Part 1

HERBERT F. PEYSER

MENDELSSOHN and Certain Masterworks

Written for and dedicated to the RADIO MEMBERS of THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK

Copyright 1947 by THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK 113 West 57th Street New York 19, N. Y.

FOREWORD

In the compass of the present pamphlet it is impossible to give more than a cursory survey of Mendelssohn’s happy but extraordinarily crowded life. He was only slightly less prolific a composer than such masters as Bach, Mozart or Schubert, even if he did not reach the altitude of their supreme heights. But irrespective of the quality of much of his output, the sheer mass of it is astounding, the more so when we consider the extent of his travels and the unceasing continuity of his professional and social activities, which immensely exceeded anything of the kind in the career of Schubert or Bach. In these few pages it has not been feasible to mention more than a handful of his more familiar compositions which happen, incidentally, to rank among his best. The reader will find here neither a detailed record of Mendelssohn’s endless comings and goings nor any originality of approach or appraisal in the necessarily casual comments on a few works. If the booklet encourages him to listen with perhaps a fresh interest to certain long familiar scores, now that a full century has passed since the composer’s death, its object will have been achieved.

H. F. P.

Mendelssohn and Certain Masterworks

_By_ HERBERT F. PEYSER

In 1729—the year of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”—a humble Jew of Dessau on the Elbe, Mendel by name, became the father of a boy whom he called Moses. Mendel was something of a scholar as the times went, but desperately poor. He kept body and soul together by running a small Hebrew day-school and transcribing the Pentateuch. His infant son might know the pangs of hunger but he should have the boon of a sound education. The training was begun almost before the child could walk. Mendel would rout him out of bed at three or four on winter mornings, fortify him with a cup of tea and carry him, wrapped in a shawl, to a public seminary where he was put in charge of the learned Rabbi David Frankel.

Moses showed himself an extraordinarily gifted pupil. For one thing, he was consumed by a restless spirit of inquiry. He set about making an exhaustive study of the Scriptures, read voraciously, acquired languages with uncanny facility and, before he was ten, composed Hebrew verses. Nothing influenced him so deeply as Maimonides’ “The Guide of the Perplexed”. But the intensity of his intellectual occupation was such that he fell prey to a nervous malady which deformed his spine for life. He bore his ailment with the patience of Job and was never heard to complain. “If Maimonides weakened my body”, he had a habit of saying, “has he not made ample atonement by invigorating my soul with his sublime instructions?”

According to a traditional Jewish manner of forming a surname Moses called himself “Son of Mendel”—in German, “Mendels Sohn”—albeit he long alluded to himself as “Moses Dessauer”. When Rabbi Frankel transferred his activities to Berlin his disciple, though only fourteen, followed him on foot. Hunger, sickness, deprivations, bitter antagonisms, far from breaking the youth’s spirit, deepened his perceptions and broadened his vision. He wrote and studied with fanatic zeal and in the fullness of time developed into one of the greatest scholars and philosophers of the age. The poet Lessing was one of his intimates. His work, “Phaedon, or the Immortality of the Soul”, gained such currency that it was translated into every language of Europe.

Moses Mendelssohn endured without a murmur the numberless hardships and disabilities to which the German Jews of the period of Frederick the Great and his tyrannical father were subjected. One of the most preposterous of these regulations obliged every Jew when he married to buy a certain amount of chinaware from the royal porcelain factory in Berlin, whether he needed it or not. Not even the choice of articles was left to him, so long as the factory manager decided the place was overstocked. In this way Moses Mendelssohn when in 1762 he took to wife Fromet, daughter of Abraham Gugenheim, of Hamburg, acquired twenty life-sized china apes which had been found unsaleable. Much later the apes became valued family heirlooms.

The domestic happiness and tranquility he had never known in his youth were at last to be the philosopher’s portion. Moses and Fromet had a considerable family, though only six of the children—three sons and three daughters—survived to maturity. Moses himself died in Berlin at 57. Longevity, as it proved, was not to be a trait of the Mendelssohns.

Of the three sons the second, Abraham, was destined to play a role in musical history. True, he was not himself a trained musician although he had very sensitive artistic instincts; and he labored under a mild sense of inferiority, which used to find expression in his whimsical phrase: “Formerly I was the son of my father, now I am the father of my son”. In any case he had not to endure anything like the paternal struggles and poverty. Of his boyhood not much is known. But in his twenties he was sent to Paris and worked for a time as cashier in the bank of M. Fould. When he returned to Germany he entered a banking business founded in Berlin and Hamburg by his brother, Joseph. It was possibly on his trip home that he met his future wife, Leah Salomon. If marriages are made in heaven this match assuredly could boast a celestial origin! Leah Salomon was an wholly unusual woman. She came of a Berlin family of wealth and position, she was exquisitely sensitive and cultured and, although she strictly limited her singing and playing to the home circle, was a musician of gifts quite out of the ordinary. Moreover, she drew, was an accomplished linguist (she even read Homer in Greek, though only in the privacy of her boudoir, lest anyone suspect her of “immodesty”), and dressed with studied simplicity. Among Leah’s elaborate virtues was her tireless devotion to her mother. She kept house for her and granted her a substantial income.

