Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Impressed by the Leipzig musicians, Berlioz now programmed the formidable finale of his “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette , for orchestra, bass solo, and triple chorus. Copyists hastily fitted a translation to the parts but failed to observe proper German prosody, so that Felix had to make corrections. When the bass engaged to sing Friar Laurence’s aria muttered “gross Teutonic imprecations,” Berlioz summarily withdrew the work. The morning of the concert, Felix organized a final rehearsal, and Berlioz was able to substitute in the eleventh hour his King Lear Overture and a movement from his Requiem, which inspired the taciturn Robert Schumann to comment, “This Offertorium surpasses everything.” 18

  The final month of the season brought four more concerts for Felix to direct (March 2, 9, 23, and 30). Among the attractions was the premiere of Niels Gade’s First Symphony, in C minor, Op. 5, which aroused Felix’s admiration for the young Dane. Its stylistic proximity to the Scottish Symphony notwithstanding, Gade’s symphony delighted the German audience by evoking a distant Danish past, already vaguely familiar through Felix’s Ossianic musings in the Fingal’s Cave Overture. One week later, on March 9, the Gewandhaus celebrated its centenary in a Jubiläumskonzert . The first part offered seven works by the principal musicians associated since 1743 with the Gewandhaus and Thomaskirche—J. F. Doles, J. S. Bach, J. A. Hiller, J. G. Schicht, H. A. Matthäi, Moritz Hauptmann, and Felix—all stitched together by a flowery poem recited between performances. It closed by extolling the future to be faithful to the motto enshrined in the hall, res severa est verum gaudium . 19 The second half then capped the commemoration with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  While Felix turned his thoughts to Leipzig’s past, fresh dispatches affecting Berlin’s future arrived. On March 21 Frederick William approved a plan establishing the royal Hof- und Dom-Chor (court and cathedral choir). Unconvinced of its viability, Felix grumbled that in Berlin “nobody knows, nobody cares, but everybody rules, from the King down to the meanest porter and the pensioned drummer.” 20 Still, the bureaucratic machinery began to grind, and on March 27 von Massow was able to predict the choir would be ready for Felix by winter. 21 Developed by a Major Einbeck, who had organized military choruses after Russian prototypes, the new ensemble was initially directed by H. A. Neithardt and Zelter’s former pupil Eduard Grell. Its personnel was made up of seventy singers: twenty-three boy sopranos, twenty-three boy altos, nine tenors, and fifteen basses. Though Einbeck thought the choir might require a year to mature, it began singing in sacred services on May 7, so that once again Felix had to ponder returning to royal service in Berlin. 22

  The pull between Berlin and Leipzig intensified in April, when four events in quick succession tested Felix’s Saxon loyalties. First, on April 3, 1843, the new conservatory opened its doors to forty-two students. 23 Among those matriculating were the composer/organist Theodor Kirchner; Emil Naumann, later known for his popular illustrated music history; and Wilhelm von Wasielewski, Robert Schumann’s “first” biographer. 24 At this time Felix also knew and possibly offered lessons to Gustav Nottebohm (1817–1882), who during the 1870s developed the study of Beethoven’s sketches into the new scholarly discipline of compositional process. 25

  The original faculty included Hauptmann (harmony and counterpoint), Robert Schumann (piano and composition), David (violin), C. F. Becker (organ), and Henriette Bünau (née Grabau, voice) , who replaced the recently deceased Pohlenz. Felix himself offered instruction three times a week in “solo singing, instrumental playing, and composition.” 26 Though the guiding force behind the institution, he scrupulously avoided assuming its directorship. No doubt his Düsseldorf experiences still haunted him, and he was bound to respond to Frederick William’s summons to Berlin, whenever that occurred. Instead, the management of the school was entrusted to a Directorium of five (all Gewandhaus directors), including the Saxon minister von Falkenstein, Felix’s close friend H. K. Schleinitz, the music publisher Kistner, Stadtrat Moritz Seeburg, and Hofrat J. G. Keil. Within a year, the student roster expanded to sixty-three, requiring additional faculty; eventually a two-story building was erected in the courtyard of the Gewandhaus to house the new school.

  Scarcely had the conservatory opened before Felix hastened to Dresden to direct Paulus on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1843. (Cécile was unable to accompany him, on account of her advanced fourth pregnancy.) In gratitude, the Saxon king sent the composer a handsome rococo clock of Meißen porcelain. 27 Ironically, among Felix’s most ardent supporters was Richard Wagner, recently installed as the new Dresden Kapellmeister and author of a short but glowing review. 28 Praising the oratorio as a classical masterwork, Wagner regretted only that Paulus was not joined to a Protestant service, so that its true religious import could reach the hearts of the faithful.

