In mid-July Rebecka, Fanny, and Wilhelm returned from Italy. Devotedly Fanny had nursed Rebecka back to health in Florence after the birth of her daughter, Flora, in February. Now Felix arranged a joyful family reunion in Freiburg im Breisgau, where on July 12 the Freiburg Liedertafel gave a concert in his honor, 47 and the travelers joined Felix and Paul for a few restful days (Cécile, pregnant with her fifth child, remained in Soden). There was music making, for the Woringens from Düsseldorf augmented the party, and Felix notated part-songs for open-air entertainments. 48 Then the “Felicians” proceeded down the Rhine and, en route to Soden, encountered Varnhagen von Ense at the picturesque Roman spa of Bad Homburg, just north of Frankfurt. After a fortnight together with Cécile in Soden, Rebecka, Paul, Fanny, and Wilhelm returned to Berlin, and Felix prepared to move to Leipzig.
II
Only days after arriving in Leipzig on August 13, Felix was on his way to Berlin to consult with Tieck about Oedipus at Colonus . Returning to Leipzig, the composer then visited Dresden to finalize his agreement with the Saxon king; the formal contract appeared on September 18, permitting Felix to begin his “service” on October 1. A search for new quarters in Leipzig came to fruition on September 4, when the family moved into the second floor of a stately building just off the Promenade, Königstrasse Nr. 3—Felix’s final residence (plate 16 ). 49 But two days later, he left for Berlin and, having returned to Leipzig after nine days, again commuted to Dresden. In the midst of this Unruhe , the family’s furnishings arrived from Berlin, and Cécile gave birth on September 19 50 to Elisabeth (Lili) (1845–1910), who later married the jurist Adolf Wach.
To trumpet fanfares and stormy applause in the Gewandhaus, Felix inaugurated the new concert season on October 5. 51 The program, which included the Overture to Weber’s Der Freischütz , solos by Clara Schumann, and Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, won acclaim in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , a veritable Mendelssohnian organ that greeted the composer’s return as the “greatest security for the true enjoyment of art.” 52 Once again Felix presided over the refined musical life of Leipzig’s art-loving burghers. At the first chamber-music Unterhaltung (October 18), he accompanied the charming French cellist Lisa Cristiani, for whom he composed that year a tender Lied ohne Worte in D major, posthumously published as Op. 109. And at the Conservatory, he drafted detailed reports of the students’ progress. W. S. Rockstro merited Felix’s general approbation, while Otto Goldschmidt, Jenny Lind’s future husband, received not only praise for his piano skills but also encouragement to avoid the superficial (Äußerliche ) in favor of a more serious tone in his compositions. 53 Alternating with Gade, Felix then directed the third Gewandhaus concert (October 23), which featured Robert Schumann’s First Symphony and Felix’s Violin Concerto, Op. 64, performed for the first time under the composer’s direction by Ferdinand David. The concert also marked the debut of the English contralto Helen Dolby (Sainton-Dolby), who left an amusing anecdote about Felix. Preoccupied with preliminary work on Elijah , Felix arrived late one evening for a dinner party hosted by Raymund Härtel. When Felix blamed his tardiness on the contralto part of the oratorio, Miss Dolby exclaimed, “‘do tell me what that will be like, because I am specially interested in that part.’ ‘Never fear,’ he quipped, ‘it will suit you very well, for it is a true woman’s part—half an angel, half a devil,’” 54 revealing the part’s division between angelic voices and Queen Jezebel.
Not quite extricated from his Leipzig commitments, Felix arrived in Berlin on October 24 to oversee Oedipus at Colonos . Within days he was sitting for a new oil portrait by his old friend Eduard Magnus, subsequently widely copied and disseminated, and later judged by Sir George Grove as a “good representation,” though it was “deficient in that lively speaking expression which all admit to have been so characteristic” of the composer. 55 Somehow, Albert Lortzing had secured Felix’s agreement to compose a choral work for the annual Leipzig celebration of Friedrich Schiller’s birthday (November 11). Between final rehearsals in Berlin, Felix drafted a spirited part-song for mixed chorus, Die Frauen und die Sänger (The Ladies and the Minstrels ), on stanzas from Die vier Weltalter (The Four Ages of the World ). 56 By filling this commission, Felix revealed liberal sympathies, for in Leipzig before the 1848 Revolution, political clubs intent upon promoting a pan-German, constitutional monarchy championed Schiller’s verses. In 1831 Felix had written a rapturous letter to his parents about Schiller’s egalitarian play William Tell ; 57 he now chose two stanzas from Schiller’s 1802 poem that, in a reworking of Ovid’s Four Ages, divided the world into eras of shepherds, dragons, and heroes, and a final utopian vision of beauty. Early in 1846, Felix added two more stanzas, expanding the composition into a paean to the union of art and life that Schiller had glorified in his optimistic vision of classical antiquity.
