Mendelssohn: A Life in Music
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Ex. 16.14 : Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 15
In the plaintive aria No. 26, sung by Elijah in Part 2 after his flight to the wilderness, Felix made special efforts to advance a Christological reading. Though he could have related Elijah’s words from 1 Kings 19, “It is enough, O Lord, now take my life, for I am not better than my fathers,” to Moses’s lament in Numbers 11, instead Felix designed the aria to foreshadow Christ’s final words in John (19:30), “It is finished,” and the references linking the crucified Christ to Elijah in Matthew (27:47) and Mark (15:35, 36). To clarify this reading, Felix modeled the aria on “Es ist vollbracht” from Bach’s St. John Passion (No. 58), a similarity occasionally noticed in the literature but not examined until 1986 by the German scholar Martin Staehelin. 127 The resemblances are indeed striking. Preceding both arias are recitatives with two soloists, Obadiah and Elijah in the oratorio, the narrator and Jesus in the Passion. Both arias are scored for strings with a solo line in the lower register (cellos in “Es ist genug,” viola da gamba in “Es ist vollbracht”), both arias fall into a ternary ABA form in which an opening Adagio yields to a contrasting middle section in a faster tempo, and both arias begin with a descending melodic line spanning a sixth ( ex. 16.15 ). Staehelin interpreted Felix’s aria as evidence of his desire to give the Old Testament prophet a “New Testament coloration,” and to bolster “Elijah–Christ correspondences.” And to clinch the argument, Staehelin demonstrated that Felix was familiar with a series of popular lectures by the preacher F. W. Krummacher, Elijah the Tishbite , where Felix would have found a comparison between Elijah’s juniper bush in the wilderness and the Cross, a “juniper covered with thorns and barbs that pierce the soul.” 128
Ex. 16.15a: Mendelssohn, Elijah , Op. 70 (1846), No. 26
Ex. 16.15b: J. S. Bach, St. John Passion (1724), “Es ist vollbracht”
In 1848 Otto Jahn noted that at the time of Elijah Felix was already working on a third oratorio, Christus , unfinished at his death; Jahn speculated the two were to form a “complementary whole, so that in a certain sense the prophet of the Old Testament was to precede Christ.” 129 Almost surely the oratorio fragments, published in 1852 as Op. 97, were what remained of Felix’s collaboration with Gollmick on a work titled Erde, Himmel und Hölle (Earth, Heaven, and Hell , see p. 391), parts of which Felix played for Queen Victoria in May 1847. Because the thirteen surviving movements—a trio, several recitatives and choruses, and a chorale setting—treat the birth and Passion of Christ, Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who examined the untitled autograph in Leipzig after his brother’s death, labeled it Christus , the title that has come down to us. But more likely, the fragments belonged to the Erde segment and were to precede a second and third for Christ’s Resurrection and the Last Judgment. 130
Though we risk over interpreting what remains a torso, Felix’s selection and treatment of the biblical texts suggest he was designing the new oratorio to complement Elijah . Perhaps the most compelling evidence occurs in the chorus “Es wird ein Stern aus Jakob aufgeh’n,” in a radiant E ♭ major that recalls the prominence of that tonality in the first part of Elijah ( ex. 16.16a ). The opening text, Numbers 24 (“A star shall come out of Jacob”), can be understood to prophesy the rise of King David but also to refer to the Messiah and, in a Christological sense, the star of Bethlehem. Felix clarifies the last interpretation in the closing portion of the chorus, where he introduces a chorale, at first a cappella and then supported by the orchestra, to promote a Protestant reading of the text. Unlike Elijah , the chorale that intrudes here is no altered or freely composed melody but Philipp Nicolai’s famous 1599 hymn, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (“How brightly gleams the morning star,” ex. 16.16b ), which in a cantata of 1725 J. S. Bach had associated with the Annunciation. Felix thus employed the shared image of the star, captured in shimmering string tremolos, to link the Old and New Testaments.
