Felix Mendelssohn
Wagner’s attempts to tarnish his reputation did not prevent Mendelssohn becoming Romantic music’s guiding light, says Stephen Johnson
There’s a story that someone once handed the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche a pamphlet entitled ‘German Culture without the Jew’. Nietzsche turned it round and handed it back with the words, ‘What German culture without the Jew?’. He would no doubt have been thinking of Heinrich Heine, whose poetry was so popular that the Nazis were later forced to keep it in print even during the War, though of course omitting his name. But he would also have been thinking of Felix Mendelssohn, whose statue in his home city of Leipzig those same Nazis could only remove under cover of darkness, for fear of provoking a massed uprising. This was, after all, the same Mendelssohn who had been the target of an obscene vilification campaign by Nietzsche’s once loved, now detested former mentor Richard Wagner.
Why was Wagner so keen to trash Mendelssohn’s reputation? In addition to his anti-semitism, Wagner had a way of dismissing composers from whom he had learned most. In the case of Mendelssohn there must also have been an element of rivalry. Not only was Mendelssohn’s musical and wider cultural legacy huge, he had begun to make his mark as a composer at a breathtakingly early age, unlike Wagner, who had taken a while to find his feet. This gave his achievement an almost supernatural aura.
For a composer who wanted to set himself up as Germany’s spiritual redeemer, Mendelssohn just had to be dethroned. There he was, at the age of just 16, creating one of the glories of the 19th-century chamber repertoire, his miraculous and irresistible Octet for strings. At 17, he had composed a defining masterpiece in the newly emerging field of the Romantic tone poem: the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. If Beethoven’s Overture Leonore No. 3 opened up the possibility of this genre, it was Midsummer Night’s Dream which showed how musical poetry, mood-painting and even literary reference could be brought into the picture. A year later, Mendelssohn created one of the most beautiful and original postbeethovenian string quartets, his No. 2
Mendelssohn began to make his mark as a composer at a breathtakingly early age
Op. 13 in A minor. Yes, it’s indebted to Beethoven’s late masterpieces, but it was written at a time when those last five quartets weren’t just hot of the press but had caused complete bafflement to some of the most sophisticated musicians of the day and would continue to do so for decades afterwards. Mendelssohn had achieved all of this at an age when even Mozart was only really getting going.
Then, two years after that, barely out of his teens, Mendelssohn had brought off one the most remarkable coups in both German musical history and in world culture. While studying in Weimar and visiting the revered German poet, dramatist, novelist and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – who was deeply impressed, by the way – Mendelssohn had discovered music by Johann Sebastian Bach, then largely unknown. With
the help of his insightful teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter and his friend the actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn put on a performance of the long-neglected
St Matthew Passion in Berlin. A stunning success, it turned out to be the pivotal moment in the Bach revival that soon gained momentum across the world. It was an event of immense musical, cultural and religious significance. As Mendelssohn himself wryly noted, ‘To think it took an actor and Jew’s son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!’
Mendelssohn didn’t often refer to his Jewish inheritance – and note the guarded ‘Jew’s son’ – but his pedigree was impressive. His grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, one of the intellectual stars of Frederick the Great’s Berlin. He did much to break down anti-semetic prejudice in his home city and beyond. A deep desire for acceptance and recognition on home ground seems to have motivated Felix’s father, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn and his mother, the highly cultured Lea (née Salomon) – hence their embrace of the Protestant Christian faith. And they evidently regarded their son Felix as the chosen vessel, somewhat to the detriment of his also gifted older sister, Fanny.
But it was a burden, as well as an encouragement, for Felix. It is said that if Lea Mendelssohn detected evidence her son was not engaged in something productive she would call out, ‘Felix, tust du nichts?’ (‘Felix, are you doing nothing?’). Later Abraham took the view that Mendelssohn was wasting his time producing ‘elfin’ stuff like Midsummer Night’s Dream; he should be writing Handelian oratorios. Members of 19th-century British and American choral societies, for whom the choralorchestral Elijah and St Paul became firm favourites, might well have agreed. Today, however, when the perspective has shifted somewhat, and pious Protestant sermons in music have dropped out of fashion, we may conclude that Abraham’s influence had its downside.