On November 1, 1845, Felix directed the long-delayed premiere of Oedipus at Colonos , held, like Antigone , before Frederick William IV in the Neues Palais at Potsdam. The first “public” performance followed in Berlin at the opera house on November 10. But unlike the popular wave of philhellenism that followed Antigone in 1841, Oedipus at Colonos failed to excite the Berlin public. A correspondent for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung confessed to being utterly bored by the play and found the production’s scholarly trappings as tedious as a doctoral exam in philology. 58 Minna Meyerbeer, wife of the composer, reported that the king did not attend the second performance, that Felix was neither acknowledged nor called for, and that only one chorus received applause. 59 No doubt his newly diminished relationship with the king explains in part the succès d’estime of the Berlin performances. Unfortunately, Frederick William never ordered a production of Oedipus Rex , which, had Felix composed the music, would have completed his Sophoclean trilogy and placed Oedipus at Colonos in the context of the whole. For his part, Felix abandoned further attempts to bridge classical Greece and modern Germany: he made no effort to perform Oedipus at Colonos in Leipzig or publish the score (premiered in Leipzig after Felix’s death by Julius Rietz in 1850, it appeared posthumously as Op. 93 in 1851). 60 Indeed, since 1845, the work has remained among Felix’s most obscure, unknown compositions, though a fresh appraisal reveals some compelling music, suggesting its fate was not entirely justified.
In the first play of the trilogy, Oedipus Rex , we learn how the proud Theban King had unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother; the revelation of these horrific acts caused him to put out his eyes and exile himself. As the second play opens, he has wandered for years with his daughter Antigone and reached a grove sacred to the Eumenides at Colonos, near Athens. Here, through a rite of purification, he is reconciled with the avenging goddesses and given asylum by the Athenian king, Theseus. Summoned by divine thunderclaps, Oedipus prepares to enter Hades. His painless passing, “of human exits the most marvelous,” transforms him into a heroic protector of the Athenian state; in death, the gods receive and exalt him.
Like its sibling Antigone , the score to Oedipus at Colonos describes a closed, musico-dramatic circle, now circumscribing an overture and nine numbers, including episodes in melodrama (with the orchestra providing a musical backdrop to dramatic action), portions in which the chorus interacts with the actors, and several reflective choral odes. Felix intensifies the expressive range of the chorus by testing the extremes of a barren, recitative style, with the chorus singing in unison and, in the odes, opulent eight-part harmony that invokes the lush sonorities of German part-songs. The overture, reduced (in contrast to Antigone ) to a spartan Introduction of thirteen bars, establishes as a dissonant melodic and harmonic element the interval of the tritone, symbol of Oedipus’s defilement as an incestuous parricide ( ex. 15.11a ). This dissonant agent remains in force until his ultimate heroic transformation. Examples 15.11a–f summarize several variants of the unifying motive, including: (1) the revelation of Oedipus’s identity to the Athenians and Antigone’s response ( 15.11b , c ); (2) the chorus’s view of Oedipus as a victim of
fate, and the ensuing thunder peals summoning him to Hades ( 15.11d ); and (3) the final choral ode, a lament for Oedipus ( 15.11e ). Only in the closing bars does the dissonant metaphor yield to majestic dotted rhythms in D major ( 15.11f ), symbolizing Oedipus’s heroic transformation.
The spirit of Greek tragedy also imbued Felix’s incidental music to Racine’s Athalie , premiered privately one month after Oedipus at Colonos , on December 1, 1845, at the royal Berlin palace of Charlottenburg. In this case, Felix focused primarily upon the choruses in the neoclassical French drama, which, in a relaxed imitation of their Greek counterpart, comment about the impious reign of the Old Testament queen of Judah (ca. 843–837 B.C .). In 1690 Racine had written his tragedy for the Maison Royale de Saint Louis in St.-Cyr, a school founded by the wife of Louis XIV for daughters of impoverished nobility. The playwright’s theme—“that in heaven kings have a severe judge, innocence an avenger, and the orphan a father” 61 —struck a resonant chord in Prussia. Frederick the Great reportedly confessed that instead of winning the Seven Years’ War he would have preferred to write Athalie , 62 and in 1783 J. A. P. Schulz, Kapellmeister to the Prussian monarch’s brother, composed incidental music for a Berlin production. Though the young Abraham Mendelssohn hummed favorite choruses from this score, 63 Schulz’s music failed to impress, and in 1785, Princess Anna Amalia refused its dedication. 64 By the 1840s, of course, Schulz’s choruses, stylistically somewhere between Gluck and C. P. E. Bach, were woefully obsolete. By commissioning Felix to compose new music, Frederick William IV remedied this inadequacy and furthered his own neoclassical project.
