Part 2

On Felix’s fifteenth birthday, Zelter suddenly rose and, “in masonic phraseology”, promoted his pupil from the grade of “apprentice” to that of “assistant”, adding that he welcomed him to this new rank “in the name of Mozart, of Haydn and of old Bach”. This last name was significant. For a little earlier the boy had received as a Christmas present a score of the “St. Matthew Passion” transcribed by Zelter’s express permission from a manuscript preserved in the Singakademie. Henceforth the “assistant” was to immerse himself in this music and it was the exhaustive study of the treasurous score which resulted a few years later in the historic revival of the work an exact century after its first production under Bach’s own direction.

The summer of 1824 Felix for the first time saw the sea. His father took him and Rebecka to Dobberan, on the Baltic, a bathing resort in the neighborhood of Rostock. Here he received those first marine impressions which in due course were to shape themselves musically in the “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” and “Fingal’s Cave” Overtures. For the moment, the scope of this inspiration was less ambitious. He wrote for the military band at the local casino an overture for wind instruments (“Harmoniemusik”), which stands in his output as Op. 24. It is sweetly romantic music, with a dulcet _andante con moto_ introduction that has a kind of family resemblance to the softer phraseology of Weber, a spirited, vivacious _allegro_ forming the main body of the piece.

But the “Harmoniemusik” Overture was only an incident of the creative activity marking the year 1824. The chief composition of the time was the Symphony in C minor, which ranks as Mendelssohn’s First. Actually, it is his thirteenth in order of writing, though for conventional purposes the preceding twelve (for strings) may pass for juvenile efforts. We may as well record here that, irrespective of the dates of the composition, the official order of Mendelssohn’s symphonies is as follows: The Symphony-Cantata in B flat (the so-called “Hymn of Praise”, dated 1840) stands as No. 2, the A minor (“Scotch”), written between 1830 and 1842, as No. 3, the A major (“Italian”), composed in 1833, as No. 4, and the “occasional” one in D minor, known as the “Reformation Symphony” (1830-32), as No. 5.

The Mendelssohn family was outgrowing the old home on the Neue Promenade and late in the summer of 1825 Abraham bought that house on Leipziger Strasse which was henceforth to be inalienably associated with the composer. If it had its drawbacks in winter the spacious edifice with its superb garden (once a part of the Tiergarten) was ideal at all other seasons. The so-called “Garden House” was one of its most attractive features and became the scene of those unforgettable Sunday concerts where a number of new-minted masterpieces were first brought to a hearing. The young people published a household newspaper, in summer called the “Garden Times”, in winter the “Tea and Snow Times”. Pen, ink and paper were conveniently placed and every guest was encouraged to write whatever occurred to him and deposit it in a box, the contributions being duly printed in the little sheet. These guests included the cream of the intellectual, social and artistic life of Europe who chanced to be in Berlin. It was a point of honor to be invited to the Mendelssohn residence.

To this period belongs Felix’s operatic effort “Die Hochzeit des Camacho” (“Camacho’s Wedding”). The text, by Karl Klingemann, a Hanoverian diplomat who played a not inconsiderable role in Mendelssohn’s life, was based on an episode from “Don Quixote”. The story has to do with the mock suicide of the student, Basilio, to rescue his beloved from the wealthy Camacho. Possibly the little work would never have been written but for the ambitions of Leah Mendelssohn to see her son take his place among the successful opera composers of the day. Having embarked upon the scheme Felix went about it with his usual zeal. But the piece was played exactly once, and in a small playhouse, not at the big opera. Although there were many calls for the composer he seems to have sensed a defeat and left the theatre early. It was not long before he lost interest in the work altogether.

