Curiously, the first edition reshuffled the pieces into an incongruous order, with Ascension Day preceding Passion Week, and Advent before Good Friday, a realignment Felix surely would have rejected. But when placed in the proper sequence, 26 the opus coheres with considerably greater clarity. Thus, the pieces for Advent and Christmas share the key of G major and similar, rising triadic figures ( ex. 16.2 ), while those for New Year’s Day, Passion Week, and Good Friday form a sobering group related by minor keys and use of an elementary motive with a repeated pitch. Standing somewhat apart is the Spruch for Ascension Day, exalting Christ in majestic dotted rhythms. All six pieces require eight-part double choirs, yet Felix employs their resources sparingly, alternating translucent passages of imitative Palestrinian counterpoint with more densely sculpted block harmonies. Terse, epigrammatic utterances, the Sprüche range in length from only twenty to forty measures, yet they manage through simple means to convey an expressive beauty and spiritual power that ranks high among Felix’s sacred works.
Ex. 16.2a: Mendelssohn, Sechs Sprüche , Op. 79, Im Advent (1846)
Ex. 16.2b: Mendelssohn, Sechs Sprüche , Op. 79, Weihnachten (1846)
Much the same could be said of his music for Frederick William’s second commission, a setting of the standard musical portions of the Prussian liturgy, for the weekly Sunday services of the Berlin Cathedral. Felix finished his version of the Deutsche Liturgie at the end of October and dispatched a copy to Berlin on November 6. 27 Though recalling his earlier, disagreeable experiences with the cathedral choir and clergy, he lavished special care on the ten movements, fitted delicately like so many musical pieces into the liturgical puzzle apportioned among the minister, chorus, and congregation. No fewer than six were short responses or Amens. The four more substantial pieces included an “Ehre sei dem Vater” (composed earlier for the Domchor), and three new movements, the “Kyrie,” “Ehre sei Gott in der Höh,” and “Heilig,” the Protestant counterparts to the Kyrie, Gloria, and Sanctus from the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass. Felix again restricted the scoring to double choir, from which he selected various textures: four-part harmony expanding to eight full parts (“Ehre sei dem Vater”), antiphonal exchanges between the two choirs (“Kyrie” and “Ehre”), and eight-part imitation (“Heilig”). Throughout he set the text with one note per syllable, to render the declamation as clear as possible. Once again Felix envisioned his work as a cycle and thus placed all the pieces in related keys, centered on A major with three sharps, possibly a reference to the Holy Trinity. Arguably the most impressive setting is the “Heilig,” impelled by a cascading series of thirds. Descending from the soprano, they complete a sequence beginning and ending on D, as the texture increases in density from one to eight voices. The effect is of suspended heavenly voices eventually “grounded” in a radiant major sonority ( ex. 16.3 ). Along with the “Kyrie” and “Ehre sei Gott in der Höh,” the “Heilig” was published separately in the 1850s, but not as part of a liturgical cycle. 28 Indeed, not until 1998 did all ten parts of the Liturgie appear in a collected edition that rescued this little-known gem from its unjustified oblivion. 29
Ex. 16.3 : Mendelssohn, Die deutsche Liturgie (1846), Heilig
I
For the new Gewandhaus season Felix and Gade again shared the twenty subscription concerts. By directing the first five odd-numbered and final five even-numbered concerts, Felix inaugurated and closed his last year at the Gewandhaus. His first two appearances (October 4 and 22) featured the pianists Louise Dulcken (Ferdinand David’s sister) and Clara Schumann, who performed the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto and works by Chopin and her husband. Attending that evening was Ignaz Moscheles, recently established as “Head of the Department for Playing and Composition” 30 at the Conservatory. There were private entertainments and speeches in Moscheles’s honor, and Felix arranged for his friend a recital by the best piano pupils of the school. The most important performance of this period was the highly anticipated premiere on November 5 of Schumann’s Second Symphony, Op. 61, but the work’s placement at the end of the program minimized its impact. When the audience demanded Felix first encore a rousing work heard earlier, Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Schumann’s symphonic fortunes suffered further. An oversatiated audience could not appreciate the majestic beauty of the new symphony, and its unusual chains of high string trills in the slow movement gave some listeners pause. 31
