Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by Todd, R. Larry

  Felix’s final performance at the Philharmonic Society, on April 26, was again graced by the presence of the Queen and Prince Albert, and heard by Jenny Lind, who, to the composer’s delight, had arrived in London nine days before. During the concert he played Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and directed the Scottish Symphony and selections from the Midsummer Night’s Dream music. As in 1844 and on other occasions, he executed the concerto from memory and crafted his own cadenzas, “displays of extemporaneous invention and mechanical facility that would have astonished Thalberg, Leopold de Meyer, or Madame Pleyel herself.” 100 Felix’s conducting prompted comparisons with that of the new Philharmonic director, Michael Costa, who presided over the first part of the concert. If the Italian led like an “admirable” though soulless metronome, Felix made the orchestra “express all the modifications of feeling that an imaginative soloist would give a tongue to on a single instrument.” Still, the Times reported that in the Wedding March the brass “sinned on the side of coarse obstreperousness,” though Felix’s position in English musical life was unambiguous: he was “the greatest musician of his time—one upon whose shoulders the mantle of Beethoven has descended, and who wears it worthily.” And Elijah , composed by Felix at the zenith of his fame, had “no parallel but in the greatest monuments of art.”

  Through the first week of May Felix lingered in London and kept a full social calendar. Presumably around this time he met the nine-year-old boy William Beatty-Kingston, who played a Bach Prelude and Fugue for the composer and then listened in astonishment as Felix improvised twenty variations on “The Blue Bells of Scotland.” Among the various “amazing feats” were two treatments of the theme in canon, two different harmonizations in the minor mode, a left-hand etude-like variation in the style of Chopin, a four-part fugue with the inversion of the melody, a chorale and free cadenza in which Felix “notoriously delighted to ‘let himself go,’” and culminating march. 101 On April 30 Felix joined the Baroness Bunsen, wife of the Prussian ambassador, for lunch and performed Lieder; on May 5 and 6 the Bunsens hosted at the embassy two musical gatherings, attended by London high society and the future prime minister, Gladstone, at which Felix also performed. 102 On May 1 he spent an hour alone with Victoria and Albert in Buckingham Palace; Felix played some new compositions, with “that indescribably beautiful touch of his,” and the Queen sang three of his songs. The new offerings apparently included parts of Die Lorelei and a third oratorio, about which Felix was already ruminating, as Victoria’s journal reveals: “For some time he has been engaged in composing an Opera & an Oratorio, but has lost courage about them. The subject for his Opera is a Rhine Legend & that for the Oratorio, a very beautiful one depicting Earth, Hell, & Heaven, & he played one of the Choruses out of this to us, which was very fine….” 103 When the Queen offered in exchange to fulfill a wish, Felix asked to see the “Royal children in their Royal nurseries,” and, personally escorted by Victoria, discussed with her “homely subjects that had a special attraction for both.” 104

  On May 4 the Beethoven Quartet Society gave another concert in Felix’s honor. He delighted his listeners with a memorized rendition of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, though the other repertoire was drawn from Felix’s works, including one of his piano trios, the String Quartet, Op. 44 No. 1, and Octet, in which Alfredo Piatti took up a cello part. Possibly at this time Felix shared with Piatti the first movement of a new cello concerto sketched or composed for the Italian sometime after the two met in 1844. 105 Source material for this work has yet to materialize; in Piatti’s estimation, it “did not come up to the violin concerto by a long way.” 106 After the Quartet Society concert Felix joined the throngs of Londoners crowding into Her Majesty’s Theatre to hear the London debut of Jenny Lind, who triumphed in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable as Alice, a “fine histrionic study,” the Times reported, “of which every feature is equally good.” 107

  Before leaving England, Felix enjoyed another meeting with the Prince Consort. On May 5, at a Concert of Ancient Music organized by Albert for the Hanover Square Rooms, Felix improvised and performed a Bach organ prelude and fugue on an instrument, according to Anna Joanna Alexander, that “seemed a little loathe to do so at first” 108 (more blunt, the Times noted that Felix “had to wrestle with the inconvenience of an organ that may reasonably be pronounced one of the worst in the metropolis” 109 ). The next day, Felix made a four-hand arrangement of the Lied ohne Worte in B ♭ major, Op. 85 No. 6, which he sent to Albert with a note of appreciation on May 8, the day of his departure. 110 When a friend regretted Felix could not extend his stay, the exhausted composer replied, “One more week of this unremitting fatigue, and I should be killed outright!” 111 That evening he left the city with Klingemann, who accompanied him across the Channel before bidding farewell in Ostende.