However, better things were at hand to obliterate the memory of the check suffered by “Camacho’s Wedding”. For we are now on the threshold of the composer’s first mature masterworks. It must be understood that there was really no relation between Mendelssohn’s years and the extraordinary creations of his adolescence. In point of fact, his creative mastery at the age of sixteen and seventeen is maturity arrived at before its time. That preternatural development, as remarkable in its way as Mozart’s, is the true answer to the problem why the later creations of Mendelssohn show relatively so little advance over the early ones. We can hardly believe, for instance, that the F sharp minor Capriccio for piano or the Octet could have been finer if written twenty years after they were. How many not familiar with the respective dates of composition could gather from the music itself that the incidental pieces fashioned for the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” by royal command came fully seventeen years after the immortal Overture? The whole might have been created at one sitting, so undiscoverable is any sign of cleavage.

The Octet for strings, finished in the autumn of 1825 represents, perhaps, the finest thing Mendelssohn had written up to that point. It is a masterpiece of glistening tone painting, exquisite in its mercurial grace and color, imaginative delicacy and elfin lightness. The unity of the whole is a marvel. But the pearl of the work is the Scherzo in G minor, a page as airy and filamentous as Mendelssohn—whose scherzos are, perhaps, his most matchless achievements—was ever to write. Not even the most fairylike passages in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” excel it.

Before passing on to the last-named, however, we must not fail to signalize the “Trumpet” Overture, composed about the same time (which Abraham Mendelssohn liked so much that he said he should like to hear it on his deathbed); the Quintet, Op. 18, the Sonata, Op. 6, the songs of Op. 8 and 9, the unfailingly popular Prelude and Fugue in E minor, of Op. 35. Let us not be confused, incidentally, by opus numbers in Mendelssohn which have as little to do with priority of composition as they have in the case of Schubert.

Felix and Fanny read Shakespeare in translations of Schlegel and Tieck. Their particular favorite was the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. In August 1826, in the delightful garden of the Leipziger Strasse home the youth of seventeen signed the score of an Overture to the fantastic comedy which, as much as anything he was to write, immortalized his name. The famous friend of the family, Adolph Bernhard Marx, claimed to have given Felix certain musical suggestions. Be this as it may, the Overture was something new under the sun and not a measure of it has tarnished in the course of an odd 130 years. It was first performed as a piano duet and shortly afterwards played by an orchestra at one of the Sunday concerts in the garden house.

Felix entered the University of Berlin in 1826 and offered as his matriculation essay a translation in verse of Terence’s “Andria”. Nevertheless, he seems to have had no time to bother about a degree. Music was absorbing him completely, especially his weekly rehearsals of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” with a small choir. The more intimately he penetrated into this mighty work the keener became his desire to produce it at the Singakademie. Together with his friend, Eduard Devrient, he divulged his scheme to Zelter, only to be rebuffed. Spurred by the energetic Devrient he returned again and again to the attack, till Zelter finally weakened. Having carried the day Mendelssohn left the Singakademie jubilantly exclaiming to the elated Devrient: “To think that it should be an actor and a Jew, to give this great Christian work back to the world!” It was the only recorded occasion on which Mendelssohn alluded to his Hebraic origin.

Three performances were given of the “St. Matthew Passion” at the Singakademie—the first on March 11, 1829, a century almost to a day since the original production in the Leipzig Thomaskirche. Mendelssohn conducted the first two. It was the real awakening of the world to the grandeur of Bach, the true beginning of a movement which has continued undiminished right up to the present. Fanny spoke more truly than perhaps she realized when she declared that “the year 1829 is likely to form an epoch in the annals of music”.

Scarcely had Mendelssohn restored the “St. Matthew Passion” to the world than he left Berlin for the first of those ten trips he was to take to the country that was to become his true spiritual home. Abraham Mendelssohn having finally decided his son might safely adopt music as a means of livelihood resolved to let him travel for three years in order to gain experience, extend his artistic reputation and settle on the scene of his activities. Felix was not averse to the idea. Already he was feeling some of those pin-pricks of hostility which Berlin, for reasons of jealousy or latent anti-Semitism was to direct against him in years to come. It was Moscheles who counseled a visit to London, where another friend, Klingemann, filled a diplomatic post.