Small wonder that such a union was blessed with exceptional offspring. Of the four children of Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn, Fanny Cäcilie, Jakob Ludwig Felix and Rebecka saw the light at Hamburg, in the order named. The youngest, Paul, came not long after the family had removed to Berlin. It may not be inappropriate to call briefly into the picture at this point Leah’s brother, Jacob Salomon Bartholdy, if for no other reason than to account for a surname which formed an adjunct to part of the Mendelssohn family, including the composer. Salomon, a distinguished art critic who spent his later years in Rome as Prussian consul-general, had embraced Protestantism (despite a traditional curse launched by his mother) and adopted the name “Bartholdy” after “the former proprietor of a garden belonging to the family”—a garden which subsequently passed into the hands of Abraham Mendelssohn. It was Salomon Bartholdy who at length persuaded his brother-in-law to procure for his children what Heinrich Heine had called “a ticket of admission to European culture”—in short, conversion to the Christian faith. To distinguish between the converted members of the family and those who clung to their old belief “Bartholdy” was henceforth affixed to “Mendelssohn”. In time, Abraham and Leah followed their children into the Lutheran faith, Leah adding to her own name those of Felicia and Paulina, in allusion to her sons.

Felix was born on Friday, Feb. 3, 1809, at 14 Grosse Michaelisstrasse, Hamburg. Long afterwards the place was marked by a commemorative tablet above the entrance, a tribute from Jenny Lind and her husband. Curiously enough, the violinist Ferdinand David, Felix’s friend and associate of later days, was born under the same roof scarcely a year after. Hamburg became an unpleasant place during the occupation by Napoleon’s troops and in 1811, soon after the birth of Rebecka, the family escaped in disguise to Berlin where Abraham, at his own expense, outfitted a company of volunteers. The Mendelssohns took up residence in a house belonging to the widow Fromet. It was situated in what was then an attractive quarter of north-eastern Berlin, on a street called the Neue Promenade that had houses on one side and a tree-bordered canal on the other. It offered a spacious playground for the children and the singer, Eduard Devrient, recalled seeing Felix play marbles or touch-and-run with his comrades.

Abraham Mendelssohn, having severed the partnership with his brother, started a banking business of his own which soon prospered famously. Somehow even the myriad cares of running a bank did not prevent the father from scrupulously overseeing the education of his sons and daughters. If the young people were virtually bedded on roses, Abraham was of too strong a character and, indeed, too much of a martinet not to subject them to the discipline of a carefully ordered routine. Wealth and ease did not cause him to forget the privations and the conflicts which helped to forge the greatness of his own father’s soul. His children need not hunger, they need not be denied opportunities to develop what talents nature had bestowed on them. But given such opportunities they must labor unremittingly to make the most of them. They had to be up and about at five in the morning and, shortly after, repair to their lessons. Felix always looked forward to Sundays when he could sleep late! In some ways one is reminded of the manner Leopold Mozart supervised the training of Wolfgang and Nannerl. If Abraham Mendelssohn was not, like Father Mozart, a practising musician, he had an artistic insight which nobody valued higher than Felix himself. “I am often unable to understand”, he wrote his father when he was already a world celebrity, “how it is possible to have so accurate a judgment about music without being a technical musician and if I could only say what I feel in the same clear and intelligent manner that you always do, I should certainly never make another confused speech as long as I live”. It is easy to believe that some of the adoration Felix felt for his father above all others grew out of his unbounded respect for the older man’s intellectual superiority.

Business connected with war indemnities associated with the Napoleonic conflicts obliged Abraham in 1816 to go to Paris and on this journey he took his family with him. Felix and Fanny were placed for piano instruction under a Madame Marie Bigot de Morogues and both appear to have profited. Their first piano lessons had been given them at home by their mother who, in the beginning restricted them to five minute periods so that they ran no risk of growing weary or restive. Fanny no less than her brother disclosed an unusual feeling for the keyboard at an early age and even when she was born Leah noted that the infant seemed to have “Bach fugue fingers”.

When the Mendelssohns returned to Berlin the young people’s education was begun systematically. General tuition was administered by Karl Heyse, father of the novelist; the painter, Rösel, taught drawing, for which Felix exhibited a natural aptitude from the first; Ludwig Berger, a pupil of Clementi’s, developed the boy’s piano talents, Carl Wilhelm Henning gave him violin lessons and Goethe’s friend, Carl Zelter, taught thorough-bass and composition. Nor were the social graces neglected. Felix learned to swim, to ride, to fence, to dance. Dancing, indeed, was one of his passions all his life. Father Mendelssohn always found time to supervise his children’s studies and to guide their accomplishments. For that matter he never considered his sons and daughters—even when they grew up—too old for his discipline; and, certainly, Felix welcomed rather than resented it.

