Throughout the eighth English sojourn Felix maintained a harried calendar of engagements; he confessed that in two months he had experienced more music than elsewhere in two years. 121 Among his performances were: (1) the First Piano Trio on May 21 (when the violinist Ernst missed a page turn, Felix improvised a few bars, causing a banker in the audience to banter there were more notes in “circulation than allowed by printed authority”); 122 (2) Bach’s Triple Concerto in D minor with Moscheles and Thalberg on June 1 at the Hanover Square Rooms (according to C. E. Horsley, Felix unleashed an “electrical” cadenza that culminated in a “storm, nay a perfect hurricane of octaves, which must have lasted for five minutes”); 123 (3) an improvisation at a Crosby Hall concert on June 3, when Felix wove together themes from Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor and Schubert’s Ave Maria , heard earlier on the program; 124 (4) again the First Piano Trio on June 5 (by mistake, only the string parts were placed on the music stands, so that Felix had to play from memory; still, he insisted a colleague occasionally turn the pages of some other music on the piano, lest Felix’s memory become the center of attention); 125 (5) a “monster” morning concert organized by Julius Benedict with twenty-three works performed by Felix, Thalberg, Jacques Offenbach (then celebrated not for operettas but as a cello virtuoso), the harpist Parish-Alvars, Joachim, and several leading singers; 126 (6) an appearance at a concert of the Society of British Musicians given in Felix’s honor on June 15, where after hearing for the first time a piano trio by William Horsley and canzonet by George Macfarren, Felix improvised on their themes; 127 (7) a morning concert of Sterndale Bennett on June 25 (when members of the orchestra were tardy, Felix began the concert by fabricating the instrumental accompaniments himself on the piano 128 ); and (8) two performances of St. Paul at Exeter Hall before Prince Albert (June 28) and the Duke of Cambridge (July 5).
Felix’s correspondence reveals a composer at the height of fame, lionized by English society. Among the celebrities he met were Charles Dickens, who, having finished Martin Chuzzlewit , was about to embark for the Continent; Felix recorded in his diary that on June 16, at 3:00, the two dined together. 129 Possibly during this sojourn Felix met Dickens’s friend and fellow novelist Thackeray, who after breakfasting with the composer recalled that his face was “the most beautiful face I ever saw, like what I imagine our Savior’s to have been.” 130 Felix enjoyed private audiences with the Queen and the Consort, and on June 9 inscribed to them a new four-hand piano arrangement of seven Lieder ohne Worte , including Op. 62 and the as yet unpublished Op. 67 No. 1. 131 Aristocratic ladies requested private piano lessons, and the widow of the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who had isolated potassium and sodium, sent a note asking for a meeting. It was delivered by the wife of George Grote, who wryly commented, “If I did not know your vanity was fairly used up, it might serve to rekindle it, at least till you beheld the fair Lady, after which I fear her flatteries would fall pointless.” 132 Somewhat more serious was the importuning of Mary Alexander, now Mary Crompton, but still enamored of Felix and desperate to see him after an absence of ten years. Her letters betray the depth of her feelings, hint at a spark of romance, and suggest that Felix was not at all the prude he was later portrayed to be. 133
Among Felix’s other social engagements was a “musical séance ” on May 19 at the residence of the music critic Thomas Alsager, who organized private performances of Beethoven’s late string quartets. 134 A few days before, Felix experienced English eccentricity in the form of a peculiar invitation to join the Contrapuntists’ Society, a musical club founded by G. F. Flowers to advance the most rigorous discipline of music. Felix was to review the “rules” of the Society and to compose exercises for potential candidates; his fame, Flowers hoped, would win royal patronage for the organization. But Felix found more pedantry than art and penned a Pickwickian reply: “I thank you for the Rules, notices etc. concerning the Contrapuntists’ Society which you kindly sent me. I perused them with much attention and as I always think it my duty to tell my sincere opinion, particularly when it relates to matters of art, I must confess to you that I cannot agree with those rules that have been fixed for the exercises to be composed by the Candidates for the Contrapuntist Society; ….” He thus declined the honor of “entering this Society.” 135 In June came another unusual request, this one from the patriotic Englishman Boyman Boyman, who reasoned that the army of the “greatest nation in the world” should have a national song, written by the “greatest composer,” 136 that might compete with the Royal Navy’s Rule Britannia . Boyman sent Felix some verses and even offered to give him two thirds of the profits, but nothing came of the scheme.