Mendelssohn’s first Channel crossing was not calculated to put him in a pleasant frame of mind. He was seasick, he had fainting fits, he quarrelled with the steward and solemnly cursed that “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” Overture he had composed scarcely a year earlier. The boat trip lasted almost three days! Luckily his friends had found him comfortable quarters in London, at 103 Great Portland Street. At once it developed that he and London were predestined for each other. The metropolis both appalled and enchanted him. “It is fearful! It is maddening!”, he wrote home; “I am quite giddy and confused. London is the grandest and most complicated monster on the face of the earth. How can I compress into a letter what I have been three days seeing? I hardly remember the chief events and yet I must not keep a diary, for then I should see less of life.... Things roll and whirl round me and carry me along as in a vortex”.

He had arrived at the height of the season. The wife of Moscheles took him about in a carriage (“me in my new suit, of course!”) He went to the opera and to the theatre, saw Kemble in “Hamlet” and was incensed at the way Shakespeare was cut. Still “the people here like me for the sake of my music and respect me for it and this delights me immensely”. He made his first London appearance with the Philharmonic on May 25, 1829, and even at the rehearsal found two hundred listeners on hand, “chiefly ladies”. The program contained his C minor Symphony, though later an orchestrated version of the scherzo from the Octet was substituted for the original minuet. J. B. Cramer led Mendelssohn to the stage “as if I were a young lady”. “Immense applause” greeted him. This was soon to be an old story. When people spied him in the audience at a concert someone was sure to shout: “There is Mendelssohn!”; whereupon others would applaud and exclaim: “Welcome to him!” In the end Felix found no other way to restore quiet than to mount the stage and bow.

He played piano for the first time in London at the Argyll Rooms on May 30. His offering was Weber’s “Concertstück” and he caused a stir by performing it without notes. One might say he was heard _before_ the concert—for he had gone to the hall to try a new instrument several hours earlier but, finding it locked, seated himself at an old one and improvised for a long time to be suddenly roused from his revery by the noise of the arriving audience. Whereupon he dashed off to dress for the matinee in “very long white trousers, brown silk waistcoat, black necktie and blue dress coat”. Not long afterwards he gave concerts with Moscheles and with the singer, Henrietta Sontag. The Argyll Rooms were so crowded that “ladies might be seen among the double basses, between bassoons and horns and even seated on a kettle drum”.

London life, for that matter, seemed made to order for Felix, the more so as he was received with open arms by those influential personages to whom he brought letters of introduction. Yet the whole spirit of London was vastly to his taste. Writing later from Italy he confided to his sister that, for all the luminous atmosphere of Naples, “London, that smoky nest, is fated to be now and ever my favorite residence. My heart swells when I even think of it”!

The admiration was mutual! England of that age (and for years to come) adored Mendelssohn quite as it had Handel a century earlier and peradventure even more than it did Haydn and Weber. Musically, the nation made itself over in his image. And Felix loved the rest of the country as he loved its metropolis. The London season ended, he went on a vacation in July, 1829, to Scotland, accompanied by Klingemann. The travelers stopped first at Edinburgh, where they heard the Highland Pipers and visited Holyrood Palace. Like any conventional tourist Felix saw the apartments where Mary Stuart lived and Rizzio was murdered, inspected the chapel in which Mary was crowned but now “open to the sky and ... everything ruined and decayed; I think I found there the beginning of my ‘Scotch’ Symphony”. And he set down sixteen bars of what became the slow introduction in A minor. It was to be some time, however, before the symphony took its conclusive shape. If Holyrood quickened his fancy “one of the Hebrides” (which he saw a few days later) struck even brighter sparks from his imagination. A rowboat trip to Fingal’s Cave inspired him to twenty bars of music “to show how extraordinarily the place affected me”, as he wrote to his family. He elaborated the overture—than which he did nothing greater—in his own good time and recast it before it satisfied him. For in the first form of this marine mood picture, he missed “train oil, salt fish and seagulls”. Yet the twenty bars he set down on the spot form its main subject.

