Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  III

  From Berlin in March 1842, Felix finalized his plans for the summer. He convinced the committee of the Lower Rhine Music Festival, scheduled for May, to program Handel’s Israel in Egypt ; he determined to visit London, this time with Cécile, for the conclusion of the English concert season, for which he contemplated composing a third piano concerto. 65 The couple then intended to return to Frankfurt before embarking on a Swiss holiday.

  If the public premiere of Antigone in April scored an unqualified success—six performances occurred between April 13 and 29—Berliners’ memories of Liszt’s tour overshadowed Felix’s other appearances. On April 16 and 21 he participated in two Quartett-Soiréen in the Singakademie. With the Moravian violinist H. W. Ernst, celebrated for imitating Paganini’s pyrotechnical feats, Felix performed his Piano Trio, Op. 49 and Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Then, on April 25, he directed a lavish concert in the Schauspielhaus that offered one of Beethoven’s Leonore Overtures, Handel’s Zadok the Priest , Felix’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Lobgesang . But the reception was “not cordial,” and when Felix again inquired about plans for the new Berlin music academy, he was put off with vague assurances. 66 Around this time Felix received an importunate visitor, Richard Wagner, then attempting to secure the premiere of The Flying Dutchman in Berlin. Wagner reported that he “struck up rather friendly relations” with Felix, 67 though there is no mention of Wagner in Felix’s contemporaneous letters. It seems unlikely Felix did more than observe social amenities, although he appears to have revealed his determination to leave Berlin to Wagner. 68 In the end Meyerbeer, not Felix, promoted the new opera, premiered not in Berlin but Dresden, where Wagner became a Kapellmeister early in 1843.

  The beginning of May 1842 found Felix in Leipzig, where he again concertized with Ernst. Separating from Cécile and his children in Frankfurt, he proceeded to Düsseldorf, and en route learned of the calamitous fire that for three days (May 6–8) had consumed sizable areas of his birthplace, Hamburg (experiencing the firestorm firsthand, Paul and Albertine had to flee their Hamburg residence 69 ). The Pentecost music festival opened on Sunday, May 15, with Israel in Egypt and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, followed on the 16th by the Lobgesang Symphony and other works. The organizers were able to amass a chorus of 403 and orchestra of 170. 70 On the morning concert of the third day (May 17), when Ernst, scheduled to appear, fell ill, Felix performed without rehearsal Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and then continued with some Lieder ohne Worte , and an improvisation on works heard at the festival, including Beethoven’s Fifth.

  A reminiscence of the festival has come down to us from Karl Schorn, who reports that during rehearsals Felix quietly glided from his rostrum to musicians’ stands to correct their parts without interrupting the ensemble, and that he beat time calmly, while encouraging the orchestra with energetic glances. 71 Felix’s improvisations created such a stir among female admirers that they seized his handkerchief and shredded it into so many mementos of the event. Schorn closed with a sketch of Felix’s appearance that revealed as much about Schorn as Felix: “He was … a delicate little man with distinguished, elegant manners and fastidious grooming, so that one recognized the subject had not been cradled next to a loom. On his refined, black-curled head he wore a high top hat tilted somewhat toward the right ear, which made a smart, cheerful impression. His facial features—dark, flashing eyes, Roman nose, and pronounced sideburns hanging down on each cheek—did not disown his oriental extraction, but conveyed absolutely nothing of its often unpleasant aftertaste. This was a personality who won love and respect from everyone coming into contact with him.” 72

  Felix convinced the festival committee to donate its proceeds to the Hamburg relief efforts and to that end waived his fee and travel expenses. Unhappily, despite these gestures, the festival closed its books with a deficit. Still, he continued his philanthropic efforts by giving concerts in Bonn (May 21) and Cologne (May 22, Haydn’s Die Schöpfung ) that raised over one thousand thalers. 73 Then the composer met Cécile in Bonn; alone for the first time since Carl’s birth, the couple made a leisurely trip by way of Aachen, Liège, Antwerp (where they viewed paintings of Rubens), and Ghent to Ostende. 74 On May 29 they experienced a calm crossing of the English Channel. Two days later, in Berlin, the Prussian king announced the appointment of thirty distinguished men to the new Ordre pour le mérite ; along with Liszt and Meyerbeer, Felix was cited in music. 75

