Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Ex. 15.3 : J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion (1727), No. 25

  Shortly after moving to Frankfurt in December 1844 Felix also began to plan the sixth volume of Lieder ohne Worte , Op. 67. He assembled the new collection primarily from earlier piano songs, but a fresh stimulus was his creation on December 12 of a colorful new piece, titled in a later copy Reiterlied . Largely a canonic repartee in octaves between treble and bass, Felix’s Reiterlied unfolds as a crescendo and a diminuendo that suggest the approach and passing by of riders on horseback; presumably the implied subject is a romantic text of the hunt ( ex. 15.4 ). 19 By December 24 Felix had assembled six Lieder as a present for Cécile’s cousin Fritz Schlemmer (to whom Felix would dedicate the Organ Sonatas); it comprised Op. 67 Nos. 1, 5, and 6, two posthumously published piano songs, Op. 85 Nos. 1 and 2, and the Reiterlied . In mid-January Felix prepared a similar volume for Klingemann, who had obtained leave to visit Frankfurt. And, Felix sent copies of Lieder ohne Worte (possibly similar volumes) to the painters K. F. Lessing and Julius Hübner. 20 Then he set the work aside until April, when he hit upon the idea of dedicating the collection to Klingemann’s new fiancée, Sophie Rosen. 21 Further rumination inspired several new pieces, including Op. 85 Nos. 4 and 5, Op. 102 No. 2, and Op. 67 No. 4. 22 But excepting the last, the celebrated “Spinnerlied ,” Felix rejected all, as well as the Reiterlied . By May 21, the opus was in final form 23 and released on September 1.

  Ex. 15.4 : Mendelssohn, Reiterlied in D minor (1844)

  Op. 67 was the last volume of Lieder ohne Worte Felix saw through the press. Unlike the previous Hefte , each of which included at least one titled Lied, the six new pieces stood by themselves, without programmatic labels. Even so, they are among his most evocative utterances. No. 1 in E ♭ major, which Felix had arranged in June 1844 as one of seven piano duets fashioned for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, concludes by superimposing above its lyrical melody intermittent, belllike pitches in the soprano. The whimsical No. 2 in F ♯ minor begins as a solo Lied but evolves into a graceful Duett ohne Worte . No. 3 in B ♭ major, is mottled with impressionistic, softly syncopated harmonies ( ex. 15.5 ). The brilliant No. 4 in C major inevitably became known as the Spinnerlied (Spinning Song ), on account of its whirling figurations and recurring, refrainlike opening that lends the design a mesmerizing circularity. The volume concludes with two pieces of sharply contrasting characters. No. 5 in B minor, prefaced by drones that conjure up a folksong, actually borrows a somber figure from the First Organ Sonata (cf. exs. 15.6 and 15.2b ), while No. 6 in E impresses as a sentimental waltz.

  Ex. 15.5 : Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in B ♭ major, Op. 67 No. 3 (1844)

  Ex. 15.6 : Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in B minor, Op. 67 No. 5 (1844)

  Some larger works also piqued Felix’s interest during the Frankfurt sojourn. The idea of a second oratorio tantalized him, although his correspondence with Schubring about Elijah had broken off early in 1839. References to an oratorio crop up in Felix’s letters from the first half of 1845, and on June 10 he announced he had begun the new work. 24 Almost certainly it was Elijah , for on January 28, Edward Sartoris, husband of Adelaide Kemble, had inquired “whether Elijah (with imitative music for the ravens in the desert) is progressing,” revealing that Felix had begun to conceptualize music for the prophet’s exile to Cherith’s brook (1 Kings 17:4). 25 Still, other oratorio subjects were in circulation. In August 1844 he had declined a proposal for an oratorio about Luther 26 and a few months later rejected one from the Reverend John Webb, whom Felix had met in Birmingham in 1837, for an oratorio titled Rachel in Ramah . 27 Then, in June 1845, the Birmingham Musical Festival committee, chaired by Joseph Moore, resolved to invite Felix to compose a new oratorio for the 1846 festival, to which he provisionally agreed in July. This commission provided the impetus for him to resume serious work on Elijah .