On Oct. 28, 1818, the boy made his first public appearance as pianist. The occasion was a concert given by a horn virtuoso, Joseph Gugel. Felix collaborated in a trio for piano and two horns, by Joseph Wölfl. He earned, we are told, “much applause”. But Abraham, though pleased, was not the man to have his head turned by displays of precocity, shallow compliments or noisy acclamations. Neither did Zelter flatter his pupil on his never-failing facility. No problem seemed excessive for the boy, who could read orchestral scores, transpose, improvise—what you will. “Come, come”, Zelter would grumble contemptuously, as if these feats were the most natural thing in the world, “genius ought to be able to dress the hair of a sow and make curls of it!” Yet to Goethe he made no effort to conceal his satisfaction. “Felix is a good and handsome boy, merry and obedient”, he confided in a letter; “his father has brought him up the proper way.... He plays piano like a real devil and is not in the least backward on string instruments...”. And the crusty contrapuntist saw to it that the ten-year-old genius entered the Singakademie and sang among the altos where he could learn to know, inside and out, works by Palestrina, Bach, Handel and lesser masters, distinguish between styles and observe the minutest technicalities of fugal construction.

It was only natural that Felix should, at this stage, have tried his own hand at composition. He wrote to his father, in Paris, asking for music paper. Abraham took the request as the text for a mild sermon: “You, my dear Felix”, he admonished his son, “must state exactly what kind of music paper you wish to have—ruled or not ruled; and if the former you must say distinctly _how_ it is to be ruled. When I went into the shop the other day to buy some, I found that I did not know myself what I wanted to have. Read over your letter before you send it off and ascertain whether, if addressed to yourself, you could execute the commission contained in it”. Sooner or later he must have gotten his music paper for in 1820, when Felix began to compose, it is figured that he wrote fifty or sixty movements of one sort or another, solo and part songs, a cantata and a comedy. In every instance his methodical training caused him to inscribe the work with the exact date and place of its composition—a practice which saved no end of doubt and conjecture in later years, the more so as Felix remained quite as systematic his life long. These scores (of which he kept a painstaking catalogue) are headed in many cases with the mysterious formula “L.v.g.G.” or “H.d.m.”, which though never satisfactorily deciphered, reappears again and again in his output.

Some of these compositions, together with several by Fanny were dispatched to Abraham in Paris. The father was particularly pleased with a fugue and wrote home: “I like it well; it is a great thing. I should not have expected him to set to work in such good earnest so soon, for such a fugue requires reflection and perseverance”. He was perturbed over his daughter’s composing, though he appreciated her talent. It was well enough, he declared, for Felix to take up music as a profession but Fanny must bear in mind that a woman’s place is in the home. As a warning example he points to the sad end of Madame Bigot, who busied herself professionally with music and now is dead of consumption!

In 1821 there took place in Berlin an event which stirred the musical world of Germany to its depths—the first performance of Weber’s “Der Freischütz”. The composer, who supervised the rehearsals, was generally accompanied by his young friend and pupil, Julius Benedict. One day while escorting his master to the theatre, Benedict noticed a boy of about eleven or twelve running toward them with gestures of hearty greeting. “’Tis Felix Mendelssohn!” exclaimed Weber delightedly, and he at once introduced the lad to Benedict, who had heard of the remarkable talents of the little musician even before coming to Berlin. “I shall never forget the impression of that day on beholding that beautiful youth, with the auburn hair clustering in ringlets round his shoulders, the look of his brilliant, clear eyes and the smile of innocence and candour on his lips”, wrote Benedict much later in his “Sketch of the Life and Works of the late Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”. Felix wanted the pair to visit the Mendelssohn home at once, but as Weber was expected at the opera house he asked Benedict to go in his stead. “Felix took me by the hand and made me run a race till we reached his house. Up he went briskly to the drawing-room where, finding his mother, he exclaimed: ‘Here is a pupil of Weber’s, who knows a great deal of his music of the new opera. Pray, mamma, ask him to play it for us’; and so, with an irresistible impetuosity, he pushed me to the pianoforte and made me remain there until I had exhausted all the store of my recollections”.