  Four days later (April 13), Felix received the honorary freedom of Leipzig in “recognition of his great services for the musical culture of this city.” 29 Bolstering those efforts, the fourth event then followed on April 23, bringing to culmination his efforts to restore the legacy of J. S. Bach. At a morning Gewandhaus concert Felix presented an all-Bach program: the orchestral Suite in D, the motet Ich lasse dich nicht , the Keyboard Concerto in D minor, an aria from the St. Matthew Passion, a free fantasy and cantata, the E-major Prelude for violin performed by David, and the Sanctus from the B-minor Mass. 30 The finale was a remnant of Felix’s original intention to perform on this day the entire Mass, which, like the St. Matthew Passion, had lain unrecognized in Leipzig for over a century. 31

  After the concert, a select audience reconvened before Bach’s former residence in the Thomasschule. There, in a simple ceremony, the Thomanerchor sang two chorales and the motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied , interspersed with short speeches. Then the Bach monument, three years in planning and the first such remembrance of the Thomaskantor, was unveiled. Designed by Felix’s friend Eduard Bendemann in consultation with Julius Hübner (both professors at the Dresden Academy of Art) and the sculptor Ernst Rietschel, 32 the sandstone monument rested upon a cluster of columns, and spiraling, free-standing columns at the four corners. They supported a four-sided monument protected by a “Gothic covering” and a cross. The principal side featured a colossal bust of Bach; the other three sides, bas-reliefs symbolizing Bach’s work as organist, teacher (this side faced the Thomasschule), and composer of Christian music. After an advance viewing in December, Felix had described the effect in the last letter he wrote to his mother: “The monument for old Sebastian Bach has become wonderfully pretty…. The many columns, little columns and scrollwork, above all the bas-reliefs and the old, splendid wig-adorned countenance shone freely in the sunlight, and gave me great joy. With its many decorative ornaments the whole really recalled the old Sebastian.” 33 At the dedication at least one other member of the audience, who had traveled from Berlin to attend the ceremony, wholeheartedly agreed. An infirm octogenarian with snow-white hair, this mysterious person had served as Kapellmeister to the queen of Prussia until his retirement in 1811, and now was a forgotten, impoverished pensioner. He was Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (1759–1845), son of J. C. F. Bach (the “Bückeburg” Bach), and sole surviving grandson of J. S. Bach. 34

  I

  Late in the evening of May 1, 1843, Cécile gave birth to a boy, named Felix. Sadly, the composer’s namesake did not prosper; sickly and frail, he succumbed to scarlet fever at age seven, in 1851. On May 2, however, the father joyfully announced the birth of his third son and thanked God. 35 The concert season finished, Felix looked forward to a restful summer. His only public engagement was with the Milanese violinist Antonio Bazzini (May 14). 36 The next day he received the composer Charles Gounod, who had visited Fanny in Berlin after the conclusion of his Prix de Rome fellowship. Felix reportedly greeted the young Frenchman with the salutation, Ah, c’est vous le fou dont ma soeur m’a parlé (“Ah, it’s you, the madman of whom my sister has spoken”). For four days Felix entertained Gounod, reviewed his compositions, arranged a reading of the Sc
ottish Symphony at the Gewandhaus, and played Bach organ works at the Thomaskirche. 37 But on May 25 Felix again had to return to Berlin for a conference. Industriously, he had finished in piano score the choruses for the projected production of Racine’s Athalie and brought the manuscript with him. His principal purpose, though, was to gauge the quality of the new Domchor. 38

  In June the infant Felix was baptized in a ceremony witnessed by Fanny, Wilhelm, and Sebastian. 39 At last Felix anticipated the leisure time to finish new compositions, even though another royal commission intruded upon his time. On June 7, in the baroque courtyard of the Dresden Zwinger, he attended the unveiling of Rietschel’s new statue of Frederick Augustus I. For the celebration Felix contributed a setting of the Saxon national anthem, Gott segne Sachsenland 40 — as it happened, the same melody as “God Save the King,” which Carl Maria von Weber had used in his Jubel-Ouvertüre of 1818 for Frederick Augustus’s jubilee.