Back in London his mind was occupied with numerous compositions, among them the first stirrings of the “Scotch” and “Reformation” Symphonies and the “Hebrides” Overture. But before developing these he wanted to write an organ piece for Fanny’s marriage to the painter, Wilhelm Hensel (whom Leah Mendelssohn had put on a five years’ “probation” before she consented to give him her daughter’s hand!); and a household operetta for the approaching silver wedding of his parents. Klingemann wrote the libretto of this piece (“Heimkehr aus der Fremde”, which the critic Chorley in 1851 Englished as “Son and Stranger”). It contained special roles for Fanny, Rebecka, Devrient and Hensel—the last-named limited to one incessantly repeated note, because he was so desperately unmusical.

_Hebrides, August 7, 1829._

_... in order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there:_

Felix returned to Berlin for the parental festivities. But Fanny’s wedding he missed, having injured his leg in a carriage accident and being laid up for two months. He might, had he chosen, have accepted a chair of music at the Berlin University in 1830, but he preferred to continue his travels. It seemed almost a matter of routine that he should stop off at Weimar to greet Goethe once more. He may or may not have suspected that he was never to see the poet again. Another friend he visited was Julius Schubring, rector of St. George’s Church in Dessau. Nürnberg, Munich, Salzburg, the Salzkammergut and Linz were stations on the way to Vienna, where his enjoyment was poisoned by the depressing level of musical life and the shocking popular neglect of masters like Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. He made a side trip to nearby Pressburg to witness the coronation of the Austrian crown prince as King of Hungary. The most exciting incident of the day was the smashing of Mendelssohn’s high hat by a spectator whose view it obstructed!

Italy was another story. “The whole country had such a festive air”, he wrote in one of the first of those Italian letters which are among the gems of his correspondence, “that I seemed to feel as if I were myself a prince making his grand entry”. To be sure, there was not much music worth listening to and he was horrified by some of the things he heard in the churches. But there were the great masters of painting, there was the beauty of the countryside, the unnumbered attractions of Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, the fascination of Italian life and the charm of the Italian people. He heard the Holy Week musical services in the Sistine Chapel with works of Palestrina, Allegri and lesser men; wrote long and detailed letters to Zelter about the technical aspects of church singing in Rome, composed industriously, saw his boyhood playmate Julius Benedict and became acquainted with a wildly eccentric young French musician named Berlioz. On his way northward, in Milan, Felix met Beethoven’s friend, Dorothea von Ertmann; also, Karl Mozart, whom he delighted by playing some of his father’s music.

With his incredible dispatch he had managed to accomplish a great amount of creative work in Italy, despite his social and sight-seeing activities. He had finished a version of the “Hebrides” Overture, had made progress with his “Scotch” and “Italian” Symphonies, written a Psalm, several motets, the “First Walpurgis Night” (later recast), piano pieces, songs. Returning to Germany via Switzerland he stopped off in Munich and gave a benefit concert on Oct. 17, 1831. It was for this event that he composed his G minor Piano Concerto. In a letter to his father Felix referred to it, somewhat contemptuously, as “a thing rapidly thrown off”. It has been assumed that Mendelssohn may have had Paris in mind composing this concerto. At any rate, the first three months of 1832 found him once more in the French capital, where he made new musical acquaintances. One of these was the conductor, Habeneck; others, Chopin, Liszt, Ole Bull, Franchomme. Yet Mendelssohn found it difficult, even as he had earlier, to adjust himself to some musical insensibilities of Paris. He was appalled on one occasion to learn that his own Octet was given in a church at a funeral mass commemorating Beethoven. “I can scarcely imagine anything more absurd than a priest at the altar and my Scherzo going on”, he wrote his parents. Habeneck, who had him play at one of the Conservatoire concerts, wanted to produce at one of them the “Reformation” Symphony, which Felix had composed in 1830 for the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession. The performance never took place; the orchestra disliked the work, finding it “too learned, too much fugato, too little melody”.

