Part 3

“St. Paul” was not so swiftly completed as the composer may have hoped from his Düsseldorf “leisure” (actually, it was finished only in 1836). But he could not, from a creative standpoint, have been called an idler. To the Düsseldorf period of 1833-34 belong the Overture “The Beautiful Melusine”, the “Rondo Brillant” in E flat, for piano and orchestra, the A minor Capriccio for piano, the concert aria, “Infelice”, a revision of the “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” Overture and not a little else. The “Melusine” is one of his most poetic and mellifluous inspirations, with its lovely “wave figure” based on the arpeggiated form of the F major chord and so intimately related to one of the Rhine motives in Wagner’s “Ring”. How Mendelssohn managed to accomplish so much without slighting in any way his social obligations, his watercolor painting, his excursions here and there is hard to grasp.

In good truth, the enormous productivity which his unremitting facility encouraged, his piano playing and conducting, his incessant travels were subtly undermining his system. The effects did not make themselves felt at once but they contributed, bit by bit, to a nervous irritation that grew on him. Whether or not he appreciated that he came from a stock which, though healthy, bore in itself the seeds of an early death he made no effort to spare himself and never hesitated to burn the candle at both ends. The Mendelssohns had delicate blood vessels, they were predisposed to apoplexy. Abraham may or may not have been forewarned when, on returning to Berlin from Düsseldorf with his wife and Felix, he fell ill at Cassel. For a time his sight had been failing and he was becoming an outright hypochondriac. The more difficult he grew the more intense was the filial devotion Felix lavished on him.

Early in 1835 the composer received from Dr. Conrad Schleinitz a communication which showed that his good fortunes were to remain constant. It was nothing less than an invitation to accept the post of conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig. Mendelssohn was flattered but experience had made him canny. Before giving his reply he demanded categorical answers to a number of questions touching artistic and business matters. Everything was settled to his satisfaction and, with his parents, his sisters and their husbands, he returned to the Rhineland to conduct another Lower Rhine Festival, this time to be held in Cologne.

If there was one place which promised to provide as happy a home for Felix as London did it was Leipzig. The atmosphere of the town was a spiritual balm after the hectic life of Düsseldorf. Who shall say that it was not with symbolic intent that the newcomer led off his activities with his own “Calm Sea” Overture and Beethoven’s serene Fourth Symphony? And although Felix’s circle of musical friendships sometimes appeared boundless he now came into intimate contact with certain choice and master spirits of the age whom he might otherwise have known only casually. An early visitor at Mendelssohn’s new home was Chopin and in a letter to his parents in Berlin he writes of his pleasure in being able to associate once more with a thorough musician. One of those to whom Felix introduced Chopin was Clara Wieck, then only sixteen. On October 3—a historic date, as it proved—another stepped into the charmed circle, Robert Schumann, to whom Mendelssohn was to become a god. “Felix Meritis entered”, wrote Schumann describing in his best Florestan vein the first Gewandhaus concert. “In a moment a hundred hearts flew to him!”

Light-heartedly Felix accompanied his sister, Rebecka, and her husband on a trip to the family homestead in Berlin. There seemed to be even more gayety than usual and a greater amount of extempore music-making for the entertainment of the father. A short time after he had returned to Leipzig in great good humor he was shocked by the entrance of his brother-in-law, Hensel, with the news that Abraham Mendelssohn had died in his sleep on Nov. 19, 1835. The blow was heavy but Felix, once he regained control of himself, endured it with fortitude. Yet the loss of the father whom, to the last, he idolized marked the first great sorrow of his life. To Pastor Schubring he wrote: “The only thing now is to do one’s duty”. It sounds like a copy-book maxim but it was undoubtedly sincere. His specific “duty” in this case was to complete the still unfinished “St. Paul”, about which Abraham had been ceaselessly inquiring.

Logically the oratorio should have been given by the Cäcilienverein, in Frankfort, which had originally commissioned it. But Schelble, the director of the Society, was ill. So the premiere took place at the Düsseldorf Festival of 1836. Klingemann, who sent an account of it to the London “Musical News”, said that the performance was “glorious”, that he “had never heard such choral singing”. The composer himself was more restrained. “Many things gave me great pleasure, but on the whole I learned a great deal”. He had come to the conclusion that the work, like so many of his others, would benefit by a careful overhauling. And in due course he set about recasting and improving. He had grounds for satisfaction. If “St. Paul” does not reach some of the prouder dramatic heights of the later “Elijah” it is a woeful error to underrate it.