  Conducting Felix’s offering was the thirty-year-old Richard Wagner, who himself composed an a cappella male part-song for the festivity (Der Tag erscheint , WWV 68) and assembled a chorus of some two hundred and fifty. Felix scored the anthem, reminiscent of the 1840 Gutenberg Festgesang , for two, spatially separated male choirs, each singing in unison, and supported by an array of brass instruments—trumpets, horns, trombones, and ophicleides for the “Chorus of Singers,” and horns and trombones for the “Chorus of the People,” which carried the melody of the anthem. To the first chorus, Felix assigned a new countermelody. Fearing the anthem would dissolve in the welter of sound, Wagner judged this arrangement a miscalculation and wrote to Felix for clarification. 41 A series of documents reveals that Wagner now saw himself as Felix’s rival. While adopting a polite, solicitous tone to Felix, Wagner privately boasted to his half-sister Cäcilie Avenarius: “it was universally agreed that my own piece, which was straightforward & uplifting, knocked Mendelssohn’s over-elaborate & artificial composition into a cocked hat.” 42 Ex. 14.2 illustrates part of Felix’s setting that Wagner found over-wrought; here fussy, chromatic harmonies envelop the anthem, which momentarily yields to the countermelody. We do not have Felix’s reaction to the performance, though an earlier letter suggests his estimation of his younger colleague. “Talent he has most certainly,” Felix wrote, but also that “a great deal becomes exaggerated in that quarter,” and that Wagner had managed to make many enemies in his early weeks as a Dresden Kapellmeister. 43

  Ex. 14.2 : Mendelssohn, Gott segne Sachsenland (1843)

  By July 1843 three new works were ready for the publishers. The Sechs Lieder , Op. 57, was Felix’s first Liederheft to appear simultaneously in Germany, England, and France, where Breitkopf & Härtel, Wessel & Stapleton (London), and Benacci & Peschier (Lyon) paid forty Louis d’Or , ten guineas, and three hundred francs, respectively, for the rights. 44 Containing songs from 1839 to 1842, the collection included imitations of folksongs (Nos. 1 and 4) and drew upon texts representing stock types of lyric poetry (No. 2, Shepherd’s Song ; No. 5, Gondellied ; and No. 6, Wanderer’s Song ). In the center of the collection stood the throbbing Suleika setting (No. 3, “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?”), widely known from Goethe’s collection of exotic poetry West-östlicher Divan (though in fact by Marianne von Willemer). Here the feminine persona imagines the stirring east wind bears her lover’s tidings and kisses, but only his amorous breath (Liebeshauch ) can renew her life. The palpitating piano tremolos ( ex. 14.3 ) connect these images. Most of the other Lieder, too, treat love texts, though from a masculine point of view—for example, in No. 2 (also arranged as the part-song, Op. 88 No. 3), a shepherd compares winter and spring as seasons of separation from and reunion with his beloved, while in No. 5, a masked protagonist, consumed by Sehnsucht , anticipates an assignation in the Venetian lagoons. The selection of songs may have depended to some degree on the English edition, for which the music critic J. W. Davison made the translations. Felix dedicated that edition to the English contralto Charlotte Helen Dolby, with whom, Davison confessed, he was hopelessly in love. 45

  Ex. 14.3 : Mendelssohn, Suleika , Op. 57 No. 3 (1843)

  With the Cello Sonata in D major, Op. 58, written for Paul but dedicated to the Russian patron and cellist Count Mateusz Wielhorski, Felix made a substantial contribution to the instrument’s repertoire. Of the four movements, the outer two overflow with a sparkling, effervescent virtuosity that features, in the first, a soaring cello theme against pulsating piano chords (later recalled by Schumann in the finale of his Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63, 1847) and, in the finale, frolicsome scales and arpeggiations. The two inner movements reveal contrasting facets of Felix’s mature style. The second movement (Allegretto scherzando ) begins as a subdued scherzo in B minor, with staccato articulations in the piano answered by hollow cello pizzicati. A warmly lyrical second theme then emanates from the cello, and the rest of the movement unfolds in a dramatic crescendo and decrescendo based on the alternation of the two ideas. The third movement opens with a freely composed chorale for piano solo, performed in an arpeggiated style ( ex. 14.4 ) that injects a spiritual element into the chamber medium. The cello answers with an impassioned recitative, and the remainder of the movement combines the two. At the end the piano takes up the recitative in a retrospective passage with chromatic arabesques that link Felix’s chorale to J. S. Bach’s expressive harmonic language.