  Meanwhile, in February Felix finished the score for Oedipus at Colonos and awaited the Prussian monarch’s order for its premiere. When the minister Eichhorn inquired if Felix would be prepared to direct a new school of composition in a reorganized Academy of Arts, Felix sidestepped the issue by requesting clarification about the administrative relationship of the school to the academy. And when the Privy Minister Müller again raised as a royal desideratum the production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia with Felix’s music, the composer responded that instead he had sketched music for Oedipus Rex , which, along with his scores to Oedipus at Colonos and Antigone , effectively completed a Sophoclean trilogy. Whether Felix was being disingenuous is unclear; in any event, no music for Oedipus Rex has survived. 28

  The early months of 1845 also found Felix planning a new symphony, as references in letters from February, March, and April attest. We may identify it as the Sinfonia in C major, for which he drafted material for the exposition and development of the first movement and sketched a subject for a second movement. 29 The broadly conceived inaugural theme, unfolding in three wavelike statements rising from bass to treble, recalls the Eroica Symphony, though Felix rejected Beethoven’s militant, steely opening in favor of a balanced, classical beginning ( ex. 15.7 ). While Felix was contemplating this new symphonic foray, Ferdinand Schubert sent from Vienna the sketches for his brother’s own unfinished Symphony in E major (D729). “Believe me,” Felix wrote Ferdinand, “I know how to value the full worth of this splendid present…. It is as though I have gotten to know your brother more closely and reliably through the incompletion of the work, through its unfinished comments scattered here and there, than would have been the case through any of his finished compositions.” 30 But while later musicians, including Sir Arthur Sullivan, tinkered with completing Schubert’s draft, Felix’s autograph has remained to this day a torso.

  Ex. 15.7 : Mendelssohn, Symphony in C major (1844–1845), First Movement, Sketch

  Felix enjoyed a comparatively private existence in Frankfurt but scrupulously maintained his correspondence, of which he preserved nearly six hundred incoming letters from 1845 alone. 31 There were offers of honorary membership from singing societies in Freiburg and Mainz (in June Felix traveled to Mainz to acknowledge the award). Among the more unusual requests was a commission from the Belgian musician H.-G.-M.-J.-P. Magis for a setting of the sequence Lauda Sion to celebrate the six hundredth anniversary of the Feast of Corpus Christi in Liège (1846). 32 From considerably closer to home, Dresden, came a special request. Owing in part to Richard Wagner’s efforts, in December the remains of Carl Maria von Weber had been transferred from London to Dresden and reinterred in the Catholic cemetery. Wagner now wished to memorialize Weber with a new monument and, deferentially signing his request “your most sincere admirer,” turned to Felix for assistance in raising funds. 33

  A stream of visitors sought him out in Frankfurt. Among them was the young English student W. S. Rockstro, on his way to Leipzig to matriculate at the Conservatory. With Ferdinand David, Felix read through parts of his new Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 66, and at St. Catherine’s Church played through all six sonatas of Op. 65, of which Rockstro remembered especially the “wonderfully delicate staccato” of the pedal part in the second [fifth] sonata, executed “with all the crispness of Dragonetti’s most highly-finished pizzicato.” 34 A few weeks before, the American J. Bayard Taylor, who, in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, authored several European travelogues, met the composer: “He received me with true German cordiality, and on learning I was an American, spoke of having been invited to attend a musical festival in New York…. I have rarely seen a man whose countenance bears so plainly the stamp of genius. He has a glorious dark eye, and Byron’s expression of a ‘dome of thought’ [Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , ii.6] could never be more appropriately applied than to his lofty and intellectual forehead, the marble whiteness and polish of which are heightened by the raven hue of his hair. He is about forty years of age, in the noon of his fame and the full maturity of his genius…. [He] is now the first living composer of Germany.” 35