A more spectacular event in Felix’s young life was his first visit to Goethe, in Weimar, the same year. It was Zelter who, anxious to acquaint the poet with his prodigious young pupil, had engineered the meeting. Felix had never gone anywhere without his parents and the family was not a little concerned about this expedition. He was plied with no end of advice before setting out, told how to behave at table, how to eat, how to talk, how to listen. “When you are with Goethe, I advise you to open your eyes and ears wide”, admonished Fanny; “and after you come home, if you can’t repeat every word that fell from his mouth, I will have nothing more to do with you!” His mother, for her part, wrote to Aunt Henrietta (the celebrated family spinster, “Tante Jette”): “Just fancy that the little wretch is to have the good luck of going to Weimar with Zelter for a short time. You can imagine what it costs me to part from the dear child even for a few weeks. But I consider it such an advantage for him to be introduced to Goethe, to live under the same roof with him and receive the blessing of so great a man! I am also glad of this little journey as a change for him; for his impulsiveness sometimes makes him work harder than he ought to at his age.”

The Mendelssohns need not have worried. The old poet took the boy to his heart from the first. Nor was Felix remiss about communicating his impressions. “Now, stop and listen, all of you”, he writes home in an early missive which forms part of one of the finest series of letters any of the great composers has left posterity. “Today is Tuesday. On Saturday the Sun of Weimar, Goethe, arrived. We went to church in the morning and heard half of Handel’s 100th Psalm. After this I went to the ‘Elephant’, where I sketched the house of Lucas Cranach. Two hours afterwards, Professor Zelter came and said: ‘Goethe has come—the old gentleman’s come!’ and in a minute we were down the steps and in Goethe’s house. He was in the garden and was just coming around a corner. Isn’t it strange, dear father, that was exactly how you met him! He is very kind, but I don’t think any of the pictures are like him....

“Every morning I get a kiss from the author of ‘Faust’ and ‘Werther’ and every afternoon two kisses from my friend and father Goethe. Think of that! It does not strike me that his figure is imposing; he is not much taller than father; but his look, his language, his name—they are imposing. The amount of sound in his voice is wonderful and he can shout like ten thousand warriors. His hair is not yet white, his step is firm, his way of speaking mild....”

Felix made much music for the poet’s enjoyment. Every day he played him something of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or compositions of his own (he had even brought some of Fanny’s songs for Goethe’s daughter-in-law, who had a pretty voice). “Every afternoon”, wrote Felix, “Goethe opens the Streicher piano with the words: ‘I haven’t heard you at all today; make a little noise for me’; then he sits beside me and when I am finished (I usually improvise), I beg him for a kiss or else I just take it!” Once Felix played a Bach fugue and suffered a slip of memory. Nothing daunted he went on improvising at considering length. The poet noticed nothing! At other times he would sit by the window listening, the image of a Jupiter Tonans, his old eyes flashing. And when the boy finally left Weimar Goethe missed him sorely. “Since your departure”, he lamented, “my piano is silent. A solitary attempt to waken it to life was a failure. I hear, indeed, much talk about music but that is only a sorry diversion”. A certain classical symmetry and a halcyon beauty in the boy’s music and in his performances seem to have appealed to a deep-seated element of the poet’s nature. When some time afterwards Felix dedicated a quartet to him, Goethe accepted it with a letter of fulsome praise. Yet when poor Schubert about the same period sent him a number of his finest Goethe settings the Olympian did not even deign to acknowledge them!

Leah Mendelssohn, delighted with the letters Felix was writing from Weimar, proudly forwarded them to Aunt Jette, in Paris. “If God spare him”, replied that worthy person, “his letters will in long years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a holy relic; indeed, they are already sacred as the effusion of so pure and child-like a mind. You are a happy mother and you must thank Providence for giving you such a son. He is an artist in the highest sense, rare talents combined with the noblest, tenderest heart....” The good woman spoke prophetically! Not all of Mendelssohn’s letters have been preserved and some of them were withheld out of scruples which today are rather difficult to appreciate. Whether the anti-Semitic excesses of the Nazi regime spared those portions of the correspondence not previously given to the world is still unknown. Perhaps we shall never read it in all its inundating fullness. There were times in his short life when he wrote as many as thirty-five letters in one day! At any rate, those we have are precious.

It must not be imagined that Felix’s numerous boyhood compositions served student ends primarily. This early spate of symphonies, concertos, songs, piano and organ pieces, chamber music and what not furnished matter for regular family musicales. The Mendelssohns had for some time been in the habit of holding miscellaneous concerts on alternate Sunday mornings in the big dining room of the house on the Neue Promenade. In these the young people participated and invariably some work or other by Felix made up a part of the program. Felix and Fanny usually played piano, Rebecka sang, Paul played cello. Felix also conducted and had at first to be placed on a stool so that his small figure could be seen. Little operas and operettas varied the programs, the boy being the author of four of them. These “operas” were not given in costume or with any attempt at dramatic, action. The characters were duly assigned and sung, but the dialogue was read and the chorus sat grouped around a table. The listeners offered their opinions freely, Zelter (who never missed one of these events) commending or criticising, as the case might be.