  Felix’s third volume of part-songs for mixed chorus, dedicated to Henriette Benecke, appeared during the summer of 1843 as the Sechs Lieder , Op. 59. Nos. 2–5 came from a group of eight composed that year, 46 to which Felix added a setting of Helmina von Chézy’s Im Grünen from 1837. Like their predecessors, designed for performance in the open air, the Lieder celebrate natural settings—No. 1 (Helmina von Chézy) the freedom of the outdoors, No. 2 (Goethe) an early spring, No. 3 (Eichendorff) the departure from a forest, No. 4 (Goethe) a nightingale that sings old songs, No. 5 (Uhland) the quest for a valley of peace (Ruhetal ), and No. 6 (Eichendorff) a hunt. The set betrays Felix’s preference for straightforward strophic settings in a popular idiom, though the final song, filled with descriptive horn calls and animated rhythmic patterns to suggest galloping horses, employs a modified strophic arrangement and turns unexpectedly in the final couplet from a restless B minor to a euphonious B major. No. 3 (Abschied vom Wald ) attained the status of a folksong in the nineteenth century.

  Ex. 14.4 : Mendelssohn, Cello Sonata No. 2 in D major, Op. 58 (1843), Third Movement

  II

  By July 1843 Friedrich Wilhelm’s ministers were placing fresh demands upon Felix, who for the next few months commuted between Leipzig and Berlin. The king had kept his promise and created the musical institute, the “instrument” on which Felix was to play. On July 10 Felix joined the ministers von Küstner and Redern, Wilhelm Taubert (Kapellmeister of the royal orchestra), and Meyerbeer (Generalmusikdirektor of opera) to discuss arrangements for the fall. The new choir, thirty-six strong, would sing chorales and the Te Deum on high feast days; Felix would direct two oratorios a year and several orchestral concerts. 47 But when, a week after the meeting, new conditions were imposed, viz ., that Felix and the institute would report to von Küstner, Felix refused to agree. He wrote to Paul of the “tedious everlasting affair” and “shook off” his anger in a defile near Naumburg, 48 southwest of Leipzig, where he made a brief excursion with Cécile’s relatives.

  Meanwhile, the king had decided to revise the Prussian liturgy to enhance the musical treatment and increase congregational participation in the singing. To that end, von Massow sent Felix a new order of worship. 49 Among the reforms was the introduction of Introit psalms at the beginning of the service, sung antiphonally by the choir and congregation. There was to be a revival of the Reformed metrical Psalters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Felix was to provide settings of the traditional melodies. Of course, all these changes necessitated further consultations in Berlin, as did yet another royal assignment, which abruptly materialized on July 14. “By the most
high command of his Majesty the King,” von Massow wrote, “I request, esteemed sir, the favor that you set as quickly as possible Herr Gott dich loben wir in a score for four-part chorus, and an instrumental accompaniment for the 36 members of the Kapelle and organ.” 50 Obediently, Felix dispatched in two days an arrangement of the Lutheran Te Deum—two hundred and thirty seven measures long—scored for two four-part choirs, four trombones, strings, and organ. 51

  The occasion for the Te Deum, traditionally sung on the battlefield as a victory hymn, was the millennium of the German Reich, established in 843 by the Treaty of Verdun. Felix was summoned to Berlin to conduct his medieval revival in the Berlin Cathedral on August 6, 1843, with all due ceremony—reinforced by volleys from one hundred cannons. 52 Tingeing the whole affair was Frederick William’s attraction to a romanticized medieval past, which some took to betray his “catholicizing” tendencies. Felix was to apply the ancient Ambrosian modal melody as a cantus firmus and write in a “pure” style, with minimal intrusions from the instrumental accompaniment. But he found the assignment unavoidably tedious 53 and struggled to diversify his treatments of its thirty odd verses of praise. Among his solutions: combining vocal and instrumental resources for the outer sections, and applying smaller ensembles (e.g., the first or second choir with strings, the two choirs singing alternatim in unison, the first choir and trombones vs. the second choir and strings, and a cappella writing) to the interior of the work. For the most part Felix respected the modal attributes of the melody, which hovered around the pitch A and occasionally sank to its finalis , E, characteristic of the fourth (hypophrygian) church mode. But Felix could not avoid introducing some modern tonal harmonies into his setting, as if to render the austere chant palatable to its modern audience ( ex. 14.5 ).