That a determinedly post-imperialist, anti-religious age should want to forget Mendelssohn’s oratorios, so closely associated with his old image as the bard of Victorian England, beloved of the pious Queen and ‘Empress of India’ herself, is understandable. What is fascinating is that, far from bringing about an eclipse of Mendelssohn himself, this has led to a massive re-evaluation of his output, to the advantage, one might say, of Mendelssohn the German Romantic. The crucial influence of his symphonies and overtures, his chamber and solo instrumental music, is possibly more widely acknowledged now than ever before. The Scottish and Italian Symphonies are more frequently performed today than in a long time; the same goes for not only the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and Die Schöne Melusine – and yes, that is Wagner’s Rhine motif from the Ring cycle stirring in Schöne Melusine’s opening bars. Even the long-derided Reformation Symphony is enjoying something of a revival.
Mendelssohn had an extraordinary gift for tone painting. It isn’t just a matter of arresting details such as the evocation of a sombre, chanting religious processional in the Italian Symphony or the cavorting of Shakespeare’s Bottom rendered by the ophecleide in Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also the rich and powerful creation of broader mood pictures: the ominously still, deep ocean in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and the turbulent, moody sea in the magnificent Hebrides Overture.
And it’s the mysterious, enticing gloom of Holyrood Palace in the Scottish Symphony, and the Mediterranean sunlight bursting on a cold-chastened Northern European soul at the Italian Symphony’s opening.
What’s uniquely Mendelssohnian about all these pieces, and about the masterpieces of his chamber and solo instrumental output, is the way this wonderfully fertile Romantic imagination is combined with such a sure sense of musical architecture. The renowned conductor Hans von Bülow once described Mendelssohn as the most complete master of musical form after Mozart, by which he meant not just that his music is securely structured but that those structures are subtle and pliable enough to embrace all his flights of fancy without stifling or enfeebling them. Take that superb late masterpiece – if there can be such a thing as a ‘late’ work from a composer
Brahms’s chamber works would have been unthinkable without Mendelssohn
who died at the age of just 38 – the Violin Concerto. How many other concertos feature a little self-contained intermezzo between the slow movement and finale? And yet it’s engineered with such elegant control that we hardly notice that it’s a decidedly odd thing for a 19th-century concerto to do. And how many Romantic era chamber works combine impassioned, long-breathed melodic writing with the masterly formal sure-footedness of the First Piano Trio, or the E minor String Quartet, Op. 44 No. 2?
In an age that often confuses true innovation with attention-grabbing novelty there’s a still a residual tendency to play down Mendelssohn’s achievement in this regard. How much less adventurous he seems – at first sight – than his radically lateral contemporary Robert Schumann. But some of Schumann’s later works show how much of a model Mendelssohn was in this respect: fire can burn fiercely and still be contained. The same is true for Schumann’s protégé Brahms, whose superb sequence of chamber works would have been unthinkable without Mendelssohn’s example – and it has to be admitted that Brahms’s marriage of form and feeling isn’t always quite as close to infallible as Mendelssohn’s.
As for the old argument that Mendelssohn never really developed from his stunningly precocious youthful creations, just take a look at the last String Quartet, the F minor Op. 80, written in response to the devastating – and probably fatal for Felix – news of the death of his brilliant, beloved sister Fanny. There’s no patent debt to Beethoven now. Ferocious intensity, anguished, heartfelt lyricism and, especially in the scherzo, unsettling irony are all held within a musical argument that seems at once tensed steel and elastic enough to embrace just about anything. This could only be a mature masterpiece, created after years of learning and, more recently, suffering.
Mendelssohn could be a touch sentimental and expressions of conventional piety in his religious works can strike a hollow note today. Yet in the face of the superb works mentioned above – and quite a few more besides – how much does that really matter? There’s so much more to celebrate and enjoy.