Were these objections wholly unfounded? Irrespective of what passed in those days for excessive “learning” the “Reformation Symphony” is, in good truth, a stodgy work, far more willed than inspired. The most engaging thing in it is the citation in the first movement of that “Dresden Amen” formula, which half a century later Wagner was to employ in “Parsifal”. Strangely enough, some pages of the symphony sound like Schumann without the latter’s melodic invention. It is only just to point out that the composer himself came to detest it, declared it was the one work of his he would gladly burn and refused to permit its publication.

Zelter died not long after Goethe and the Singakademie found itself without a head. Mendelssohn seemed his old teacher’s logical successor and he would gladly have accepted the post. But many of the old ladies of the chorus did not take kindly to the idea of “singing under a Jewish boy”. When it came to a vote Felix was defeated by a large majority and one Karl Rungenhagen installed as Zelter’s successor. Rather tactlessly the Mendelssohns resigned their membership in a body. Felix’s popularity in Berlin was not improved by the situation, despite the family’s wealth and influence. He said little but the wound rankled, somewhat as happened earlier over Berlin’s rejection of “Camacho’s Wedding”.

The Cäcilienverein, of Frankfort, asked the composer to write an oratorio based on St. Paul. But if Mendelssohn was unable to oblige at once, the seed was planted and, in proper season, was to take root. Late in 1832 a different kind of offer came from another quarter. The Lower Rhine Festival was to be given in Düsseldorf the spring of 1833. Would Felix conduct it?

The Düsseldorf commission was accepted and as soon as preliminaries were arranged Felix was off to his “smoky nest” once more. He had now completed his “Italian” Symphony and placed it, along with his “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” and “Trumpet” Overtures at the disposal of the London Philharmonic. The Symphony was produced on May 13, 1833. To this day it remains one of the most translucent, gracious and limpid creations imaginable—“kid glove music”, as some have called it, but no less inspired for its gentility. Is it really Italian, despite the Neapolitan frenzy of its “Saltarello” finale? Is it not rather Grecian, like so much else in Mendelssohn’s art, with its incorruptible symmetry and its Mediterranean _limpidezza_? Where has Mendelssohn instrumented with more luminous clarity than in the first three movements? The second one, a kind of Pilgrims’ March, has none of the sentimentality which wearies in some of the composer’s _adagios_. The third, in its weaving grace is, one might say, Mendelssohnian in the loveliest sense.

“Mr. Felix”, as he was freely called, returned to Germany for the Düsseldorf festival, which began on May 26 (Whitsuntide), 1833. Abraham Mendelssohn came from Berlin to witness his son’s triumph. The Düsseldorf directorate was so pleased with everything that Mendelssohn was asked to take charge “of all the public and private musical establishments of the town” for a period of three years. He was to have a three months’ leave of absence each summer. “One thing I especially like about Felix’s position is that, while so many have titles without an office he will have a real office without a title”, declared the father.

Meanwhile, the projected “St. Paul” oratorio was more and more filling its composer’s mind and probably a large part of it had already taken shape. As a matter of fact, he looked upon his appointment at Düsseldorf less as a lucrative engagement than as furnishing him an opportunity “for securing quiet and leisure for composition”. Still, he gave much attention to his duties, particularly those in connection with church music “for which no appropriate epithet exists for that hitherto given here”. In an evil hour he had lightly agreed to take charge of the activities at the theatre. It was not long before he regretted it. Felix was never made to cope with the intrigues and irritations of an opera house. On the opening night, at a performance of “Don Giovanni”, there was a riot in the theatre and the curtain had to be lowered four times before the middle of the first act. Associated with him was Karl Immermann, with whom he had previously negotiated about an opera book based on Shakespeare’s “Tempest”. In Düsseldorf their relations became strained and eventually Felix, in disgust, gave up his theatrical labours and the salary that went with them.