To make amends, at an Extra-Konzert on November 16, Felix read the work a second time, when it appeared at the beginning of the program. Still, his relationship with Robert seems to have suffered a considerable strain. The details of this episode remain mysterious, but exacerbating it was an ugly, anti-Semitic report in the Leipziger Tageblatt , where Felix’s encore of the Rossini was somehow taken as a “Mosaic” plot to undermine Robert’s symphony. 32 Schumann’s biographer Berthold Litzmann assures us Robert had nothing to do with the article, but the atmosphere was sufficiently poisoned to dampen Felix’s enthusiasm for helping the moody composer. 33 Still, Robert’s memoirs of Felix contain no reference to a falling out; Robert recorded their last meeting, a few months later on March 25, 1847, in Leipzig, without revealing the nature of their conversation. 34
In mid-November 1846 Felix spent several days in Dresden visiting the art galleries with Cécile and her Frankfurt relatives. He may have entertained Frederick Augustus II at the Saxon court, but a special reason for the trip was to procure parts to J. S. Bach’s monolithic Mass in B minor, so that Felix could correct his own error-ridden score of that masterpiece. 35 According to Eduard Devrient, Felix’s Dresden friends were “struck by his excessive touchiness, which approached the quarrelsome testiness of his father.” In particular, the political ferment of the day distressed him; he “predicted evil of it from every one of its exaggerations, which were certainly numerous enough.” 36 Though Felix did not live to see the eruption of revolution in March 1848, his apprehension betrays his political views during the prerevolutionary Vormärz. Like many educated German Bürger , he was a constitutional moderate, eager to see reform “effected by lawful authority,” 37 not by radical excesses.
While the post-Napoleonic Restoration enjoyed its final year of stability, the composer’s family suffered a personal loss. The night of their return to Leipzig (November 22), Felix witnessed the death of his loyal servant Johann Krebs. To Devrient the composer related an especially affecting scene—how Krebs, in the final weeks of his illness, had insisted on managing the family’s social events from his bedside and incessantly rang his bell to supervise subordinates in the finer details of dinner protocols. When a summoned doctor declined to treat a gravely ill servant, Felix insisted on care in his residence, for “to refuse him medical attendance was to refuse it to his household.” After Krebs’s death, Felix found among the deceased’s papers his last will, in which Felix read: “I also ask Herr and Frau Doctor to forgive and pardon my faults, and thank you a thousand fold for all the goodness you have shown me. I wish you also much happiness and blessings for the children, and hope that some day we will meet again, where we are no longer separated.” 38
Shortly after returning to Leipzig, Felix took up revisions to Elijah . To Klingemann he reported satisfaction with the new, more “solemn” version of the widow’s scene (No. 8), vindication for withholding the score until it could be “improved” no further. 39 In mid-December he visited Berlin for a week, and there played for Fanny parts of the oratorio; 40 he may also have shared with her his Kinderstücke , readied for publication but not released until late 1847 as Op. 72, the last opus Felix saw through the press. No doubt, too, at this last meeting with his sister he discussed her recent publications, issued by Bote & Bock by early December.