Declining another request caused Felix much regret. In June, Charles Graves, a mathematician at Trinity College, Dublin, invited him to Ireland to receive an honorary doctorate in July, and Felix was asked to deliver a letter to John O’Connell, the imprisoned leader of the Irish emancipation movement. 137 Felix’s many commitments made the plan impractical; indeed, he was able to venture out of London for only a few days (June 17–20), to visit Cécile’s relatives in Manchester and Joseph Moore in Birmingham. Otherwise, there was no end of fresh demands upon his time. From Berlin came a directive to complete the overture to Athalie , urgently needed for a royal production; Felix complied, but the performance was postponed until December 1845. And the Handel Society, founded in June 1843 to promote “a superior and standard edition” of the composer, enlisted Felix to edit Israel in Egypt , a task he completed on July 4, only one week before his departure.
The history of this project, which involved Felix in some controversy, can be sketched here. In April 1844, George Macfarren, secretary of the Society’s Council, invited Felix to edit Messiah . 138 Instead, Felix settled on Israel in Egypt and, after his arrival in London, began work in earnest, comparing a printed edition with Handel’s autograph in the Queen’s Library. Felix’s duties were to enter corrections and dynamics, tempo, and metronome markings, prepare a keyboard reduction of the orchestral parts for a piano-vocal score, complete the figured bass for the organ part of the full score, and write a preface discussing the “historical particulars” of the oratorio. But the Society’s editorial practices ran counter to Felix’s musical priorities: while the Society expected to blend Felix’s editorial alterations into the score, Felix intended to prepare a text faithful to the autograph. He thus envisioned the full score as an Urtext , at the time a novel notion in music editing, and insisted on introducing alterations only in the orchestral reduction of the piano part, printed beneath the score in small notes, so that readers could separate the two. Achieving this result required a protracted, heated correspondence with the Handel Society that delayed publication until 1845 and 1846; an exasperated Felix wrote to Moscheles that “it would be no slight evil if the edition did not clearly distinguish between Handel’s and the editor’s views.” 139
Concerning the organ part, which also appeared in small notes beneath the score, Felix clarified his intentions in his preface: “I have written it down in the manner in which I would play it, were I called upon to do so at a performance of this Oratorio. These works ought of course never to be performed without an Organ, as they are done in Germany, where additional wind instruments are introduced to make up for the defect. In England the Organist plays usually ad libitum from the Score, as it seems to have been the custom in Handel’s time, ….” 140 Felix conceived the part as “a genuine improvisatory continuo realization, entirely free from the pedantically rigid observance of four-part playing required in theoretical books of Handel’s time…,” 141 and thus introduced a variety of textures and settings—for example, the organ in four-part harmony or two- or three-part imitation, and the organ simply doubling the bass line (tasto solo ). Felix’s musical “liberties” later collided with the pedestrian views of Friedrich Chrysander, a musicologist who in 1856 founded a German Händel Gesellschaft, and in 1867 published a damning study of Felix’s organ part. 142 Chrysander’s conclusion, that the
greatness Handel achieved in Israel in Egypt was “despite Mendelssohn, rarely with him and never through him,” smacks of pettiness. The longer view of history has recognized Felix’s considerable efforts on behalf of modern Handel scholarship and Chrysander as a hidebound and arbitrary scholar.
