Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  With Bartholomew, Felix renewed the frenzied correspondence about the English translation; their exchanges again yielded significant musical alterations. Thus, at the end of the recitative No. 25, to represent Elijah’s flight to the wilderness, Bartholomew suggested adding a short “instrumental interlude” before the prophet’s aria of resignation, “It is enough, O Lord.” 63 Felix added four Adagio bars for the orchestra. But then came a setback: in March, he learned that Joseph Staudigl would not be able to sing the bass solos. When Felix suggested postponing the performance until the fall, Bartholomew hurriedly replied, “I can tell you twenty reasons why you should come , and not one why you should not come .” 64 Preparations continued apace; on March 18, Felix sent off the revised organ part for the oratorio and, early in April, the final missing piece—metronome markings for all the movements. 65

  Such a schedule would have taxed most musicians, yet Felix accomplished the revisions while carrying out his duties at the Conservatory and Gewandhaus. Thus, on January 10, he detailed a report about fifteen negligent students: Cécile’s relative Alfred Jean Petitpierre from Neuchâtel rated only a mediocre appraisal (“very moderately diligent and comes irregularly”), while the Londoner Alfred Albert Suggate, faring somewhat better, avoided a strenge Mahnung (“sharp warning”) for missing one of David’s classes. 66 Felix’s final appearances at the Gewandhaus began on January 14 with the twelfth concert, when he conducted his Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt Overture. For the fourteenth (January 28), which featured the Czech virtuoso pianist Alexander Dreyschock, Felix accompanied the young Elise Vogel in Schubert Lieder and also performed Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, K. 550, with a tempo, according to Moscheles, moderate enough that the chromatic modulations of the finale emerged “much more clearly than I have been accustomed to hear them.” 67

  The sixteenth concert (February 11) culminated with the Scottish Symphony; then, with Gade, Felix shared a series of four historical concerts (February 18 and 25, March 11 and 18), interrupted by a royal summons from Dresden. On February 24 the minister Falkenstein had admonished Felix about his rare appearances in the Saxon capital; three days later, he was entertaining Frederick Augustus II with piano music, obtaining leave to direct Elijah in England in April, and discussing his concerns about Geibel’s Die Lorelei with Eduard Devrient. 68 Meanwhile, in Leipzig the final four concerts explored a historical progression from J. S. Bach and Handel to Haydn and Mozart, to Beethoven and Weber, and on to modern times. Sparing little effort to program lesser-known works of eighteenth-century composers, Felix searched out for the second concert a symphony of C. P. E. Bach and orchestrated a trio from Cimarosa’s comic opera Il matrimonio segreto (1792). 69 But this time his historicizing efforts earned mixed reviews in a Leipzig on the threshold of the cataclysmic Revolution of 1848. If Franz Brendel ostensibly supported the return to “the old, healthy times,” he effectively treated some of the compositions as museum curiosities. And an anonymous reviewer in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung went farther, criticizing the repertoire as beholden to the conservative past and present but neglecting the future. Thus the critic could only wonder why Marschner’s formerly popular Der Vampyr (1827)—its overture was the final work Felix conducted in the Gewandhaus—had fallen from the operatic repertory, and why future-minded composers such as Berlioz were excluded. 70 If anything, Felix’s performance of Paulus on Good Friday (April 2) at the Paulinerkirche ignored the reviewer’s “progressive” agendum, though neither he nor his contemporaries could have imagined that its final chorus, resplendent with Bach, Handel, and the “old, healthy times,” was Felix’s very last public performance in Leipzig.

  To summarize Felix’s achievement at the Gewandhaus, W. A. Lampadius observed that he was “as great as a conductor, as he was as virtuoso and composer,” and that he perfected “three gifts which are usually granted only singly to men.” In an age when the role of the virtuoso conductor was taking shape and finding its definition, Felix’s contributions were indeed of seminal importance:

