Part 25

During the next winter, hearing a complaint that Bach seemed like an arithmetical exercise, Felix formed a choir of sixteen voices for the practice of the _Passion Music_ at his house. That led to the public performance of the great neglected master-work a year later; and that to the "Bachgesellschaft" for the stately publication of all Bach's works, not yet completed. The little choir warmed to the heavenly music, and grew eager for its public performance, under Felix's own care, by the three to four hundred voices of the Singakademie, of which Zelter was Director. Besides the intrinsic difficulty of the music, there were two serious obstacles: the opposition of Zelter, and the apathy of the public. The first was overcome with the sanguine aid of his friend Devrient, the actor, who with him faced the lion in his den, and made him finally consent. The second melted to enthusiasm before the splendid success of the performance. Felix conducted the rehearsals without notes, knowing the music all by heart; the leading opera singers undertook the solos; the public flocked to the rehearsals; and on Wednesday, March 11, 1829, this greatest choral work of the great old master composer was introduced to the world for the first time since his death. A thousand people were turned away from the doors. Said Felix: "It was an actor and a Jew who restored this great Christian work to the people." That was the dawn of the Bach culture, which steadily if slowly gains ground in these our modern times.

In the midst of this excitement, his gifted, darling sister Fanny became engaged to William Hensel, the distinguished Berlin painter. Mendelssohn had reached the age of twenty. Not on the best terms with the musical world of Berlin, he yearned for more congenial air and stimulus. To improve himself in art and general culture, and "to make friends," he set out on his "grand tour." He arrived in London (April 21), where he was welcomed by his friends Klingemann (then secretary of legation there) and Moscheles. At the Philharmonic Concert, May 25, he conducted his C-minor Symphony, old John Cramer leading him to the piano, at which in those days, the conductor sat or stood. The applause was immense, and the Scherzo (which he had scored from his Octet, in place of the Minuet and Trio) was persistently encored against his wish. The London reception had "wiped out the sneers and misunderstandings of Berlin." Near the close of his life he spoke of it as "having lifted a stone from his heart." Indeed, the English, from that day to this, have been warm, even to the extreme of partiality, in their enthusiasm for the man and for his music. He took part in several other London concerts, was much petted in aristocratic circles, and disported himself in so many fashionable balls and gaieties, that the sober family at home became alarmed for him.

From London to Scotland, where he called upon Sir Walter, and stopped at the Hebrides, sending thence in a glowing letter to Fanny the first motive of the famous overture which he scored in Rome. Returning to London in September, he was confined to his room two months and could not go home to his sister Fanny's wedding. In December he found her with her artist husband installed in the _Gartenhaus_ as studio, together with the Devrients. These, indeed every member of the family took part in the little comedy, _Das Heimkehr aus der Fremde_ ("The Son and Stranger"), which Felix had composed for his parents' silver wedding. For Hensel, utterly unmusical, he wrote a part upon one note. That winter he composed his "Reformation Symphony." A chair of Music was founded expressly for him in the Berlin University, which he knew himself too well to accept.

In May, 1830, the "grand tour" was resumed. He reached Weimar on the 30th, spent a fortnight of close intercourse with Goethe, leading what he called a "heathenish life"; then several very interesting weeks in Munich. Then, through the Salzkammergut, to Vienna, where he found Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven ignored in favor of Hummel, Field, and Kalkbrenner; and where he passed a gay month with musicians, but managed to compose some serious things.