First to appear were Fanny’s Sechs Lieder Op. 1 and Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte Op. 2. By April 1847 Bote & Bock also brought out six Gartenlieder Op. 3 for mixed chorus; 41 meanwhile, in January, their competitor Schlesinger released the first half of the Six Mélodies pour le piano Op. 4. In th
e final months of her life Fanny prepared three more works—for Schlesinger, the second installment of the Six Mélodies as Op. 5; for Bote & Bock, a second volume of Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte Op. 6, and the Sechs Lieder Op. 7—but they appeared between June and October 1847, after her death. 42 Felix had at his disposal advance exemplars of these publications; in February she sent him as a birthday present the Gartenlieder , 43 and around the same time he played her piano pieces, presumably including Op. 2, for Moscheles, who found them “treated in a genuine musical spirit,” even if “close imitations” of Felix’s Lieder ohne Worte . 44 But there is no evidence to suggest he offered her advice or read proof. What is more, her Op. 1 reached him during the closing months of 1846 through the “mediation” of Cécile, as Fanny explained, revealing that for all her artistic independence, she remained intimidated by her brother: “Why didn’t I address my Lieder to you? In part I know why, in part I don’t. I wanted to enlist Cécile as a go-between because I had a sort of guilty conscience toward you. To be sure, when I consider that ten years ago I thought it too late and now is the latest possible time, the situation seems rather ridiculous, as does my long-standing outrage at the idea of starting Op. 1 in my old age. But since you’re so amenable to the project now, I also want to admit how terribly uppity I’ve been, and announce that six four-part Lieder [Op. 3], which you really don’t know, are coming out next.” 45
For her “professional” debut in Op. 1 Fanny selected settings of Heine, Eichendorff, Goethe, and Geibel that displayed her clear melodic gifts and sensitivity to textual nuances. The most striking include two wistful Heine settings (Nos. 1 and 3), and the Gondellied (No. 6) of Geibel. All three share a meter and gently rocking, trochaic rhythms. The barcarolle-like Schwanenlied (No. 1, Swan Song ) compares the course of love to a descending star, the deciduous leaves of an apple tree, and dulcet song of a swan plunging into a watery grave. The closing Gondellied , with its gently undulating arpeggiations and clandestine rendezvous, revisits a genre explored by Felix in his own Gondellieder with and without texts. Warum sind denn die Rosen so blaß? (No. 3, “Why, then, are the roses so pale?”), composed in 1837 and copied in 1838 for Cécile’s album, 46 explores the plight of an abandoned lover, expressed through images of pale flowers, a lark’s lament, and the gravelike earth. Fanny emended one verse of Heine’s poem she found too trenchant: “Why, then, does the scent of a corpse rise from the fragrant foliage?” became “Why, then, does the scent of withered flowers rise from the fragrant foliage?” 47 Despite this poetic sanitizing, her music captures the urgent questioning of Heine’s poem by opening with a nagging, first-inversion dominant harmony and by delaying the establishment of the tonic key, A minor ( ex. 16.4 ).
In her Opp. 2, 4, 5, and 6 piano pieces, the lyrical impulses of a song-writer again reign supreme. For all purposes these are Lieder ohne Worte that closely approach the exemplars of Fanny’s brother, a feature not lost upon one of the early reviewers of her work. 48 Thus, Op. 6 No. 4 (Il Saltarello Romano ) summarizes Fanny’s impressions of Rome by recalling the piquant A-minor finale of Felix’s Italian Symphony. 49 And in Op. 6 No. 3, Fanny appears to revive a phrase from his Lied ohne Worte , Op. 53 No. 4, though the allusion is distorted by the change of key (F to F ♯ ) and meter ( to ), and by a harmonic excursion that leads Fanny’s passage to A ♯ major ( ex. 16.5 ). To her credit, the result shows not so much a crutchlike dependence upon her brother as an imaginative melodic spontaneity that increasingly diverges from Felix’s style. As we have seen, Op. 2 No. 1, which begins as a solo Lied and then evolves into a duet, may have influenced Felix’s Op. 62 No. 1 in the same key (see p. 470). No. 2 in B minor, originally conceived as September (Am Flusse ) in Das Jahr but released in Op. 2 without extramusical headings, is a deeply felt, poignant composition that easily stands alongside Felix’s best Lieder ohne Worte (see p. 426).
Ex. 16.4 : Fanny Hensel, “Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass,” Op. 1 No. 4 (1846)
Ex. 16.5a: Mendelssohn, Lied ohne Worte in F major, Op. 53 No. 4 (1841)
Ex. 16.5b: Fanny Hensel, Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte , Op. 6 No. 3 (1847)
With the Gartenlieder Op. 3, Fanny symbolically moved from the “feminine” genres of domestic music making—the Lied and piano character piece—to the more masculine “open-air” part-song and thus vied with Felix’s four popular volumes, Opp. 41, 48, 50, and 59. There is compelling evidence that she approached the new genre with an eye to publication and determined to make the part-songs “as good as possible.” 50 Thus, between February and September 1846 she composed seventeen examples for mixed chorus, all rehearsed or performed at the Sunday musicales in the Gartenhaus—hence their title, Gartenlieder —of Leipzigerstrasse No. 3. After revising her work, she shaped six into the new opus and even made preliminary notations for a second, unfinished volume. Unlike Opp. 1 and 2, drawn from songs and piano pieces composed over a span of many years for private use, Op. 3 thus benefited from the start from the composer’s critical editorial eye. The result is a cohesive sequence of six songs, organized by a cycle of predominantly sharp keys (B–e–A–D–a–A) that, like Felix’s part-songs, celebrate nature and the open air through the poetry of Eichendorff and Uhland, among others. Though Fanny’s songs undoubtedly lean heavily on Felix’s stylistic “authority,” they contain some well-turned phrases, including one from Im Herbste (In Autumn ), Op. 3 No. 3, cited in a review published the very day of Fanny’s death, May 14, 1847. 51 Here Uhland’s poetic soul has a presentiment of spring songs, captured by Fanny in a rising, yearning sequence that moves from the minor to major mode ( ex. 16.6 ).