Mendelssohn felt he owed it to his old friend, Schelble, to take over the direction of the Cäcilienverein; so he cancelled a Swiss vacation he had planned and went to Frankfort. He hobnobbed with the Hiller family and with Rossini, who happened to be in Germany for a few days. But more important, he made the acquaintance of Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud, daughter of a clergyman of the French Reformed Church. Cécile’s widowed mother was herself still so young and attractive that for a time people thought that she, rather than the 17 year-old girl, was the cause of Felix’s frequent visits. Fanny Hensel had latterly been urging her brother to marry, alarmed by his somewhat morbid state of mind. Cécile Jeanrenaud, according to Wilhelm Hensel, complemented Felix most harmoniously; still, “she was not conspicuously clever, witty, learned, profound or talented, though restful and refreshing”. Mendelssohn was not the man to let his affections stampede him into marriage. So before an engagement might be announced he accompanied his friend, the painter Schadow, on a month’s journey to the Dutch seaside resort, Scheveningen, there to take long walks on the beach, think things over and come to an understanding with himself. Only then did he settle definitely upon the step.

The marriage took place in Frankfort on March 28, 1837, and the couple went for a honeymoon to Freiburg and the Black Forest. The wedding trip was followed by a seemingly unending round of social obligations. Nevertheless, Mendelssohn found time for considerable work. Then a summons to England, to produce “St. Paul” at the Birmingham Festival (the oratorio had already been given in Liverpool and by the Sacred Harmonic Society in London). If only “St. Paul” had been the whole story! But Mendelssohn had enormous miscellaneous programs to conduct, he played the organ, he was soloist in his own D minor Piano Concerto. Back in Leipzig he settled with his wife in a house in Lurgenstein’s Garden, welcomed Fanny, who saw for the first time those “beautiful eyes” of Cécile, about which she had heard so much, and greeted the arrival of a son, named Carl Wolfgang Paul. The Gewandhaus concerts flourished as never before. Felix produced much Bach, Handel and Beethoven; also he had many of those typical German “prize-crowned” scores of sickening mediocrity to perform. Musical friends came and went—Schumann, Clara Wieck, Liszt, Berlioz, and a young Englishman, Sterndale Bennet, whom both Mendelssohn and Schumann praised to a degree which we, today, can scarcely grasp. Small wonder that, amidst all this unmerciful and never-ending ferment Felix occasionally became worried about his health. “I am again suffering from deafness in one ear, pains in my throat, headaches and so on”, he wrote to Hiller. Occasionally his friends made fun of his intense love of sleep. One can only regret that he did not yield to it more often!

We must pass over Mendelssohn’s unending labours in Leipzig, at a number of German festivals and in England (where his new “symphony-cantata”, the “Hymn of Praise”, was featured) to follow him once more to Berlin. In 1840 Frederick William IV had become King of Prussia. One of the pet cultural schemes of the monarch was an Academy of Arts, to be divided into classes of painting, sculpture, architecture and music. For the direction of the last department the king wanted none but Mendelssohn. Hence much correspondence passed between Mendelssohn and the bureaucrats concerning the royal scheme. Time had not softened his hostility toward officialdom, particularly of the Berlin brand. However, he bound himself for a year, took up residence on the Leipziger Strasse once more, submitted his scheme for the Musical Academy and received the title “Kapellmeister to the King of Prussia” along with a very tolerable salary. Frederick William wished, among other things, to revive certain antique Greek tragedies, beginning with Sophocles’ “Antigone”. The scheme led to exhaustive discussions between Mendelssohn and the poet, Tieck, touching the nature of the music to be written. In due course there followed “Oedipus at Colonos”. The kind of music needed was, as it will probably remain forever, a problem defying solution. What Mendelssohn finally wrote turned out, by and large, to be adequate Mendelssohnian commonplace.

Greek tragedy was not the only sort of dramatic entertainment projected by the King of Prussia. Racine’s “Athalie”, Shakespeare’s “Tempest” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” likewise took their place on the royal schedule. Nothing came of “The Tempest” so far as Mendelssohn was concerned. But he fashioned some excellent music for Racine’s play and enriched the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with an incidental score which may well be inseparably associated with the immortal fantasy to the end of time. There was, to be sure, no need for a new overture, Felix having written the most perfect conceivable one in his boyhood. But a dozen other numbers, long or short, were called for and, with the most consummate ease and soaring inspiration, Mendelssohn produced them. They are exquisitely delicate settings of Shakespeare’s elfin songs and choruses, a “funeral march” of extravagant grotesqueness, clownish dance music, a flashing Intermezzo, depicting the pursuit of the lovers through the wood, and other “background” pieces. The memorable concert numbers, however, are the incomparable Scherzo—perhaps the most priceless of all the famous scherzi the composer wrote; the romantic Nocturne, with its rapturous horn revery, and the triumphant Wedding March, a ringing processional which, in reality, belongs to all mankind rather than to Shakespeare’s stage lovers.