  V

  English-speaking realms early on identified Elijah as Felix’s principal masterpiece and, indeed, emblematic of Mendelssohnism. The English embrace of the work—long a staple of oratorio societies, it stood only behind Messiah in popularity—is not difficult to explain. Unlike St. Paul , written for the Lower Rhine Musical Festival, Elijah was designed for Birmingham and English tastes. In contrast to the cumbersome translation thrust upon St. Paul , Elijah benefited from Bartholomew’s expert paraphrase of the German libretto, meticulously polished in collaboration with the composer. And the linkage of the revised version with Victoria and Albert—and with Albert’s pronouncement of Felix as a second Elijah—bolstered the composition’s claim as a Victorian masterpiece. But in the end, the heightened status was a two-edged sword. If in 1847 H. F. Chorley asserted, “Elijah is not only the sacred work of our time, … but it is a work ‘for our children and for our children’s children,’” by the 1880s George Bernard Shaw was decrying Felix’s “despicable oratorio mongering,” 112 and reversing Albert’s metaphor—Felix was no longer a courageous prophet contending with musical Baalism, but a sanctimonious musician exuding a “kid glove gentility” that concealed a flawed Victorian culture. In the critical tradition Elijah has thus traversed, pendulum-like, the vast, uneven terrain between these extremes.

  In many ways though, the oratorio was the crowning achievement of Felix’s career. Standing upon the shoulders of St. Paul , Elijah reflects Felix’s lifelong love of Handel and Bach through a historicism now blended subtly into the composer’s mature style. Thus, in comparison to St. Paul , we find a reduction of Bachian counterpoint—of forty-two numbers only a handful of fugues (principally to anchor the work at its endpoints), fugal passages, and chorales. Felix himself identified No. 15, “Cast thy burden upon the Lord,” as the “only specimen of a Lutheran Chorale in this old-testamential work.” 113 In addition, unlike St. Paul , Elijah does not employ the traditional narrator to advance the action; rather, the principal characters serve this purpose, lending the oratorio the dramatic immediacy of opera and partially fulfilling Felix’s lifelong quest to achieve a large-scale dramatic conception. (His efforts failed to convince the Mozart biographer Otto Jahn, who maintained the inviolability of the oratorio as an intrinsically epic, not dramatic genre. 114 )

  A survey of Part 1 illustrates the dramatic nature of the oratorio, which unfolds as a series of scenes framed and supported by reflective choruses. At the outset, Elijah solemnly appears in a recitative to pronounce the seven-year drought and introduces two motives, melodically and harmonically active throughout the oratorio 115 : a consonant, rising triadic figure (D–F–A–D), associated with the prophet as servant of the Lord, and a series of grating, descending tritones (C–F ♯ , G–C ♯ , D–G ♯ ), symbolizing the curse ( ex. 16.9 ). The subsequent overture expresses the time of tribulation through a fugue, the fanlike subject of which contains a tritone ( ex. 16.10 ). Intensified by a shift to faster rhythms and use of mirror inversion, the overture spills over into the opening chorus, designed as a vocal fugue on the lamenting text from Jeremiah, “The harvest now is over, the summer days are gone, and yet no power com
eth to help us!” In response to Obadiah’s consoling aria (No. 4), which shifts the tonal center to E ♭ major, the agitated following chorus initially recalls the curse motive but then gives way to a consoling passage for “His mercies on thousands fall.” Connecting the two parts of No. 5 is a short section in chorale style, presaging the later use of a chorale in No. 15. The next complex of movements (Nos. 6–9) introduces Elijah and the widow. After the prophet appeals three times to the Lord, the widow’s lifeless son miraculously revives. Framing this scene are two choruses drawn from psalm verses to represent angelic hosts. No. 7, “For he shall give his angels charge over thee,” is a re-scoring of the 1844 a cappella chorus composed after the assassination attempt on Frederick William IV. No. 9, “Blessed are the men who fear Him,” recalls with clear points of imitation and acclamations “For unto us a Child is born” of Handel’s Messiah , in the same key of G major.