Then came the leisurely, long stay in Italy, particularly Rome, of which his letters give such glowing and minute accounts. There he lived a most genial and happy life, giving himself up completely to the sunny scene and climate, to art, and fine churches (of which he found the music dull), old ruins, and all that was picturesque and characteristic in _roba di Roma_ of all sorts. He was six months in Rome; six weeks in Naples, finding there his old friend Benedict, whom he first knew as Weber's pupil in Berlin; then Florence, Genoa, Milan and the Italian Lakes. In Italy he composed the "Italian" and "Scotch" Symphonies, the _Walpurgisnacht_ music, and many smaller things. And he filled several drawing-books with sketches. Then, by way of Switzerland, walking from Geneva to Interlachen (all minutely, graphically chronicled in the Letters), to Paris again, where he threw himself into the musical and social "swim." But in spite of his warm reception, and the presence of Hiller, Meyerbeer, and many friends, he found the gay metropolis no more to his taste than before, and was glad to spend two months again in the "smoky nest" of London, playing, composing, and publishing.

During a second stay in Munich he became "on a brotherly footing" with the very musical family of the Baermanns. For Heinrich Baermann, one of the finest of clarinet players, he, as well as Weber, composed concert pieces. It is his grandson, Carl Baermann, the admirable pianist, who now adds to the musical prestige of Boston. There, too, he brought out his G-minor Concerto (Oct. 17, 1831). And there he was commissioned to compose an opera, and went to Düsseldorf to consult the poet Immermann about a libretto with Shakespeare's _Tempest_ for a subject.

Early in 1832, his great friends Goethe and Zelter died. Mendelssohn seemed to be the man of all others to succeed the latter at the Singakademie; but he lost the election. As a proof of his wise and noble loyalty to art about this period, read what he wrote to William Taubert from Lucerne: "Don't you agree with me, that the first condition for an artist is, that he have respect for the great ones, and do not try to blow out the great flames, in order that the petty tallow candle may shine a little brighter?"

In May, 1833, his success in conducting the Lower Rhine Festival brought him an offer to take general charge of the Music in Düsseldorf for three years at an annual salary of six hundred thalers ($450)! But his father advised him to accept duties before emoluments. There he brought out operas by Mozart and Cherubini; and in the church, Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven: above all _Israel in Egypt_. There he composed the greater part of _St. Paul_, and his _Melusina_ Overture. Socially Düsseldorf was a delightful place to him; but musically it was disappointing. In the spring of 1835 he conducted the Cologne Festival.

Soon we find him settled (from 1835 to 1844, and again from 1845 to the end of his life) in the most genial home sphere of his artistic labors, Leipsic, where he held the first conductor's post in Europe, at the head of the famous _Gewandhaus_ Concerts. Hardly had he begun his notable career there, when he was summoned to Berlin to the death-bed of his father (Nov. 19, 1835). His grief was profound; for we have seen in what respect and love he held him. He carried back to Leipsic two fixed purposes: first, to finish _Paulus_, then to seek a wife. The Oratorio, for which he selected the words himself, had lain complete before him a year when it was first given at the Lower Rhine Festival in 1836 with great enthusiasm. The wife was found in Frankfurt am Main. It was Cecile Jeanrenaud, the lovely seventeen-year-old daughter of a deceased pastor of the Reformed French Church there, who lived with her mother, _née_ Souchay, a highly respected, rich, patrician family of Frankfort. The happy honeymoon ran over with fun and drollery in their joint diary full of sketches.

In Leipsic his hands were soon full of most congenial tasks: conducting the _Messiah_; the _Israel in Egypt_, with his own organ part; his own _St. Paul_; besides a series of historical concerts; and composing his Forty-Second Psalm, E-minor string Quartet, the D-minor piano Concerto, the three organ Preludes and Fugues, etc. And is it not worth notice, by the way, that here Mendelssohn commonly shines as the best of programme-makers? Indeed, he seems to have been the first in whom that function rose to the dignity of an art, when he was not balked by others. Certainly the concerts, ("academies") which Mozart and Beethoven gave mostly in noble houses, to make their new works heard, offered no models of good programme-making, containing often far too much of a good thing, say three great Beethoven Symphonies, with much other matter, in a single evening! The democratic age of concert-giving had not yet come in.