  In London Felix’s hosts were Cécile’s aunt Henriette and her husband, the merchant F. W. Benecke, who had settled near the south edge of the city on Denmark Hill, Camberwell. By 1842 their family had grown to seven children ranging from an infant to fourteen years (Victor, eleven, later married Marie, Felix and Cécile’s first daughter, and Victor’s first cousin, once removed). At Camberwell Felix enjoyed musical entertainments with Moscheles and charades, in which Klingemann acted out Sir Walter Scott. To Klingemann Felix later wrote of his affection for the Beneckes 76 and their children, with whom he cavorted in the garden. On June 1, after the other adults left to visit Windsor, Felix found himself alone with his young charges, who teasingly pulled on his hands as he worked on two new Lieder ohne Worte at the piano. If the elegiac Op. 102 No. 1, in E minor, betrayed nothing of these pranks, the famous “Frühlingslied ” in A major, Op. 62 No. 6, depicted them through clipped staccato notes exchanged between the hands ( ex. 13.10 ). 77 On July 11, the day before his departure, Felix inscribed a humorous Bärentanz (Bears’ Dance ), dedicated to the “gooseberry eaters at Benecke castle” (a reference to Felix’s favorite fruit in the garden). Resembling a caricature, this sketch opposes a lumbering, ursine pedal point in the bass and shrill, fifelike figure in the high treble. 78

  Ex. 13.10 : Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in A major, Op. 62 No. 6 (1842)

  Felix sought to capture in both pieces a childlike naiveté, a quality he explored more thoroughly in eight keyboard miniatures recorded in sixpenny music books of two of the children, Teddy and Lilly. 79 The composer prepared six of the pieces for publication as Kinderstücke in 1846, but their release was delayed until December 1847, one month after Felix’s death, when they appeared in England from Ewer & Co. as Op. 72, with the surely unauthorized title “Six pieces for the Pianoforte, composed as a Christmas present for his young friends, by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.” Less ambitious than Robert Schumann’s Kinderscenen (Scenes of Childhood , 1838), Felix’s Op. 72 nevertheless shares the same compositional strategy of self-reflective juvenescence, as the mature composer seeks to reclaim musically his childhood. Unlike Schumann, however, Felix did not fit descriptive titles to his pieces; still, little imagination is required to apprehend their refreshing innocence, projected through a tuneful, melodious style with repetitive rhythms and straightforward harmonies. But Felix suggests too the topsy-turvy world of childhood, as in No. 5 in G minor, which re-explores his elfin, scherzo idiom, and No. 6 in F, in which the inversion of the parts and canonic imitation suggests a helterskelter chase.

  At the height of the concert season Felix made at least six public appearances, including three as organist. On June 12, 1842, he returned to St. Peter’s Cornhill, where he found the congregation appropriating Haydn’s “Emperor’s Hymn” as an English hymn. 80 The young organist Elizabeth Mounsey prevailed upon Felix to improvise on the melody for the concluding voluntary. 81 Four days later, at Christ Church, he reexplored the melody but added an extemporized fugue. One of his young English admirers, W. S. Rackstraw (later the well-known musical pedagogue Rockstro), recalled how before the fugue Felix introduced a “long treble A … on the swell,” and developed it into “an inverted organpoint of prodigious length, treating it with the most ingenious and delightful harmonies, his invention of which seemed to be inexhaustible.” 82 A third organ performance followed the next day, June 17, at a Sacred Harmonic Society Concert at Exeter Hall, where Felix rendered Bach’s “St. Anne” Fugue and improvised on Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith . Arriving to attend another concert there,
Felix was greeted by a spontaneous ovation led by the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. 83

  Of Felix’s other engagements, we know little about the last, on June 24, when he participated in a benefit concert Moscheles organized for victims of the Hamburg fire. But Felix’s two other appearances, at the Philharmonic Society, are well documented. On June 13 he led the seventh concert, which began with Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony (No. 101) and included overtures by Beethoven and Weber, two piano fantasies performed by Thalberg, and the English premiere of the Scottish Symphony. From the audience, the young composer G. A. Macfarren decided to hiss Thalberg and flirt with his female admirers, but then discovered in Felix’s symphony an overwhelming pathos, “that deep, intense, and soulful feeling which dives down to the bottom of the human heart.” 84 At the eighth and final concert Felix performed his D-minor Piano Concerto and directed the Fingal’s Cave Overture. The reception was so positive that the directors gave a dinner in his honor at Greenwich on July 9, a few days before Felix and Cécile left London, 85 and offered him a small sum, despite the Society’s constrained treasury. 86