  When once his fine, firm hand grasped the bâton the electric fire of Mendelssohn’s nature seemed to stream out through it, and be felt at once by singers, orchestra, and audience. We often thought that the flames which streamed from the heads of Castor and Pollux must play around his forehead, and break from the conductor’s staff which he held, to account for the wonderful manner with which he dissipated the slightest trace of phlegm in the singers or players under his direction…. As soon as he had given the first beat, his face lighted up, every feature was aflame, and the play of countenance was the best commentary on the piece. Often the spectator could anticipate from his face what was to come. The fortes and crescendos he accompanied with an energetic play of features and the most forcible action; while the decrescendos and pianos he used to modulate with a motion of both hands, till they slowly sank to almost perfect silence…. He had no patience with performers who did not keep good time. His wondrously accurate ear made him detect the least deviation from the correct tone, in the very largest number of singers and players. He not only heard it, but knew whence it came. 71

  III

  Felix’s correspondence from his last year betrays a markedly wistful quality as he struggled with issues of loss, imagined and real. As early as October 1846, he disclosed to Jenny Lind his intention to leave Leipzig: “in two or three years, at the utmost, I think I shall have done my duty here, after which I should scarcely stay any longer. Perhaps I might prefer Berlin; perhaps, the Rhine; somewhere where it is very pretty, and where I could compose all day long, as much as I liked. But really, you would have to sing to me, sometimes.” 72 For a brief moment, the parental home held a special appeal: when Gustav Dirichlet, concerned at the social unrest in Berlin, considered moving to Heidelberg, Felix urged his brother-in-law to remain. A change of residence could accomplish no more against the gathering political crisis than Felix’s Gewandhaus concerts. Indeed, Felix now felt compelled to leave Leipzig, to “rejoin those with whom I enjoyed my childhood and youth, and whose memories and friendships and experiences are the same as my own.” He desired to secure “one pleasant united household, such as we have not seen for long, and live happily together (independent of political life or non-life , which has swallowed up all else).” 73 And yet, a day trip to Berlin at the end of March burst the illusion of his idealized childhood home—to Droysen, Felix confessed how “almost each and every thing that in our day was fresh and young had disappeared, and was stultified, obsolete, and in decline!” 74

  In Leipzig he found other ways to preserve distant memories. For Klingemann, Felix made careful copies of the drawings from their Scottish sojourn of 1829. 75 And on February 3, 1847, he celebrated his last birthday with the Moscheles’s and Cécile’s relatives. Encircling the cake and its “candle of life” were thirty-seven tapers, to which Charlotte Moscheles attached comments reviewing Felix’s life, “from the cradle to the piano and the conductor’s desk; from his first attempt at composition to Saint Paul , Elijah ,” 76 and the hoped-for opera. The principal entertainment was a theatrical representation of the word “Gewandhaus.” First, a wig-adorned Joachim played a fantasy à la Paganini on the G (Ge ) string. The Pyramis and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream , with the lovers communicating through a chink in a makeshift wall, represented Wand (wall). And to convey Haus , Charlotte Moscheles delivered a domestic soliloquy on “the foibles of female authoresses,” interrupted by her husband impersonating a female cook. Then a children’s symphony, directed by Felix’s godson, Felix Moscheles, and performed on toy instruments, parodied the orchestra and reinforced musically the entire word. 77

  A much more serious distraction was the career of Jenny Lind, who naively had entered into conflicting engagements with two London opera impresarios. Early in 1845 Alfred Bunn, lessee of Drury Lane Theatre, had pursued Jenny to Berlin, where she was featured in Meyerbeer’s Ein Feldlager in Schlesien . Between the acts of the opera, Bunn convinced her to sign a London eng
agement for the next season. Though the terms were generous, Jenny later reneged, partly because Bunn required her to sing Meyerbeer’s opera in English, a language still unfamiliar to her. Then, in 1846, Benjamin Lumley, director of the Italian opera at the King’s Theatre, saw the fortunes of his company decline when a succession of musicians, including the conductor Michael Costa, left to establish the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden. Lumley attempted to salvage the situation by engaging Jenny, and appealed for assistance to Felix, who encouraged her in October 1846 about the prospect of a London debut. No disinterested spectator, Felix had discussed with Lumley writing an opera for the King’s Theatre and no doubt cherished the idea that Jenny would sing at its premiere. All Felix lacked was a suitable libretto; “in the meantime,” he wrote, “I have music-paper and finely-nibbed pens lying on the table—and wait.” 78