In all this he was strong and happy in the sympathetic companionship of his young wife, though often torn from her to fulfil engagements at the Birmingham Festival and elsewhere. Thenceforth for several years he gave his heart and soul to Leipsic, chiefly to the Gewandhaus concerts; he worked with enthusiasm, and was rewarded by the enthusiasm he created.

In June, 1838, he conducted the Cologne Festival, and we have a cogent letter in which he induced the committee to include "at least one important vocal work of Bach" (a Church Cantata) in the programme, besides pieces from Handel's _Joshua_. The summer was spent in the dear garden-house at Berlin; and that was the young wife's first introduction to her husband's family. He kept on composing noble things; among them the Violin Concerto and a Psalm for eight voices: "When Israel," etc. And he fell just short of giving the world another Symphony (in B flat). The great event of the next Gewandhaus season was the first performance, at the last concert (March 22, 1839), of the great Schubert Symphony in C. It was played from the MS., which had been found in Vienna by Schumann.

It would require a volume to detail the programmes of those ten or eleven years of Gewandhaus concerts under his direction,--to say nothing of great musical enterprises outside of all that. In December, 1842, his mother died, and then the Berlin house was his. Yet he lived for the most part in Leipsic, aiding as a professor, with David, Hauptmann, Schumann and the like, in the carrying out of his pet scheme of a Conservatorium of Music. Since 1838 _Elijah_ had been in his mind as the subject of an oratorio. It was finished for the Birmingham Festival of 1846. He was on hand there to conduct it, all the world knows with what success. Yet his own fastidious taste saw much in it to alter and polish, and he returned to England for the tenth and last time to conduct it in the revised edition, so to speak.

Meanwhile, near the end of 1840, he was prevailed on to accept a year's engagement at Berlin, and lend his labor and his genius to certain high artistic schemes of king Frederick William IV. Taking leave of Leipsic with a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion Music, he became Kapellmeister to the King. The first fruit of that was his noble music to the _Antigone_, and afterwards the _Œdipus Coloneus_ of Sophocles; and in another vein, the _Athalie_ of Racine. It was also by the king's request that he wrote the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ music, into which the early overture fitted as if pre-ordained, and his both beautiful and wildly melodramatic setting of Goethe's _Walpurgisnacht_. Not far from the same time he was moved to make an overture, more dramatic than any of his early ones, to _Ruy Blas_.

On his last return from England a shadow came over that serene and happy life. He met the sudden news of his sister Fanny's death, and with a cry fell unconscious to the ground. He sought relief and rest in Switzerland that summer, painting in water-colors, and playing the organ all alone in a little village church--what a touching picture his letters give of it! His own hour was near at hand. A trouble in his head grew worse. He died in the evening of Thursday, Nov. 4, 1847. He was mourned by all Europe. In Leipsic it was as if the most beloved and honored, the soul and centre of all their higher life and aspiration, were withdrawn. Memorial concerts were organized in London, Manchester and Birmingham, even in Paris. To this day among English music-lovers Mendelssohn has been a name to conjure by, adopted as their own like Handel. Mendelssohn scholarships, busts, statues, became frequent. And a commission was appointed to publish selections from the mass of works he left in manuscript; nor could they keep pace with the impatient, almost angry outcry (at least in England) for every scrap of manuscript withheld.

Mendelssohn stands as the best modern representative of sound, many-sided, conservative, and yet progressive musical culture. He was artist to the marrow. Gifted with original creative genius--a genius not so deep and absolute, so elemental, so Titanic as that of Bach and Handel and Beethoven, nor of so celestial temper as that of Mozart;--trained to consummate musicianship through earnest study and personal absorption of the world's great musical inheritance; compelling himself to daily exercise of his own productive faculty, he summed up in himself the rounded whole of musical art down to his own time. He was the ripe musical scholar. Haunted by original and beautiful ideas, he resisted all extravagant solicitations of the ambitious passion for sensation-making novelty. He kept within bounds of reason and good taste; he respected "Terminus, the god of bounds." Standing at the height of the musical culture of his age, he won all his triumphs without setting up new theories, new forms of art, without resorting to questionable ways. He was nothing if not sincere, frank, simple in his art. Within the approved forms and principles of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he found free air and scope for the expression of what was in him. He never dreamed of questioning the validity of absolute, pure music,--music in itself, without words or programme. On the contrary, he maintained that music is a language far more definite and less ambiguous than speech; that speech is the gainer by translation into music, but that music is the loser by any attempt to translate or "interpret" it in words.

