Then, at the nineteenth concert on March 3, Sterndale Bennett offered his Fourth Piano Concerto, and Felix premiered the Scottish Symphony. Finally, on March 5, he introduced in the municipal theater his music for Antigone . Initially, the new symphony caused some bewilderment, for Felix had specified its four movements be performed attacca , without pauses. But at its second performance, on March 17 by Karl Bach (the Leipzig theater Kapellmeister), the audience energetically demarcated the movements with bursts of applause. 52
The exact chronology of Felix’s final symphony has long vexed scholars. At Holyrood Palace in 1829, he had easily conceived the somber Andante opening, notated in piano score with instrumental cues for the orchestration. The moldering, ivy-covered ruins of Queen Mary’s chapel stimulated simple but powerfully evocative musical imagery: a rising figure, doubled at the octave, and gloomily scored for oboes and violas, that unfolded the A-minor triad in its form, E–A–C ( ex. 13.7 ). Despite Felix’s sporadic efforts to work on the composition during the 1830s, the symphonic kernel appears to have lain dormant until his return to Berlin in 1841. 53 In the meantime, the figure found an expressive outlet in another context: the wintry schlechtes Wetter of the overture to Die erste Walpurgisnacht (1832, see p. 270). Felix thus seems to have associated Goethe’s medieval Druids on the Harz Mountains with their Scottish cousins.
Ex. 13.7 : Mendelssohn, Scottish Symphony, Op. 56 (1842), Andante con moto
At the premiere Felix performed the sy
mphony without reference to its extramusical inspiration; still, for a reporter of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , much of the score displayed a folk character. 54 Somehow Robert Schumann confounded the composition with the unpublished Italian Symphony, and, in a critical misfire, imagined in its opening “ancient melodies sung in lovely Italy.” 55 But the Leipzig audience would have had little difficulty relating the symphony to Scotland, for its musical style recalled Felix’s then well-known Fingal’s Cave Overture. Thus we find examples of open-spaced chords, dronelike fifths, rough-hewn harmonic progressions, darkly hued scorings, and sequential repetitions, all reminiscent of the overture and what might be termed Felix’s Ossianic manner. 56
Around this time another composer was drawing upon the Fingal’s Cave Overture to create an explicitly programmatic, Scottish work. Late in 1840 the young Dane Niels Gade (1817–1890) had composed the Echoes of Ossian (Nachklänge von Ossian ) Overture and submitted it to a competition of the Copenhagen Musikforeningen. Its director, the composer J. P. E. Hartmann, had secured the services of three German musicians to judge the entries—Louis Spohr, Friedrich Schneider, and Felix. But at the end of 1840, owing to his mounting workload, Felix had withdrawn. 57 In March 1841 his colleagues awarded the prize to Gade; later that year Gade’s overture appeared in Copenhagen and Leipzig, and it received its German premiere at the Gewandhaus on January 27, 1842, one week after Felix finished the Scottish Symphony in Berlin.
Although Felix did not meet Gade until 1843, Echoes of Ossian may have left its mark on the new symphony. Felix’s copy of the 1841 first edition of Gade’s overture survives at Oxford, 58 though admittedly, we do not know when Felix acquired the score. Especially intriguing are several musical similarities between the overture and first movement of the symphony, both of which employ a framing device, a brooding A-minor passage that recurs as an epilogue to the movements. Gade’s overture begins with some melancholy chords that introduce a folksonglike melody, evidently intended to connote an ancient, bardic song ( ex. 13.8 ). As does Felix, Gade animates the tempo for the primary theme of his sonata-form exposition, a militaristic figure with brass fanfares. Its dissonant harmonies indeed resemble the bridge section in Felix’s movement, which also bristles with fanfares. The similarities may be coincidental, but possibly by January 1842 Felix was aware of Gade’s overture; its emulation of the Fingal’s Cave Overture may have influenced, in turn, certain features of the symphony.
Ex. 13.8 : Gade, Echoes of Ossian Overture (1840)
As we know, Gade sketched a private program for his overture, based upon excerpts from a Danish translation of Ossian. 59 Echoes of Ossian adopts a narrative approach—it tells a story, in a ballade-like tone, of Celtic exploits. Thus, when we read in Gade’s program “The warriors strike their shields” (a quotation from Macpherson’s Temora ), we can pinpoint that portion of the program in the fanfares of his score. To underscore the mythic voice of the bard, Gade employs a harp—the traditional instrument with which Ossian accompanies his recitations—that figures intermittently throughout the overture. Felix’s Scottish Symphony too displays narrative features but expands its compass to incorporate other extramusical strategies. As a result, the symphony lies somewhere between the poles of programmatic and absolute music and, like the Fingal’s Cave Overture, admits a rich variety of interpretations.