Of Felix’s new compositions, time allowed the completion of only the Six Duets, Op. 63, released later that year. In their final form, they included two earlier duets, the Volkslied after Burns (No. 5, 1842, see p. 443) and the Heine setting, “Ich wollt’ meine Lieb’” (No. 1, 1836), in which Felix again used pulsating piano chords (cf. Suleika , Op. 57 No. 3) to suggest a wind bearing tidings of love. Among the newer settings was the wistful Abschiedslied der Zugvögel (von Fallersleben, No. 2), with its image of migrating birds mourning the passing of summer (“after joy came sorrow,” the text reads), the tender Gruss (No. 3, Eichendorff), which greets an idealized lover, and the playful Maiglöckchen und die Blümelein (No. 6, von Fallersleben), in which lilies of the valley summon spring flowers to a miniature round dance, lightly syncopated in Felix’s brisk scherzo idiom. While all these duets employ simple strophic or modified strophic schemes, the Herbstlied (Autumn Song , No. 4, Klingemann) required a more complex, through-composed solution. The piece had begun its existence in October 1836 as a Duett ohne Worte for piano, not long after Felix had parted from Cécile to return to Leipzig ( ex. 14.10a ). 143 Whether he already had in mind a generalized text of separation is unclear, but when, in 1844 (presumably during the London sojourn) Klingemann fitted his autumnal verses to the piano miniature, 144 the piano song metamorphosed into a poignant expression of loss and transience, and mirrored verbal images from the other duets—fleeting memories of the round dance, and the turning of spring to winter, of joy into sorrow ( ex. 14.10b ). 145 This curious experiment, with its text subordinate to the original musical inspiration, tests the definiteness of musical expression and offers tantalizing evidence to support Fanny’s claim that as children the siblings had indulged in the “game” of adding texts to Felix’s “instrumental Lieder .” 146
Ex. 14.10a: Mendelssohn, Duett ohne Worte in F# minor (1836)
Ex. 14.10b: Mendelssohn, Herbstlied , Op. 63 No. 4 (1844)
V
After a rapid crossing but disquieting return through Antwerp, where Felix had passport difficulties, he reached the Frankfurt spa of Bad Soden on July 13, 1844, and found Cécile fully recovered and his children, with whom he cavorted in the garden, “brown as Moors.” 147 In contrast to the din of London, Felix now enjoyed a bucolic existence, with quiet walks along the Taunus hills overlooking Frankfurt. Among his companions were the poets Lenau and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of the nationalistic Deutschland, Deutschland über alles . Pressed by the Baroness Bunsen, Felix agreed to read a new version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy that collapsed the three plays into one act, but he remained skeptical of conceiving music for such concentrated choruses. 148 Meanwhile, two new projects, brainchildren of the English publisher Charles Coventry, piqued Felix’s interest. Capitalizing on his reputation as a peerless organist, Coventry invited the composer to edit J. S. Bach’s organ works and write several voluntaries for the instrument. By late August Felix had amassed all he possessed of Bach’s organ chorale settings, 149 including forty-four of the little preludes of the Orgel-Büchlein , BWV 599–644, fifteen of the larger Choral-Vorspiele , BWV 651–668, and the variations on Christ, der du bist der helle Tag and Sei gegrüßet Jesu gütig , BWV 766 and 768. Felix drew upon his own library, and collections of at least two other Bachians, Franz Hauser and F. X. Gleichauf, a local music pedagogue whom Felix visited in Frankfurt. 150 Setting a fee of thirty guineas, 151 he dispatched the edition to Coventry & Hollier, who released it in four volumes in 1845 and 1846; a German edition followed from Breitkopf & Härtel, further accelerating the Bach Revival. 152
Coventry’s second commission initially perplexed Felix, uncertain about the boundaries of the voluntary, generally understood as freely composed or improvised organ pieces used within English church services. But on July 21 he made a start with an Andante in F major, and within days finished three more pieces, a scherzo-like Allegretto in D minor, theme and variations in D major, and Allegro in D minor that culminated in a freely composed, “imaginary” chorale and fugue in four parts. 153 On July 25 he asked Fanny to send him the old Orgelstück in A major written for her wedding, but then interrupted work to attend the eleventh Palatinate Music Festival in Zweibrücken (July 31–August 1), where he conducted Paulus and Die erste Walpurgisnacht . Felix later recalled that nearly as much socializing took place as serious music making—rehearsals began at 7:00 A.M., and drinking at 8:00—and he had to hold his baton in front of at least one soloist’s nose. 154 En route to the festival, he learned of the attempted assassination of Frederick William IV by a disgruntled Brandenburg burgomaster. The jaded royal General-musikdirektor experienced a range of emotions, from shock and disbelief to relief the monarch had suffered only slight wounds. Recalling some reassuring verses from Psalm 91 (“For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways”), Felix dispatched to Berlin upon his return to Soden an a cappella motet for eight soloists. Later incorporated into the oratorio Elijah , Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen über dir approached the ideal of “pure,” contemplative church music favored by the king, with antiphonal blocks of euphony, clear syllabic declamation of the text, and careful control of dissonances ( ex. 14.11 ), and it became a staple of church choirs. 155
Ex. 14.11 : Mendelssohn, Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen über dir (1844)
Meanwhile Coventry’s organ commission continued to gestate; by early September Felix had finished several new pieces, which he began to group together according to keys. 156 A concern for the unity of the collection led him to conceptualize the new opus as a series of organ sonatas, a redefinition to which Coventry acceded. 157 Felix began to tie his pieces to the legacy of Bach’s organ music, most notably by extending the A-major wedding processional for Fanny to accommodate a learned chorale fugue on Aus tiefer Noth . By September 24 he was able to announce the commission was “finished,” though in fact a good deal of revision and new composition ensued before the collection emerged in 1845 as the Six Organ Sonatas, Op. 65.