Fac-simile autograph manuscript of Mendelssohn's most popular song for male voices, "Farewell to the Forest" Composed in 1840.]

Of his complete musicianship there is no question. As a performing artist, an interpreter, he was a masterly pianist. We do not measure him by the phenomenal virtuosity of the Liszts, von Bülows, Rubinsteins, and Tausigs, who came after him. Such comparison would be irrelevant; he was not of their kind; not primarily a virtuoso, but essentially an artist and interpreter. In that sense his playing was remarkable; fluent, brilliant, vital, full of fire and feeling; his touch sensitive, decided, strong or delicate as the phrase required; his technique free and faultless; its perfection seemed to be spontaneous. Hiller said his playing was what flying is to a bird. Mme. Schumann said: "Of mere _effects_ of performance he knew nothing; he was always the great musician; in hearing him one forgets the player in the full enjoyment of the music." Joachim says: "His playing was full of fire, which could scarce be controlled, and yet was controlled and combined with the greatest delicacy." His adherence to strict time and to his author's meaning is said to have been absolute. He had a rare faculty of playing at sight from a MS. orchestral score, characterizing each instrument by a peculiar quality of tone. He rarely played from book, trusting to his prodigious memory. His improvisations astonished all; they were no vague, random excursions over the keyboard, all digression, with which so many flashy finger-knights dazzle their audiences; they were consistent, well-planned compositions, in which the themes were not merely touched and set in shifting lights, but were contrapuntally worked and carried out; thematic development was with him a second nature. This was partly owing to his early practice in counterpoint under Zelter.

He deeply loved the organ, and was one of the most masterly organ players and composers of his time. For intrinsic worth and beauty his Organ Sonatas rank only next to Bach and Handel.

For conductorship he showed a passion and a gift from boyhood, when he improvised little private concerts in his father's house. Older musicians did not disdain to play under his bâton. Charming pictures are given by his biographers of the overtures and symphonies, as well as his own juvenile operas, performed there under his enthusiastic lead. Later he became one of the first conductors living, whether in symphony or oratorio. He had the magnetic quality; all the grace and flexibility of his attractive person, the electric eloquence of look and gesture, made each point of the music felt by performers and hearers. The former never could mistake his meaning, which was the meaning of the music. We have heard it said by those who knew him, that in the rendering of orchestral music, even movements of his own, he was subject to his moods, would take the same movement at one time much quicker, with more fire than at others; but it was all genuine, all loyal; there was a reason for it, and the essential music never suffered from this elasticity.

His seemingly instinctive and spontaneous command of counterpoint, already seen in his improvisation, is manifest in his organ music, in his psalms and oratorios, in his fugues as such, in the clear, symmetrical development of his orchestral and chamber works, in fact in all his compositions of whatever form. He was happily at home in this soul secret of the plastic tone-art. For the truth is, he was musically, spiritually, a true child of Sebastian Bach: who more fit than he to be the first exponent to our century of the long-shelved Matthew _Passion_ of that mighty master? Through Mendelssohn has Bach gained a foothold in the more modern world of music.