Ex. 16.16a: Mendelssohn, Christus , Op. 97 (1847), “Es wird ein Stern”
Ex. 16.16b: Mendelssohn, Christus , Op. 97 (1847), “Es wird ein Stern”
With the movements devoted to Christ’s Passion, Felix employed the traditional narrator and discordant choral turba scenes and thus reverted to the style of St. Paul and its models, the Bach Passions. But here again, Felix’s treatment of the scriptures is revelatory: Sposato has suggested that Felix removed references to the Jews in passages from Luke and John, apparently to “reduce the oratorio’s anti-Jewish content.” Instead, Felix may have designed this portion of the work to uphold the “Lutheran tradition of universal blame for sin.” The final movement is a setting of the chorale O Welt, sieh’ hier dein Leben , set by J. S. Bach in the St. Matthew Passion, as a sobering reflection on Christ’s disclosure that one of the apostles would betray him. While Bach set the fourth and fifth verses, Felix chose the sixth (“He takes upon his back the burdens that oppress me”), according to Sposato, to “convey the same sense of universal guilt.” 131
What are we to make of Felix’s pairing, in the last year of his life, of Elijah and Christus , the Old and New Testaments, the faith of his grandfather and his own professed Christianity? The conclusion, developed by Sposato in the epilogue of his study, is that Felix’s attitude toward the oratorio—traced from his revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, through the libretto drafted for A. B. Marx’s Mose in 1833, and the three oratorios of 1836, 1846, and 1847—shifted during his career as he struggled with issues of his Jewish ancestry and adopted Christian faith. If St. Paul , with its depiction of the Jews as a “stiff-necked people” resisting the Holy Spirit (Acts 7:51), proclaimed (with Abraham’s encouragement) Felix’s avowed Protestantism, Elijah and Christus explored areas of reconciliation by embracing what Sposato terms a “strategy of dual perspective.” Thus, for all its Christological imagery and ending oriented toward the New Testament (the tenor aria No. 39, sung after Elijah’s ascension, cites verses from the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13), Elijah was performed in 1937 in a Berlin synagogue, whose members, Leon Botstein has observed, “believed they were hearing a Jewish work written by a German Jew affirming the greatness of Judaism.” 132 Though all evidence suggests Felix was a sincere, devout Protestant, in the eyes of his contemporaries at some level a “Jewish identity had been etched indelibly into his being, character, and life.” 133 By forging links in Elijah between that identity and an adopted Lutheran worldview, Felix in a way continued the project of assimilation advanced by his grandfather Moses, which had “focused on the compatibilities between religion and eighteenth-century rationalism.” 134 In a sense, then, the dual perspective emerging in Elijah completed Felix’s life’s work.
VI
Felix’s final return to German soil did not begin auspiciously. On the Belgian border, authorities detained him after mistaking him for his cousin Arnold Mendelssohn (son of Nathan Mendelssohn), wanted for a petty theft in a scandal of the Count and Countess of Hatzfeld. 135 In Frankfurt on May 12, the exhausted Felix began to contemplate a much-needed rest in Switzerland. Meanwhile in Berlin, Fanny composed on May 13 her last work, the Lied Bergeslust , on verses of Eichendorff destined to generate her epitaph—incredibly, its concluding line reads “Thoughts and songs are heaven bound” (Gedanken geh’n und Lieder bis in das Himmelreich ).
The next day she began a rehearsal of Felix’s Erste Walpurgisnacht , scheduled for a Sunday musicale two days later. But in the opening chorus, her hands lost sensation, a symptom she had experienced before. After washing them with warm vinegar and recommencing the rehearsal, she suffered a more serious reverse; “It is probably a stroke,” she commented, “just like mother.” When Paul arrived forty-five minutes later, she was already unconscious and died several hours later, at 11:00 P.M . on May 14. 136 On Sunday Fanny’s flower-adorned coffin replaced the piano in an eerily quiet Gartensaal. Wilhelm struggled to sketch the scene and, according to his son, Sebastian, “never painted anything worth having during the fifteen years that he survived her.” 137 On Monday, she wa
s interred in the cemetery of Trinity Church, not far from her parents; among the mourners was Giacomo Meyerbeer. 138 The following day, May 18, a memorial service was held in the Singakademie, and an obituary appeared in the Vossische Zeitung , where Ludwig Rellstab eulogized her for having attained a level of artistic cultivation of which few professional musicians could boast. 139 The same day, Felix learned in Frankfurt of his sister’s death through a brother of Paul’s wife, who relayed the tragic news; shrieking, the composer fell fainting to the ground.