According to 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, when Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel (soon to figure in Felix’s oratorio Elijah ), seized the throne, she attempted to purge all eligible male heirs. But the high priest Jehoiada (Joad) and his wife Jehosheba sequestered Athaliah’s grandson Joash in the Temple for six years, then crowned and anointed him king, and mounted an uprising against the queen. Her demise led to the destruction of Baal idolatry and the renewal of the Old Covenant. These are the main elements on which Racine based his play, delivered in the elevated style of French alexandrines typically with twelve syllables per line, divided more or less evenly by a caesura midway. Felix’s fluency in French facilitated his setting the choruses in the original language, though for the Berlin premiere a new German translation by Ernst Raupach was introduced. Early in 1846 Felix fulfilled another royal request by dispatching a copy of the score with a French dedication to Queen Victoria; 65 the work received its English premiere, in French, at Windsor Castle on New Year’s Day, 1847, and was published the following year with an English text by William Bartholomew.
Ex. 15.11a: Mendelssohn, Oedipus at Colonos , Op. 93 (1845), Introduction
Ex. 15.11b: Mendelssohn, Oedipus at Colonos , Op. 93 (1845), No. 1
Ex. 15.11c: Mendelssohn, Oedipus at Colonos , Op. 93 (1845), No. 1
Ex. 15.11d: Mendelssohn, Oedipus at Colonos , Op. 93 (1845), No. 8
Ex. 15.11e: Mendelssohn, Oedipus at Colonos , Op. 93 (1845), No. 9
Ex. 15.11f: Mendelssohn, Oedipus at Colonos , Op. 93 (1845), No. 9
Though Felix designed his score as incidental music, after his death the religious drama enjoyed a second life as a kind of oratorio, with the choruses stitched together by a narrative in lieu of stage action. Both Bartholomew and Eduard Devrient fashioned connecting texts to facilitate concert versions of the work. In part, they were motivated to read Athalie as a preliminary sketch for the more monumental Elijah , with which Athalie shared a common subject, the struggle against Baalism. On general stylistic grounds, Athalie indeed approaches Elijah . Thus, prefacing the score is a full-scale overture that depicts the essential dramatic conflict. The orchestra begins with a majestic rising figure later associated with God’s wrath, and the just rebellion against the queen ( ex. 15.12a ). Next, we hear a yearning wind melody, accompanied by harp and pizzicato violins, evidently meant to remind us “of the temple service and the psalms,” and to superimpose over the whole a “kind of Oriental cloud of fragrance” ( ex. 15.12b ). 66 Trumpet fanfares herald a third musical figure, symbolizing the military uprising. From these three elements Felix constructs his overture, which culminates in a reprise of the wind-harp melody, transformed into a victorious, festive march.
As a musical topic, marches figure three more times in Felix’s score, first in the opening chorus, as the Levites prepare a sacred procession from the Temple with a song of praise: “Heaven and earth display, His grandeur is unbounded” ( ex. 15.12c ). The same music returns at the end of the work, so that the idea of musical ritual frames the score (in an early version of the conclusion Felix expanded the chorus to include a fugue 67 but excised it to preserve the marchlike character of the finale). Finally, between the third and fourth acts Felix inserted the celebrated War March of the Priests ( ex. 15.12d ), which in the nineteenth century fairly rivaled in popularity the Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream . But this entr’acte march was purely Felix’s invention, to suggest the bellicose stirrings of the priests as they prepare to reveal Joash’s identity and overthrow Athaliah.