  Ex. 16.9b: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), Einleitung

  Ex. 16.9a: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), Einleitung

  Ex. 16.10 : Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), Overture

  At the midpoint of Part 1 (No. 10) Felix revives the opening of the Introduction, now transposed a step above to E ♭ major, to mark the passage of three years, after which Elijah decides to confront Ahab and the priests of Baal. The prophet challenges them to slay a bullock and invoke their deities to light a sacrificial fire. When their pleas in successively higher keys and faster tempi fail (Nos. 11–13), Elijah addresses the “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel” in a soothing aria in E ♭ major (No. 14), joined to the chorale “Cast thy burden upon the Lord” (No. 15). The fire appears in No. 16, a powerful chorus that ends in another chorale-like passage, in which the people recognize the Lord; the energetic flames, symbolized by broken arpeggiations in the strings, then carry over to Elijah’s aria (No. 17), “Is not His word like a fire?” It remains for the prophet to lift the drought, accomplished dramatically in No. 19, with Elijah’s implorations to the Lord set against terse reports of a soprano, who looks out to the sea for signs of rain. When the inundation finally arrives, the chorus erupts into No. 20 (“Thanks be to God! He laveth the thirsty land!”), which brings Part 1 to its triumphant close in E ♭ major. Animating much of this chorus are wavelike arpeggiations in the strings, but the music begins with a majestic rising triad, another reference to the opening measures of the work, and a final unifying gesture.

  The second part similarly features several dramatic scenes in the prophet’s life: his confrontation with Ahab and Jezebel (Nos. 23–24), flight to the wilderness (25–29), journey to Mt. Horeb and encounter with the Lord (30–36), and ascension to heaven (38–40). The final two numbers (41–42) form an epilogue linking Elijah through texts from Isaiah to the coming of the Messiah. That Felix expected his English audience to discover in the conclusion a Christian message of salvation is evident in the music of the ultimate chorus—a majestic fugue in D major on a subject derived from the final “Amen” fugue of Handel’s Messiah ( ex. 16.11 a–b ). 116 But the closing bars offer something else—the resolution of the curse motive, presented near the final cadence in the bass ( ex. 16.11c ). Examination of the fugal subject shows too how the clashing, descending tritones are now replaced by a sequence of ascending perfect fourths, a consonant motive that gradually has gained currency in the second part. A sequence of fourths appears first at the close of the chorus No. 22, and in No. 37, the pastoral aria Elijah sings after the passing by of the Lord (“For the mountains shall depart”), the fourths appear in a bass line initially reminiscent of a baroque chaconne. In both examples ( ex. 16.12 ) the fourths preserve the downward spiral of the original curse motive, but in the culminating fugue, to reinforce the image of the “fiery chariot” that takes Elijah “away to heaven,” the fourths ascend.

  Ex. 16.11a: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 4

  Ex. 16.11b: Handel, Messiah , No. 53 (1742)

  Ex. 16.11c: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 42

  Ex. 16.12a: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 22

  Ex. 16.12b: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 37

  Like St. Paul , Elijah raises critical issues that touch on Felix’s own spiritual identity. His choice of an Old Testament subject sometimes has been viewed as a late-in-life reaffirmation of his Judaic roots and has encouraged some to search for signs of “Jewishness” in the music. Thus, in 1956 Jack Werner labeled a descending minor triad in Felix’s music a “Mendelssohnian cadence.” 117 Werner traced the figure in a variety of compositions, including the Variations sérieuses , Lieder ohne Worte and part-songs, Antigone , and two movements of Elijah , where it concludes the chorus “Lord, bow Thine ear” (No. 2) and Elijah’s aria “It is enough” (No. 26). To Werner’s ear, the figure resembled a cadence sung during Passover, when the congregation receives a blessing of verses from Numbers (6:24–25). Werner assumed that before converting to Christianity, the boy Felix had accompanied his parents to a synagogue service and been impressed by the “plaintive oriental chanting.” Furthermore, Werner believed the musical examples adduced established beyond doubt the influence of the composer’s “Jewish origin and of traditional synagogue music on Mendelssohn.” But there is no evidence young Felix ever attended a synagogue, or that he construed the descending minor triad, common enough in nineteenth-century music, as Jewish.