He had lost his Minerva, his Thomaskantor with the dark eyebrows; “if the sight of my handwriting checks your tears, put the letter away,” he wrote Wilhelm, “for we have nothing left now but to weep from our inmost hearts.” 140 Unable to bear a journey to Berlin and uncertain how to take up his newly saddened life, Felix sought refuge with his family and by the end of the month had escaped to the resort of Baden-Baden in the Black Forest, where Paul’s family joined them. Initially, Felix could do little more than draw, but on June 12 and 13, he was able to complete the two canticles for the Anglican Evensong, the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis . 141 A few days later his party departed for Switzerland; at Schaffhausen, where they waited for Wilhelm, Felix worked on three watercolors of the famous Rheinfall . Its churning cataracts mirrored the torment within his soul. 142
Through July and August Felix rested in Switzerland and centered his activities in Interlaken, site of happy memories once shared with Fanny and his parents. With Paul, Felix enjoyed the “old familiar mountain-summits, which look as hoary as five or twenty-five years ago, and on which Time makes little impression!” 143 He sublimated his grief through a remarkable series of watercolor landscapes “such as no artist need have been ashamed to own.” Compared to his earlier efforts, they were “broader in design,” according to Sebastian Hensel, with “the same minute treatment and correct drawing and observation of detail, but a much greater freedom of handling, and force and harmony of coloring.” 144 The paintings celebrate a panoramic natural world into which diminutive signs of mankind have tentatively encroached. Thus, in Lucerne Felix captured an inspiring view of the cathedral, symbol of salvation, with its two spires piercing the sky, as the Rigi looms in the background over the serene, glassy lake. Traversing the water diagonally in the foreground is the covered bridge, within which were concealed centuries-old murals of the Totentanz (Dance of Death); surely not coincidentally, Felix positioned the bridge to lead directly to the cathedral (plate 19) .
Writing to Fanny Horsley from Thun on July 9, Felix confessed a desire to return to the routine of composition; to dig and turn like a worm, he observed, was preferable to human brooding. 145 In his diary he began to draft the strident scherzo of a string quartet in F minor. 146 His chief concern, though, was to dispatch to London the three choral pieces, which included the Evensong canticles composed in Baden-Baden—“perhaps a little longer & more developed than usual in your Cathedral style,” Felix commented to Buxton 147 —and the Jubilate Deo for the Morning Service. The manuscript, published later that year by Buxton, 148 included an organ part and English text, and thus was intended for Anglican services; when the Ewer firm brought out the three motets, it reissued the companion Te Deum at the same time. But when the first German edition appeared from Breitkopf & Härtel in 1848 as the Drei Motetten , Op. 69, with dual, German-English texts, there were significant changes. Whether the composer approved, we shall never know. Most conspicuous was the deletion of the organ accompaniments, transforming the motets into a cappella compositions that approached the German ideal of “pure” church music. No less important was the replacement of the Gloria Patri for the Jubilate Deo (Op. 69 No. 2). In place of the spare, somewhat severe A-minor conclusion in Felix’s manuscript, 149 Breitkopf & Härtel inserted the eight-part Gloria Patri from Felix’s unpublished Deutsche Liturgie , transposed up a step from E to F major, so that the four-part motet culminated in an opulent final cadence.