  To his brother Paul Felix reported that on average he received three to four invitations a day, 87 many of which he declined. There were “dull” dinners with Frederick William’s minister von Massow and ambassador C. K. J. Bunsen, dramatic readings from Antony and Cleopatra by Fanny Kemble, meetings with the banker George Grote, preoccupied with his History of Greece (twelve volumes appeared between 1846 and 1856), viewings with Cécile of private art galleries, and an excursion to Manchester to visit her uncle and aunt, Jean David and Thekla Souchay. The English bass Henry Phillips secured Felix’s agreement to write an Ossianic scena (unfulfilled until 1846), 88 and the blind organist J. G. Emett brought him a manuscript of “the XLVIII,” which Felix certified as an autograph of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier . 89 The dandified M.P., Sir Edward Bulwer, author of Rienzi , the Last Tribune of Rome (on which Wagner based his opera of 1842) and The Last Days of Pompeii , flirted with Cécile. 90 But Felix’s most celebrated engagements were his visits with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

  Within days of arriving in London, Felix forwarded a letter to Prince Albert from his cousin, Frederick William IV, and awaited “his Royal Highness’s command.” 91 The first audience, which likely occurred the morning of June 14, was with the prince alone. 92 The following evening the Queen and the Consort received Felix in Buckingham Palace, where he entertained them with piano music and improvisations. He reported about the meeting in a well-known letter to Lea and an unpublished one to Paul; 93 cited here are the Queen’s own recollections, recorded in her journal on June 16:

  After dinner came Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose acquaintance I was so anxious to make. Albert had already seen him the other morning. He is short, dark & Jewish looking—delicate—with a fine intellectual forehead…. He is very pleasing & modest, & is greatly protected by the King of Prussia. He played first of all some of his “Lieder ohne Worte” after which, his Serenade [Op. 43] & then, he asked us to give him a theme, upon which he could improvise. We gave him 2, “Rule Britannia” & the Austrian National Anthem. He began immediately, & really I have never heard anything so beautiful; the way in which he blended them both together & changed over from one to the other, was quite wonderful as well as the exquisite harmony & feeling he puts into the variations, & the powerful rich chords, & modulations, which reminded one of all his beautiful compositions. At one moment he played the Austrian Anthem with the right hand he played “Rule Britannia”, as the bass, with his left! He made some further improvisations on well-known themes & songs [including Lützow’s Wilde Jagd and Gaudeamus igitur , later popularized by Brahms in the Academic Festival Overture]. We were all filled with the greatest admiration. Poor Mendelssohn was quite exhausted, when he had done playing. 94

  Another audience followed on Saturday, July 9, when Felix tried out Prince Albert’s chamber organ. 95 After performing a chorale, Felix began “How lovely are the messengers” from St. Paul , to which Victoria and Albert joined in, while Albert pulled the stops for Felix. Augmented by the arrivals of the Prince and Princess of Gotha and Duchess of Kent, the party adjourned to the Queen’s sitting room, so that she might perform a Lied accompanied by Felix. But first she ordered the royal parrot removed, lest the creature screech louder than she could sing, and to the servants’ astonishment, Felix proceeded to carry out the cage. After the Queen rendered Fanny’s Italien and sustained its last high G more purely than “any amateur,” he confessed that Fanny had composed the song. The Queen then essayed Pilgerspruch , Op. 8 No. 5, and Albert sang the Erntelied , Op. 8 No. 4. To summarize the meeting, Felix improvised on the royal performances and wove together various elements into a kind of quodlibet. After securing the Queen’s permission to dedicate the Scottish Symphony to her and receiving a ring engraved “V.R., 1842,” he took his leave, walked through the rain to Klingemann’s residence, and gave him and Cécile a “piping-hot account.”