  In 1963 Eric Werner argued that the chantlike opening of No. 34, “Behold, God the Lord passed by,” which Ferdinand Hiller claimed was the original inspiration for the oratorio, recalled a “variant of the melody to which the 13 Divine Attributes (Exodus 24:6–7) have been sung since the fifteenth century in all German synagogues on the High Holy Days.” 118 Indeed, similarities between the two led Werner to suppose the old melody “must have impressed itself upon the boy and associated itself with the representation of the Divine.” In this case the resemblance ( ex. 16.13 ) is perhaps striking enough to suggest that Felix, in depicting Elijah’s journey to Mt. Horeb, sought to capture musically the idea of the old Mosaic covenant and somehow (through Joseph Mendelssohn or other relatives who professed Judaism?) had access to the melody.

  Ex. 16.13a: Melody of Thirteen Divine Attributes

  Ex. 16.13b: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 34

  But if Felix pursued here a “purely historical,” Jewish perspective, 119 thorny problems still remain for the oratorio’s exegesis. He did not follow strictly the account of the Old Testament prophet in 1 and 2 Kings but selected certain episodes, loosely strung together with devotional, biblical texts, and culminating with pre-Messianic texts from Isaiah. (Thus, he ignored Elijah’s disciple Elisha, who received a double portion of the prophet’s spirit upon his ascension to heaven, and instead effectively turned Obadiah into a servant of Elijah.)

  The result, for Eric Werner, was a “weak potpourri of religious fanaticism and sanctimonious preacher’s piety whereby both elements are torn out of their respective contexts.” It did not matter whether the theological standpoint was Jewish or Christian; the libretto was “not only insultingly naïve, but really untenable.” 120 An alternate reading, at which Otto Jahn hinted as early as 1848, may extricate us from this difficulty. For Jahn, Elijah explored a territory that “is rendered symbolic by its preparation for Christianity…. This symbolic element in the Old Testament, as a subject for Christian contemplation, is found through Elijah ….” 121

  In a careful analysis based upon the drafts of Felix’s libretto, Jeffrey Sposato has extended Jahn’s comments through a Christological interpretation of Elijah , not limited to the epilogue but embracing the whole. 122 For Sposato, Felix utilized the precedent of Handel’s Messiah , in which a series of Old Testament prophecies reminded listeners of their “fulfillment in the Gospels.” When a Christological perspective is applied to Elijah , Werner’s criticisms of the libretto “begin to fall away, and the work takes on a new coherence—one more concerned with the long-term implication of events, than with their historical
accuracy.” 123 Sposato argues that Felix shaped the libretto to underscore parallels between Elijah and Christ, in part to heed Schubring’s advice that Elijah helped to “transform the Old into the New Covenant.” 124 Thus, Obadiah’s call to the people to “return to God” (No. 3, Joel 2) finds its New Testament counterpart in John the Baptist’s call to repentance; Elijah’s raising of the widow’s son (No. 8), Jesus’s similar miracle in Luke 7: 1–15; Queen Jezebel’s plot to kill Elijah (Nos. 23–24), the Pharisees’ plot to kill Jesus; Elijah’s journey to the wilderness (Nos. 25–29), Jesus’s prayer vigil at Gethsemane; Elijah’s encounter with the Lord at Mt. Horeb (No. 34), Jesus’s Transfiguration; and Elijah’s ascension (No. 38), Jesus’s ascension.

  We may find some support for Sposato’s interpretation in Felix’s revealing comment to Bartholomew about No. 15, the free-standing chorale heard just before Elijah calls upon fire to descend from heaven to answer the Baalites’ vain entreaties. “I wanted to have the color of a Chorale,” Felix wrote, “and I felt that I could not do without it , and yet I did not like to have a Chorale.” 125 His solution was to adapt the hymn O Gott, du frommer Gott , from the Meiningen Gesangbuch of 1693 and fit to it verses from four different psalms ( ex. 16.14 ). 126 The first (Psalm 55:22) Bartholomew quoted as “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee.” The result was a melody that sounded familiar but adopted its own shape and text, and thus occupied middle ground between an established Protestant chorale and a freely composed melody. It suggested the color of a chorale, without being a chorale. Elsewhere, too, in the oratorio Felix inserted hymnlike passages, as in Nos. 5 (“For He, the Lord our God, He is a jealous God”) and 16 (“The Lord is God: O Israel hear!”), where freely composed chorale phrases abruptly appear in the middle of two choruses, as if to interpret the Old Testament drama through the lens of Christianity and, indeed, adumbrate the trappings of modern Protestant worship.