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sp; Taylor later penned a fuller description of Felix’s physical appearance, as did the American’s traveling companion, Richard Storrs Willis, 36 who found Felix to be a “man of small frame, delicate and fragile looking; yet possessing a sinewy elasticity, and a power of endurance, which you would hardly suppose possible. His head appeared to have been set upon the wrong shoulders,—it seemed, in a certain sense, to contradict his body.” The head was not “disproportionately large, but its striking nobility was a standing reproof to the pedestal on which it rested”—perhaps a reference to Felix’s relatively short height, which according to Sir George Grove measured less than five feet, six inches. 37 What struck Taylor in particular were the composer’s “dark, lustrous, unfathomable eyes.” “They were black, but without the usual opaqueness of black eyes, shining, not with a surface light, but with a pure, serene, planetary flame. His brow, white and unwrinkled, was high and nobly arched, with great breadth at the temples, strongly resembling that of Poe. His nose had the Jewish prominence, without its usual coarseness: I remember, particularly, that the nostrils were as finely cut and as flexible as an Arab’s. The lips were thin and rather long, but with an expression of indescribable sweetness in their delicate curves.”

  Taylor’s visit to Frankfurt coincided with a grave natural calamity. On March 28 the Main flooded, inundating its banks and the alleyways and residences near the river, including the Fahrtor of Cécile’s family (at the time, Felix and Cécile were living in an apartment on the Bockenheimer Gasse near the highest part of the city and were thus spared the destructive energy of the deluge). The water crested some seventeen feet above flood stage. “They were using a rowboat in Frau Souchay’s vestibule,” Felix related to Paul, “and had to try to jump out of it onto the stairs”; Felix likened the chaotic destruction to the malice of “badly behaved children” who “had been playing with everything and ran off in the middle of their games.” Once again he offered his services for charity, and performed a Beethoven sonata at a relief concert in the Cäcilienverein. 38

  I

  The Frankfurt period produced two major chamber works, of which one, the Piano Trio in C minor, appeared early in 1846 as Op. 66 with a dedication to Louis Spohr, while the other, the String Quintet in B ♭ major, was left for posthumous publication in 1851 as Op. 87. The Trio, finished on April 30 and presented to Fanny on her birthday that year, 39 opens with an alluring passage: a sinuous, mysterious figure rises sequentially in three tiers (mm. 1, 3, 5) above a brooding pedal point in the cello ( ex. 15.8a ). Recalling the Hebrides Overture, the pianissimo nebulous passage creates an aura of instability and expectation. From this material Felix constructs an expanded exposition with three thematic groups, the opening complex in C minor, a lyrical second group in E ♭ major, and a dramatic closing group in G minor. On a second level, he manipulates several rhythmic layers throughout the movement: first the restless eighth notes of the opening give way through diminution to sixteenths that invert the contours of the Ur -motiv ( 15.8b ); then, in the development, a series of chromatic modulations unfold to an accompaniment of rippling triplets in the piano; and finally, in the culminating coda, the Ur -motiv returns in augmented quarter notes against its original form ( ex. 15.8c ).

  The two internal movements offer ingratiating examples of Felix’s tuneful Lied ohne Worte and capricious scherzo idioms. In the gentle Andante espressivo the piano introduces a rocking, lullabylike melody in chordal style suggestive of a choral part-song. Soon the violin and cello enter and, against a piano backdrop, transform the music into a sentimental Duett ohne Worte . Propelling the frolicsome scherzo, which Felix described as “a trifle nasty to play,” 40 is a crisp anacrusis that impregnates an ingenious rondo design—first, in the opening material, with cascading imitative entries in the violin, cello, and piano ( ex. 15.9 ), then in the strings accompanying the dizzying second subject of the piano, and finally in the bass of the piano, against the playful third subject in the strings. Reminiscent of Felix’s earlier scherzi, this scurrying, evanescent movement dissolves at the end into blurring figurations and crisp, pizzicato chords.