  Lumley rejoiced when the same month Jenny signed an exclusive agreement with his company. But now events took a legal turn. Foiling her attempt to win release from the earlier Drury Lane engagement, Bunn threatened an action for breach of contract. The soprano conceived “so inordinate a dread of Mr. Bunn’s vengeance” that she remained on the Continent. 79 Felix’s opera fell through as well. After initial discussions, he had provisionally settled on Shakespeare’s Tempest as a subject, and the enterprising Lumley had persuaded the French dramatist Eugène Scribe to draft a libretto. Receiving it near mid-January 1847, Felix at first was favorably inclined: early in February he wrote Paul that the first half was quite promising. 80 But by February 21, the captious composer had decided not to compose Scribe’s opera; the book was “too French,” he later explained to Henry Chorley, and the third act “thoroughly bad.” 81 An exasperated Lumley summed up the difficulty: “it was impossible to reconcile their peculiar idiosyncrasies. The German and French natures were in conflict. The more strictly logical and analytical spirit of the former seemed strangely hypercritical to the latter. The facile imagination of the Frenchman, however fertile in scenic resources … found no response in the less flexible tenets of the German.” 82 Scribe’s féerie inspired no suitable Elfenton .

  Another factor helped trigger Felix’s refusal. When Lumley prematurely announced the Scribe-Mendelssohn collaboration in the English papers, the publicity, far from encouraging Felix to compose the score, acted as a disincentive. First, Emanuel Geibel, engrossed with his own libretto for Felix, got wind of the proposed opera and, coolly asking for an explanation, suggested the composer return Die Lorelei . 83 Meanwhile, the Morning Chronicle , favorable to Covent Garden, challenged the legitimacy of Jenny’s engagement to Lumley and denounced Felix’s new opera as “a mere fabrication.” Wondering whether instead of The Tempest the whole affair was “much ado about nothing,” Felix asked Klingemann to clear up the confusion, but when new announcements of the opera appeared, the composer himself wrote in March to the Morning Chronicle and returned Scribe’s libretto to Lumley, thus ending the “opera fuss.” 84 By then Felix had resumed serious discussions with Geibel about Die Lorelei 85 and also rejected new libretti from the Bavarian writer Konrad Philipp Lattner. 86

  Somehow, in the midst of this confusion, Felix left for London with Joachim on April 8, 1847. In the composer’s baggage were the revised score of Elijah and also a setting of the Jubilate Deo (Psalm 100) for four-part choir and organ, completed just days before, on April 5 87 —apparently with some difficulty (on the margins of the draft manuscript Felix toyed with an unrelated canon to the Virgilian moral per aspera ad astra ). The Jubilate Deo complemented Felix’s old setting of the Te Deum (1832)—originally written for Novello but issued by Edward Buxton’s firm, Ewer & Co., in 1846—and thus completed the Anglican Morning Service. Buxton had requested the new composition in January 1847, 88 and in the hurried days before he left Leipzig Felix was able to comply. But Buxton’s additional request for the Evening Service would remain unfulfilled until Felix’s return from England.

  While Felix was in transit to London, some six hundred members of the Prussian Landtag (United Diet) were assembling in Berlin from the provinces at the behest of Frederick William IV. Privately the king regarded the convocation as a grudging concession to “the principles of popular representation, which have laid hold of so many states and ruined them since the French Revolution”; 89 he had no intention of granting the Diet legislative powers, let alone a popular constitution. And so the king severely curtailed the Diet’s authority and called out the military to quell food riots that erupted in Berlin in April. Fanny, whose last portrait was drawn by her husband during the final months of her life (plate 18 ), silently joined her voice in her diary to that of the growing opposition; “Now politics will for a time take the lead,” she noted, “and absorb all other interests.” 90 But at Leipzigerstrasse No. 3, sequestered from the unrest, she continued her Sunday musicales and on April 11, the opening day of the Diet, premiered her last major work, the Piano Trio in D minor, written for Rebecka’s birthday.