In a probing analysis, Thomas Grey has argued for multiple, intersecting readings in the symphony. 60 The framing introduction suggests an “epic-narrative prelude” that “mimics the gestures … of storytelling, without telling the story.” Using Felix’s prefatory note to the first edition (1843), which identified the characters of the movements (Introduction und Allegro agitato , Scherzo assai vivace , Adagio cantabile , and Allegro guerriero und Finale maestoso ), Grey proceeds to sketch out a narrative sequence, “loosely summed up as ‘balladic invocation/chivalric sortie, country dances, prayer, battle and victory tableau.’” But the symphony embraces too techniques that bring us from the realm of the narrative into the pictorial. For instance, Grey finds allusions to the traditions of landscape and historical painting—the celebrated storm sequence in the coda of the first movement, the battle (guerriero ) scenes of the finale, with its dissonant fugato and military fanfares—but also sees the connected movements as a series of musical tableaux vivants, in which images successively fade, one into the other. Grey also invokes the Parisian “diorama” spectacles popularized by L. J. Daguerre in the 1820s, in which screens and filters manipulated illustrations of natural and historical landscapes to suggest different viewings of the same object, as if striving toward a “protocinematic” reality. As Grey points out, one of Daguerre’s most successful series was of Holyrood Chapel, as seen at various times of day and night. Could Felix, who had viewed these popular entertainments in 1832, have recalled the diorama sequence in his final symphony? Be that as it may, the appeal of the composition lies in its ability to stimulate alternate modes of analytical inquiry—musical, literary, and pictorial, all of which penetrate each other.
Thus the celebrated second movement, a scherzo that begins with a delicate staccato stirring in the strings, introduces in the clarinet a pentatonic melody ( ex. 13.9a ), surely meant to imitate folk music Felix had heard in Edinburgh at the Highland Games. In contrast, the main body of the first movement, with its meter and pronounced rocking rhythms, projects the character of a ballade ( ex. 13.9b ). The details of its story come somewhat into focus in the third and fourth movements. The regal dotted rhythms of the Adagio and dirgelike procession in the winds over a descending, “lament” bass plausibly allude to the tragic figure of Queen Mary ( ex. 13.9c ). And the breathless, energetic finale, with its jagged dissonances and contrapuntal strife, generalizes the topic of conflict in Scottish history ( ex. 13.9d ).
Ex. 13.9a: Mendelssohn, Scottish Symphony, Op. 56 (1842), Scherzo
Ex. 13.9b: Mendelssohn, Scottish Symphony, Op. 56 (1842), First Movement
Ex. 13.9c: Mendelssohn, Scottish Symphony, Op. 56 (1842), Third Movement
Ex. 13.9d: Mendelssohn, Scottish Symphony, Op. 56 (1842), Finale
Ex. 13.9e: Mendelssohn, Scottish Symphony, Op. 56 (1842), Finale
We are left with the coda-like Allegro maestoso assai in A major; after nearly four hundred bars of the stormy finale, a new melody rises from the violas and clarinets in a fourfold crescendo. Nearly pentatonic, the melody suggests a new folksong, closely modeled on the primary theme of the first movement ( exs. 13.9e and b ), and thus affirming the tightknit thematicism of the symphony, a quality early critics noted. But what is the purpose of this appendage? Too short to form an independent movement like the fifth-movement finale of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the Allegro nevertheless recalls that model by resolving the dissonance of the fourth movement and projecting tonal stability and closure. Felix himself offered a clue about the coda when he recommended the passage begin like a Männerchor 61 (to that end, after the premiere he retouched the scoring, lest the timpani obscure the part-song texture). Drawing on this statement, Peter Mercer-Taylor has argued that the coda in fact alludes to the German genre of the male part-song, so that the symphony ends as a German symphony celebrating the German present and its memories of a distant Scottish past. 62
Other readings of the symphony remain for consideration. In 1979 Ludwig Finscher labeled it a “Walter Scott symphony,” 63 as if to suggest a line of influence from the poetry and novels of Scotland’s most famous writer, translated and widely read by the German middle class. In Scott’s The Abbot (1820), for instance, Felix would have found a historical romance about Mary’s flight to England after the Battle of Langside (1568). On the other hand, the novel’s sequel, Kenilworth (1821), which focused on Mary’s adversary Elizabeth, left Felix unimpressed. In 1840 he rejected a libretto for an opera on the subject, because of his “irrepressible aversion to the novel and its material.” 64 But given the German perspective of the symphony, perhaps Felix had in mind a source closer to home: Schiller’s tr
agedy Maria Stuart (1800), which treats the final days of the queen’s life before her execution, and which almost certainly Felix had discussed with Goethe during the visits to Weimar. Perhaps this play too had a role in the unwritten “program” of the symphony, which concerns a German’s perspectives on Scotland as a musical, literary, and historical theme.
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 59