Initially, the Gartenlieder enjoyed some success. In Dresden, Robert Schumann read them with a newly formed choral Verein in 1848, while in Bonn, Johanna Kinkel, who had attended some of Fanny’s Berlin musicales, performed the opus with an amateur chorus. 52 The American hymnist William B. Bradbury, arriving in Leipzig late in 1847 to study with Moscheles, incorporated one of Fanny’s part-songs into his anthology The Alpine Glee Singer (N.Y., 1850). And in England J. J. Ewer brought out five songs in the series Orpheus: Collection of Glees of the Most Admired German Composers . 53 The pieces were still available in Germany after 1871, although a curtain of silence descended soon thereafter on Fanny’s music, not to be lifted until late in the twentieth century.
Ex. 16.6 : Fanny Hensel, Gartenlieder , Op. 3 No. 3 (1847)
II
Preoccupied at the close of 1846 with revising Elijah , Felix paid little attention to a parcel received that summer from an admirer of St. Paul . In July 1845 the young Belgian composer César Franck requested a critique of his Op. 1, three piano trios, of which the first contained a more or less clear allusion to the scherzo from Felix’s own youthful Piano Quartet Op. 3. Oddly enough, the parcel disappeared in the mail for nearly a year, so that in June 1846 Franck wrote again. Only on December 22 did Felix reply in French, offering to meet and make music with Franck and “chat” (causer ) about positive and negative features of his trios. 54 The meeting never took place, much to Franck’s regret.
By the end of 1846, Felix had revised Part I of Elijah and was about to begin sending Simrock installments of the piano-vocal score. The new year brought increased urgency. Both Simrock and Edward Buxton (Ewer & Co.), Felix’s English publisher, were concerned about pirated copies of the score, especially since Elijah had already been circulating in the public musical consciousness for months after the Birmingham premiere. 55 Moreover, Felix had acceded to the Sacred Harmonic Society’s request to perform the revised version in April 56 and intended to oversee the second, London premiere himself. Thus began the familiar, obsessive process of revision—an interminable mixture of recasting, reorchestration, retouching of text, and wholesale recomposition. To prepare Buxton, who had already engraved the choral parts for Birmingham, Felix offered his apology: “I was sorry to see that you will have to make so many alterations in the choral parts; but I think I told you before, that I was subject to this dreadful disease of alterin
g as long as I did not feel my conscience quite at rest, and therefore I could not help it, and you must bear it patiently.” 57 When Moscheles, incredulous that Felix expended so much effort redesigning successful music, asked if Elijah was “to become still more beautiful,” Felix merely replied, “Yes.” 58
On February 14 he could announce he had written the last note for the work; 59 yet, three days later, he was dispatching the “final” version of the widow scene (No. 8). This time, to “reconcile” Buxton “to the trouble you had for my and my alterations sake,” 60 Felix enclosed two additional manuscripts—a recently completed orchestration of the anthem Hear My Prayer for the Irish baritone Joseph Robinson, whom Felix had met during his last visit to London, 61 and an arrangement of the Overture to Elijah for piano duet. 62 The latter was a response to a special request of Buxton, shrewd businessman that he was, for a version of the overture with a concert ending to permit its separate sale. But after attempting unsuccessfully to divorce the overture from the elided opening chorus, Felix opted for the duet arrangement to be published in the vocal score, which at least rendered the fugue of the overture easier to realize at the keyboard.
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music Page 72