  Following the Gartenlieder , and published posthumously in 1850 as Op. 11, the trio represented for Fanny another step toward the larger musical forms and the public world of her brother. Its key, D minor, inevitably prompts comparisons with Felix’s Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49; indeed, Fanny’s first theme, asserted by the violin and cello against a piano accompaniment, begins with the same upbeat figure (see ex. 16.7 ), but the effect differs markedly: Felix’s subdued melancholy yields to an explosive, passionate opening, with a turbulent undercurrent in the piano. For the second theme, later recycled in the finale, Fanny offers a more lyrical gesture, preparing us for the two, connected inner movements, in which she retreats into her familiar, private world of the Lied. Thus the Andante begins with a Lied-ohne-Worte- like piano solo, answered by a duet for the strings. The third movement (Allegretto ), actually titled Lied , strengthens the reference to vocal models by seemingly alluding to Obadiah’s aria in Elijah , “If with all your hearts ye truly seek me” ( ex. 16.8 ). 91 The finale then begins with a cadenza-like improvisation that restores the D minor of the first movement and gradually articulates a new, noble theme enveloped by lush arpeggiations. Through the course of the movement a second, rhythmically distinct subject alternates with the first before the recall of the second theme from the opening movement. This conceit ties the whole together and clarifies its underlying cyclical progression, in which the outer, extroverted movements are balanced by the more intimate inner movements. The music exudes an irrepressible spontaneity and harmonic freshness that begin to suggest what she could have achieved as a professional composer. Clara Schumann, for one, was impressed enough to plan to dedicate her own piano trio to Fanny, who died before she could receive this honor. 92

  Ex. 16.7 : Fanny Hensel, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 11 (1847), First Movement

  Ex. 16.8a: Fanny Hensel, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 11 (1847), Allegretto

  Ex. 16.8b: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 4

  IV

  A wearied Felix arrived in London on April 12. His former pupil Rockstro was startled by his “worn look, quite foreign to his usual expression—a look of pain” 93 and concluded the composer was working himself to death. On the 16th Felix met the soloists, Charlotte Ann Birch, Helen Dolby, Henry Phillips, and Charles Lockey, and rehearsed in Exeter Hall with performing forces, according to Phillips, of some five hundred. 94 The performance two days later, attended by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, inspired a full-column article in the Times , though it labeled the ensemble an “unfinished and clumsy exhibition” inferior to the Birmingham premiere. The reviewer, probably Davison, attributed the deficiency to the lack of sufficient rehearsal; the superfluous custom of the “leader,” George Perry, of beating time with his “fiddlestick, in such a manner as to obstruct the views of the conductor”; and the amateur status of many of the musicians. Though membership in the Sacred Harmonic Society entitled them to participate, their “worthy” efforts threw “a kind of fogginess over the general effect” of Elijah . 95

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p; There now ensued an unrelenting schedule through the end of April, with Felix conducting five more performances of the oratorio in three cities. On April 20, he was in Manchester to introduce Elijah with the Hargreaves Choral Society at the Free Trade Hall; 96 on April 27, in Birmingham to conduct the work at a benefit concert for the chorus master James Stimpson, for which Felix accepted no fee. On the 23rd came the second performance at Exeter Hall, prefaced by the national anthem, since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were in attendance. This time the results were far more satisfying; indeed, although the royal presence normally obviated encores, etiquette was ignored to allow the repetition of three numbers (“Baal, we cry to thee,” “Lift thine eyes to the mountains,” and “O rest in the Lord”); many other pieces “would have been encored, had it not been for respect to the Queen.” 97 The next day Prince Albert penned in his program book an appreciative note in German, validating the “Noble Artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of debased art, has been able, by his genius and science, to preserve faithfully, like another Elijah, the worship of true art.” 98 In the days before Felix received this royal tribute on May 8, the Sacred Harmonic Society secured a facsimile copy, lithographed and widely circulated after his death. Of the two final performances of Elijah on April 28 and 30 in an Exeter Hall “crowded to suffocation,” the second aroused great excitement when Staudigl, bass soloist in Birmingham, did agree to sing. Perhaps this was the performance the young Mary Ann Evans—later canonized as George Eliot—described as a “glorious production,” a “sacramental purification of Exeter Hall, and a proclamation of indulgence for all that is to be perpetrated there during this month of May,” 99 an allusion to the boisterous annual meetings of the Church of England Missionary Society that soon followed.