Like the Psalms, Op. 78 and Sechs Sprüche , Op. 79, Felix’s final sacred works evince transparent textures that highlight the text declamation. Compressed points of imitation, typically on motives spanning expressive fourths or fifths, alternate with homophony, as Felix weighs a delicate balance between counterpoint and harmony. Only in the multipartite Magnificat (Op. 69 No. 3), the most ambitious of the three, does he indulge in learned counterpoint: the final section of Mary’s canticle, “As he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and to his seed forever,” blossoms into a fugato on two subjects, combined and intertwined with skillful applications of mirror inversion. Throughout the opus, dissonances occur generally on weak beats; indeed, in the Nunc dimittis (Op. 69 No. 1) the prevailing Palestrinian euphony seems to support the affirming sense of resolution in Simeon’s canticle (Luke 2), “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace” ( ex. 16.17 ).
Toward the end of July, after Felix’s relatives returned to Berlin, he reengaged his creative muse. By July 24, he was again industrious, painting watercolors, reading Disraeli, and composing. 150 There were the interminable proofs for the first edition of Elijah to correct, and several invitations to ponder. Helmina von Chézy sent yet another opera libretto that Felix declined, this time because it contained considerable dialogue; he preferred to write through-composed music. 151 From Cologne came a request for music to consecrate the opening of the cathedral nave, 152 and from Liverpool a commission for an occasional work, communicated by Henry Chorley and the Swiss conductor Jakob Zeugheer Herrmann, whom Felix had met in Zurich. In 1848 the new Liverpool concert hall would open, and Felix was asked to write a cantata, not “sacred, but rather illustrative of the Science of Music, to which art the building will be dedicated, with perhaps some reference to the commercial greatness of the Town.” 153 Chorley recommended Wordsworth’s poem “The Power of Sound,” but Felix reached an early impasse when he recalled that Handel had already explored the subject in Alexander’s Feast .
Ex. 16.17 : Mendelssohn, Motet, Op. 69 No. 1 (1847), Nunc dimittis
Though isolated amid the scenic beauties of Interlaken, Felix received several visitors during his last Swiss sojourn. Early in August the English historian George Grote arrived, followed by Heinrich Hoffmann, who found the composer simultaneously orchestrating and doing arithmetic exercises with his children. 154 A few weeks later he was discussing publishing Fanny’s music with Hermann Härtel 155 and spent the last three days of the month in the company of Henry Chorley, who recorded some details of his final meeting with the composer, now “aged and sad,” and “stooped.” The two took in views of the Jungfrau and visited a remote church near Lake Brienz where, while a peasant boy operated the bellows, Felix performed organ works of Bach, improvised, and, as Chorley, citing Milton (Il Penseroso , 166), recalled, brought “all heaven before the eyes.” The friends discussed Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi, whose I masnadieri had premiered in Covent Garden with Jenny Lind in July—Lumley’s replacement for Felix’s aborted opera on Shakespeare’s Tempest . When pressed by Chorley to consider a libretto based on The Winter’s Tale , Felix confessed that “something very merry could be made with Autolycus,” but reaffirmed his intention to finish Die Lorelei . “But what is the use of planning anything? I shall not live,” Felix mused. Chorley last saw Felix trudging alone on a road to Interlaken, “looking none the younger for the loose dark coat and the wide-brimmed straw hat bound with black crape which he wore….” 156
By the end of August, the music for nearly the entire first act of Die Lorelei was already “on paper.” 157 Despite this assertion, only some fragments have survived, of which three—the finale, an Ave Maria , and Winzer-Chor (Vintners’ Chorus)—appeared in 1852 as Op. 98. In addition, Felix’s composing score contains a draft of a duet and a significant amount of music for the penultimate scene, including a festive orchestral march and quartet. 158 Still, the very incompleteness of the manuscript has remained a metaphor for his lifelong inability to find success in opera. For Chorley, Felix “may have been much too curious in w
aiting for the faultless libretto which never would have come, as Rossini was too ready in setting any book and every book, which contained a few airs, duets, and a finale .” 159 The actor Eduard Devrient, who at Felix’s bidding revised Die Lorelei with Geibel, echoed Chorley with a sense of the dramatic: “There is a Hamlet-like tragedy about Mendelssohn’s operatic destiny. During eighteen years he could not make up his mind firmly to adopt any subject and work it out, because he wanted perfection; and when at last he overcame his scruples and determined upon a poem, though far from what it should have been, he sank with his fragment into the grave.” 160