  Ex. 15.8a: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845), First Movement

  Ex. 15.8b: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845), First Movement

  Ex. 15.8c: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845), First Movement

  The weighty finale projects a rondo scheme also based upon three subjects, of which the third, a freely composed chorale, injects a spiritual idea into a musical narrative of high drama and reconciliation. Here the dissonant opening cello theme, impelled by an unusual (for Felix) leap of a ninth ( ex. 15.10a ), yields to the calming strains of the chorale ( ex. 15.10b ), which eventually reemerges in the celebratory conclusion in C major. To lend the chorale a semblance of familiarity, Felix begins by alluding to Gelobet seist Du, Jesu Christ , though the succeeding strains diverge into his own melodic invention. The idea of a culminating, free chorale later appealed to Johannes Brahms, who fitted a similar device into the finale of his third Piano Quartet, Op. 60, also in C minor (1875). Underscoring his reliance on Op. 66, Brahms’s finale begins with a subdued, winding figure in the piano, an allusion to Felix’s first movement ( ex. 15.10c ).

  Why Felix chose to return to the genre of the string quintet in his Op. 87, dated in Soden on July 8, 1845, is not known. Its four movements include an exuberant Allegro vivace that, with its soaring theme for the first violin ascending against energetic tremolos, recalls the optimistic élan of the Octet. The interlude-like Andante, a subdued scherzo in G minor, acts as a foil to the Adagio in D minor, cast in Felix’s most serious vein, with majestic dotted rhythms and intensely chromatic progressions. Toward the end, the first violin again attains its high register, accompanied by agitated tremolos. But the music breaks through to a radiant D major, and the violin eventually reaches a climactic high pitch, a ray of sunlight that disperses the chromatic dissonance of the movement. The finale, much of which impresses as a restless perpetuum mobile , caused difficulty for Felix, who reported his displeasure to Moscheles. 41 The issue seems to have concerned the formal imbalance of the movement, a sonata-rondo framework in which Felix elected not to recapitulate the second subject and thus left the bustling material of the opening “overtaxed” 42 and the composition as a whole, unfinished.

  Ex. 15.9 : Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845), Scherzo

  Ex. 15.10a: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845), Finale

  Ex. 15.10b: Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845), Finale

  Ex. 15.10c: Brahms, Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60 (1875), Finale

  The same day he dated the Quintet, Felix also fulfilled a request of Friedrich Aulenbach, a law student from the Palatinate who had sung under the composer’s baton at Zweibrücken in 1844. Aulenbach had recently lost a friend and asked Felix to set some sentimental verses, in which an angel’s touch releases the spirit of the departed. Felix obliged by rapidly composing a somber in memoriam for chorus, published in 1869 as the Trauergesang Op. 116. 43 Yet even this minor occasional piece inspired two different versions from the composer, then about to surrender the tranquility of Frankfurt for the resumption of his professional career.

  By early July 1845, Frederick William IV had ordered the premiere of Oedipus at Colonos for the fall, so that the composer had to forego participating in a Beethoven festival in Bonn in order to supervise rehearsals in Berlin. 44 Further complicating Felix’s affairs, around this time he entered into negotiations with the Saxon court concerning the resumption of his duties at the Gewandhaus and Leipzig Conservatory. Eager to strengthen Felix’s ties to Dresden, the king proposed through his minister J. P. von Falkenstein that Felix would direct occasional royal concerts and music for Catholic services, “regardless of the responsibilities” of the other Saxon Kapellmeister, who included Richard Wagner. 45 Further, Eduard Devrient was authorized to explore with Felix the possibility of moving the Co
nservatory to Dresden and joining it to a new school of drama. 46 Wary of court intrigue, Felix declined an “official” position and also the directorship of the Conservatory. Instead, he agreed to serve on the faculty of the institution, to share direction of the Gewandhaus concerts with Niels Gade, who had conducted during Felix’s absence, and to appear occasionally at the Dresden court. Though nominally in the service of the Saxon king, he demanded no official title. His salary was set at 2000 thalers, of which the royal exchequer provided three fourths, the directors of the Gewandhaus, one fourth. Coupled with the 1000 thalers from the Prussian king, Felix now thus earned the handsome annual sum of 3000 thalers. But in exchange, he served two monarchs and began again a taxing double life.