His instrumentation is a model in its way, neither too much nor too little. Never dry and meagre, it is never bloated and excessive, weighed down to monotony by superfluous multitude of heavy instruments, which give each other scarcely room to vibrate freely, like so much in the "advanced" instrumentation of to-day. It is never extravagant, bent on sensational surprises and effects, if sometimes droll for cause. It is chaste, simple, clear, while it is vivid, graphic, and expressive. There is no false, exaggerated coloring, only just what suits the subject. Now it is airy, delicate, and fairylike; now bold, majestic, or sublime; now fraught with changing atmospheric quality, as in the "Rain" chorus in _Elijah_, in the _Hebrides_ overture, and the _Becalmed at Sea_ and _Prosperous Voyage_, now light-hearted and elastic, as in the "Italian" Symphony and the youthful overture to the _Return from Abroad_. If he does not touch the spiritual depths, nor strike with the lightning suddenness and fire of Beethoven, it is because he is himself, not Beethoven. But alike in his purely instrumental and his choral works, his instrumentation is always interesting, always clear and telling, and in keeping with the whole, always original, poetic, full of life and power.

We might discourse upon his mastery of Form. Enough to say, that with him all is in "good form," yet not formal, at least to a fault.

So much of his musicianship, his technical equipment, of what might be learned from masters. In him it all ministered to a creative genius of an original, rare order, as we shall see in a slight, cursory survey of his productions.

Painted by Begas.]

[Footnote A: At this age he had written two operas and almost completed a third,--six symphonies, a quartet for piano and strings, a Cantata, six fugues for the piano, a psalm for four or five voices with a double fugue, and many minor pieces.--K. K.]

We begin with the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ Overture, in which the lad of sixteen sprang into fame a masterly composer. Well had he read his Shakespeare,--the bard who fascinates the heart and soul of childhood before any child can be supposed to understand him! What a felicitous reproduction of the fairy element in tones! The perfect fairy overture, it is still heard with delight by old and young, and ever will be, it is so fresh, spontaneous, genuine, such an honest emanation from the enthusiastic heart and imagination of the boy composer. The other movements now commonly sung and played with the drama were the afterthought of Mendelssohn's riper period, when he was thirty-four years old. Schumann says: "His music is a meditation on the play, _a bridge between Bottom and Oberon_, without which the passage into Fairy Land is almost impossible." The same fairy vein, the same dainty elfin motives, or some of the same family, are met in many of the earlier and later works of Felix. That vein haunted him; it was a lucky string to play upon. Ballad movements, Canzonettas, _Volkslieder_, and the like quaint melodies, abound as well. The Overture is numbered Op. 21. Sketched or completed about the same time were the Octet, Op. 20, the first set of the Songs without Words, and the first Quintet, in A; all works of ripe and finished art of a clearly asserted, pronounced individuality. These mark the culmination of his youthful period.

His early piano efforts are in many forms, mostly with strings. He wrote three Sonatas for piano solo, but soon ceased to cultivate that field (in face of Beethoven?). But he had already opened a new and original field for himself, albeit a less ambitious one, in the Songs without Words, a field to which he returned _con amore_ from time to time until late in his short life. One is tempted to describe some of these choice little tone-poems, were there room; at least the three Gondola Songs. Had he been reading Shelley:

"My soul is an enchanted boat, Which like a sleeping swan doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing."

These perhaps express the daintiest, most exquisite of the many moods and themes poetic, sentimental, picturesque, or wideawake and stirring or heroic, in these eight and forty wordless songs. Perhaps the last two sets have not quite the verve of the earlier and more spontaneous numbers. But think of the _Volkslied_, the hunting and the martial strains, the deeper meditations, the _Duet_, above all the exhilarating "Spring Song" in A! In these, if in nothing else, he opened a new field in musical art, in which many followed him, but none approached him. These _Lieder ohne Worte_ are of his most genuine, most individual inspirations. There is hardly a characteristic trait of the composer's style, as developed in his larger works, which you do not find here clearly announced and pronounced in these perfect little miniatures. In them we have the whole of Mendelssohn,--we mean of the innate, the essential, not the acquired music of the man. If to some they have come to look commonplace, it is their own radiance that veils them.