  IV

  By mid-July 1842, Felix and Cécile had returned to Frankfurt, where they met Paul and Albertine; late in the month, the couples departed for Switzerland. They planned to attend a performance in Lausanne of the Lobgesang by the Allgemeine Schweizerische Musikgesellschaft, which had mounted Paulus in 1838 and elected Felix an honorary member. 96 Sparing little effort, the Society had prepared a French version of the text, augmented the personnel of the orchestra and chorus to 706, and modified the venue to accommodate an audience of 2500. 97 But, owing to Cécile’s indisposition, the couples tarried in Basel and arrived in Lausanne on August 4, the day after the monster concert, in time only for the concluding ball. 98 On August 7 Felix recorded a view of the city from the promenade de Montbenon, and captured the cathedral spires soaring above a dense counterpoint of buildings and city walls. The sketch was one of his first entries in a new album, one of three used during the third Swiss sojourn. 99 For the next month, drawing became Felix’s preoccupation; indeed, as he later confessed to Klingemann, “In all Switzerland I composed not even a bit of music, but rather drew entire days, until my fingers and eyes ached.” 100

  From Lausanne the party crossed the lake on the steamer Helvétie to Geneva and then proceeded southeast to Chamonix, where Felix worked up a dramatic view of les Aiguilles , the imposing mountains with needle-like peaks north of the resort. The Weimar actor Eduard Genast now joined the party, which grew to eleven with the arrival of the Preussers from Leipzig. Genast left this vignette of Felix leading a climbing expedition: “The elder ladies used sedan-chairs, the younger ones sure-footed mules, and we men, our Alpenstöcke . Always in front of everyone, Felix sprang like a chamois from rock to rock. His costume consisted of an Italian straw hat, black coat and breeches, white vest and collar. Apart from his hat and alpine shoes, he could have appeared straightaway at court.” 101

  From Martigny the party followed the Rhone valley to Leuk and then crossed the Gemmi Pass to the Bernese Alps. Felix recorded most of his sketches in situ, but he elaborated from memory a “reminiscence” of the Gemmi in Interlaken, which he reached on August 17. “Time is, time was, time is passed,” he wrote to Lea the next day 102 and recalled how in 1822 his father had admired from an Interlaken inn the sprawling, gnarled walnut trees, and how, when Felix himself returned in 1831, the same innkeeper was reluctant to serve him because of his shabby appearance. Now he resided there as a person of consequence. For three days he labored over a romantic scene, composed partly in his imagination: a monk seated with a child on a bench encircling an ancient tree, its foliage extending beyond the walls of a monastery. 103

  Enjoying the panorama from the Wengern Alp, the travelers continued on to Meiringen, where Felix had a reunion with his carefree guide of 1831, Peter Michel, now the sedate landlord of the inn Die Krone. Eleven years before, Michel had entertained Felix by yodeling a ranz des chèvres , or goatherd’s song, and Felix now revived and fixed the bucolic tune in his memory. 104 Near the Lake of the Four Cantons, in Altdorf,
he separated from his companions, crossed the Surenen Pass, and reached the secluded twelfth-century Benedictine abbey at Engelberg, where, in 1831, he had assisted in a Mass. By the end of August he was filling the last pages of his two albums and beginning a third, 105 before rejoining his family in Lucerne. En route to Zurich they encountered another trusted companion, Dominic Jutz, who had served as the Mendelssohns’ guide in 1822 and now regaled Felix with accurate memories of his father. 106 At Basel they boarded a steamer bound for Mainz and returned to Frankfurt early in September with happy memories of their idyllic journey.

  Though the concert season was officially finished, Felix’s arrival in Frankfurt generated new music making, much of it for private gatherings. He played the organ at St. Catherine’s Church, and at a matinée organized by Ferdinand Hiller, he performed his recently finished pianoduet arrangement of the Scottish Symphony. Unknown to Hiller, Felix urged Simrock to publish his friend’s music, 107 and he composed an Eichendorff setting (“Es weiss und räth es doch Keiner,” Op. 99 No. 6) for Hiller’s wife, a Polish singer. When she arranged for the painter Carl Müller to sketch Felix’s portrait, he agreed on condition she sing Lieder, sixteen of which she executed while Müller drew. The sketch shows Felix, sporting sideburns, sitting with his hands crossed and listening attentively. 108 When the young German pianist Charles Hallé visited the city, Felix joined him and Hiller to perform J. S. Bach’s Triple Concerto in D minor and gave unstintingly of his time. Hallé left this account of his idol’s prodigious memory: “The greatest treat … was to sit with him at the piano and listen to innumerable fragments from half-forgotten beautiful works by Cherubini, Gluck, Bach, Palestrina, Marcello, ‘tutti quanti’ . It was only enough to mention one of them, whether it was a Gloria from one of Cherubini’s Masses or a psalm by Marcello, to hear it played to perfection, until I came to the conclusion that he knew every bar of music ever written, and, what was more, could reproduce it immediately.” 109