Other passages of the score show Felix as a creative interpreter of Racine’s play, by gradually strengthening musically a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament drama. Preparing this process is the first chorus (I:iv), commemorating the delivery of the Ten Commandments and the establishment of God’s law. In No. 2 (II:ix), attention turns to the young Eliazin (Joash), who, “like Elijah, boldly stands forth undismay’d by this Jezebel’s [Athaliah’s] wrath,” and is praised in a lyrical soprano duet as an “ever blessed child, by heav’nly love protected.” When the chorus of the faithful asks in distress, “How long shall we see the godless against Thee arise?” Felix unexpectedly inserts the Lutheran chorale Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh’ darein , to the text Qu’ils pleurent, O mon Dieu , qu’ils frémissent de crainte , which Bartholomew rendered as “They, Lord, who scoff at Thee, who scorn, while we adore Thee” ( ex. 15.12e ). Within a few measures, the famous melody dissolves into a freely composed chorale tune, but the reference, relating the Old Testament story to modern Lutheran worship, is clear enough. And the choice of the chorale—Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 12—is particularly apposite. Like the psalm, Racine’s chorus is a plea to God for assistance in a time of evil. The final stage in Felix’s “reading” of Racine follows in the melodrama of No. 3 (III:vii). With the Temple doors closed, Jehoida now prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem and, in its place, a “new Jerusalem” that “appears in yonder desert, darting brilliant rays.” Felix supports Racine’s allusion to the advent of Christianity by introducing the Lutheran Christmas chorale Vom Himmel hoch (Luke 2) in a striking setting: against harp arpeggiations and shimmering pianissimo wind and string tremolos, the melody appears in the trumpet ( ex. 15.12f ), as if from on high. Felix symbolically reconciles his family’s history by joining the Old and New Testaments in an optimistic Christian vision: the anointing of Joash is understood to reestablish the rightful line of David, which will culminate in the Messiah—as Matthew informs us, the “son of David, the son of Abraham.”
Ex. 15.12a: Mendelssohn, Athalie , Op. 74 (1845), Overture
Ex. 15.12b: Mendelssohn, Athalie , Op. 74 (1845), Overture
Ex. 15.12c: Mendelssohn, Athalie , Op. 74 (1845), No. 1
Ex. 15.12d: Mendelssohn, Athalie , Op. 74 (1845), No. 5
Ex. 15.12e: Mendelssohn, Athalie , Op. 74 (1845), No. 1
Ex. 15.12f: Mendelssohn, Athalie , Op. 74 (1845), No. 2
III
Between Oedipus at Colonos and Athalia , Berliners were transfixed by the return of Jenny Lind, who triumphed in the title role of Bellini’s Norma , and as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Agathe in Der Freischütz , where, Ludwig Rellstab noted, her “voice seemed to float upwards, like a cloud of incense.” 68 Felix now experienced her supple, natural voice firsthand: an unpublished record of his Berlin engagements reveals he attended all three operas
on November 9, 19, and December 2, and saw the soprano on at least five other occasions (November 17, 21, 22, 27, and December 1). 69 Mendelssohn’s biographers have sometimes sought in the artistic friendship a romantic liaison, though the question of an affair remains speculative. 70 Hans Christian Andersen, who was smitten by Jenny and in “The Nightingale” allegorized her voice as the pure expression of art, 71 reports an extraordinary comment from Felix, who asserted, “There will not be born, in a whole century, another being so gifted as she.” 72 Clearly, Felix was quite taken by her talent, so much so that his thoughts turned again toward opera. He began discussing seriously with Emanuel Geibel a libretto on the Lorelei legend. By early December, Felix was responding positively to a draft, several passages of which he found already finished, though the whole still lacked a continuous dramatic thread. 73 Almost certainly he intended the bewitching title role of the opera, now to occupy him until his death, for the Swedish nightingale.
Two days after the Athalie premiere, Felix and Jenny departed Berlin together for Leipzig. She had agreed to sing in the Gewandhaus and did not disappoint. Anticipating her debut, the concert management doubled the ticket price and suspended the students’ privileged gratis admission (the young Otto Goldschmidt led an unsuccessful protest). When she appeared at the eighth subscription concert (December 4), she came forward, Elise Polko informs us, as “a slender girlish form with luxuriant fair hair, dressed in pink silk, and white and pink camellias on her breast and in her hair, in all the chaste grace of her deportment, and so utterly devoid of all pretension….” 74 She sang arias from Norma and Don Giovanni , a duet from Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Helen Dolby, and songs of Felix, with the composer at the piano. She closed with a Swedish national air in which she accompanied herself, captivating the audience with a sustained, pianissimo F ♯ , described by the press as utter magic. 75 (Felix took note of the effect, and later designed the soprano aria of Elijah “Hear ye, Israel!”, which features a high F ♯ , for her voice.) The publisher Heinrich Brockhaus recorded in his diary, “a song sung by her goes straight to the heart.” 76
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