During the restful summer of 1844 Felix did “complete” one other major work, over which he had long ruminated—the Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, for Ferdinand David. As early as July 1838 its haunting, elegiac beginning had “given him no peace,” and a year later he was still brooding about the high E’s of the first solo. 158 Then the work disappeared in his correspondence, presumably because he set it aside. By March 1842 he had turned instead to a new piano concerto and two years later was still “finishing a piano concerto” for England. 159 An undated autograph with several pages in full score and piano draft conveys the first two movements of what almost certainly would have been Felix’s third mature piano concerto. 160 Significantly, he chose the key of E minor for this torso, which betrays a telling stylistic proximity to Op. 64. There were to have been three movements connected by transitions (Allegro molto vivace in E minor, Andante in A minor, and a finale in E major—Felix sketched only the transition to the finale before breaking off work). The opening tutti of the first movement, marked by vigorous leaps, resembles the close of the first movement of Op. 64, while the placid second theme sounds like a preliminary sketch for that of the violin concerto ( ex. 14.12 a–d ). As with the Andante of Op. 64, Felix designed the piano Andante as a Lied ohne Worte in three parts (ABA), though here he had in mind a wistful barcarolle-like duet, along the lines of his earlier Gondellieder ( ex. 14.12e ). We can only speculate about the finale, but in all likelihood it was to have offered a brilliant virtuoso conclusion, perhaps in the brisk scherzo idiom of Op. 64.
Ex. 14.12a: Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto in E minor (1842–1844), First Movement
Ex. 14.12b: Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), First Movement
E
x. 14.12c: Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto in E minor (1842–1844), First Movement
Ex. 14.12d: Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), First Movement
Ex. 14.12e: Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto in E minor (1842–1844), Second Movement
Exactly when Felix resumed work on the violin incarnation of the concerto 161 is unclear, but in September 1844 he easily finished the orchestral score of Op. 64; the autograph shows only a few alterations, for the most part concerned with the finer seams of the orchestral accompaniment and details of solo violin figuration but not major structural or thematic changes. 162 Nevertheless, scarcely had Felix finished the manuscript before a plague of self-doubt beset him, and he corresponded with David about a host of details—extending the cadenza into a more florid display, reassessing issues of balance between the soloist and orchestra, and the like. By year’s end Felix was entering fastidious corrections into a second score prepared by his principal copyist, Eduard Henschke. 163 In this form Ferdinand David premiered the work in Leipzig on March 13, 1845, with Niels Gade conducting.
Ex. 14.13 : Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), First Movement
Beloved of generations of violinists, Op. 64 achieved early on an honored place in the canon of European “masterworks” and served as a model for later composers, “many of whom would be horrified at the notion of confessing a debt to anything so old-fashioned,” but, upon hearing their work, would admit that “like Hamlet , it was full of quotations.” 164 Felix’s first movement contains two structural innovations, of which one, the inversion of the traditional tutti -solo arrangement, affects the very opening, where the soloist presents a pensive first theme high above tremulous, rustling strings and timpani strokes ( ex. 14.13 ). The music then builds to the delayed orchestral tutti . The lyrical second theme in G major, of almost naive simplicity, reverses the roles of soloist and orchestra: now the winds present the theme, while the soloist defers by sustaining its open G-string (see ex. 14.12d ). The second innovation comes at the end of the development, where a brilliant solo cadenza unexpectedly interrupts the transition to the recapitulation. Beginning with triplets sweeping across the instrument’s strings, the cadenza intensifies and eventually shifts to florid sixteenth-note arpeggiations to accompany the reentrance of the first theme in the orchestra. By displacing the cadenza from its traditional place near the end of the movement, Felix minimized the break between movements and underscored the continuity of the entire composition. Later composers imitated this experiment, perhaps most notably Jean Sibelius, who in his brooding Violin Concerto (1903) employed an expanded cadenza in lieu of a development.
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 65