The royal scheme for the Academy was not advancing and presently the plans began to gather dust in official pigeon holes. Frederick William, seeing the turn things were taking, appointed his Kapellmeister the head of the music performed in the Dom. The Singakademie, conscience-stricken over its earlier treatment of the composer, now made him an honorary member. For all that, Mendelssohn was not fundamentally happier in Berlin than he had been previously. Fortunately he had not resigned his Gewandhaus post when he left Leipzig and it had again become more desirable to him than all the royal distinctions Berlin could confer. He had added greatly to his creative output during this period (for one thing he had rewritten the “Walpurgisnacht” and finished the “Scotch” Symphony) and now he was occupied with plans for a new music school in Leipzig—the famous Conservatory, first domiciled in the Gewandhaus. In January, 1843, its prospectus was issued. The faculty was to include men like the theorist Moritz Hauptmann, the violinist, Ferdinand David, the organist, Carl Becker and finally, as professors of composition and piano, Schumann and Mendelssohn. Felix was not really overjoyed at the prospect of pedagogical drudgery; yet to Hiller he wrote “I shall have to go ... three or four times a week and talk about 6-4 chords ... I am quite willing to do this for the love of the cause, because I believe it to be a good cause”.

Quite as peacefully as her husband, Leah Mendelssohn died shortly before Christmas, 1842. Felix grieved, if he was perhaps less stricken than by the passing of his father. Doubtless he felt once more that nothing remained but “to do his duty”—and these duties were unsparing and seemed to grow more numerous and complex as the years went by. One sometimes questions if, truly, the labors of a Bach, a Haydn and a Mozart were more ramified and unending than Mendelssohn’s—even if he had no need to toil in order to keep the wolf from the door!

As time passed the Mendelssohn craze in England grew steadily by what it fed on and it was only natural that Felix should find himself repeatedly in London. He alluded to his successes and to the intensity of his welcome by his British friends as “scandalous”, and declared himself completely stunned by it all. “I think I must have been applauded for ten minutes and, after the first concert, almost trampled upon!” The young Queen Victoria was quite as effusive as her subjects. She invited the composer to Buckingham Palace and was graciousness itself. He played her seven of his “Songs Without Words”, then the “Serenade”, then Fantasies on “Rule Brittania”, “Lützows Wilde Jagd” and “Gaudeamus Igitur”. It was by no means the only time British royalty was to show him favor. Up to the year of his death Victoria and Albert were to shower distinctions upon him, to treat him, as it were, like one of the family.

Doubtless this is as good an opportunity as another to particularize. On one memorable occasion the Queen sang to his accompaniment and both she and her Consort scrambled to pick up sheets of music that had fallen off the piano. On another, the sovereign asked if there were “anything she could do to please Dr. Mendelssohn!”. There was, indeed! Could Her Majesty let him for a few moments visit the royal nursery? Nothing Dr. Mendelssohn could have wished would have delighted Victoria more! Unceremoniously leading the way she showed him all the mysteries of the place, opened closets, wardrobes and cupboards and in a few minutes the two were deep in a discussion of infants’ underwear, illnesses and diets. Mendelssohn and Cécile’s own family was growing by this time and might easily profit by the example of Buckingham Palace.

The Queen found so much delight in the “Scotch” Symphony that the composer promptly dedicated it to her. But for that matter, England could scarcely hear enough of it. Whether or not one ranks it as high as the “Italian” the A minor unquestionably represents the other half of Mendelssohn’s chief symphonic accomplishment. The question to what degree it embodies Scottish elements or any appreciable degree of local colour is less important than the fact that it is strong, impassioned music, informed with a ruggedness and conflict unlike the sunnier A major. There is a mood of tumult and drama in the first movement, whose closing subject is a definite prefigurement of the songful theme in the opening _allegro_ of Brahms’ Second Symphony. The Scherzo begins with a sort of jubilant extension of the Irish folksong “The Minstrel Boy” and the buoyant movement, as a whole, is full of tingling life. On the other hand, the _Adagio_ undoubtedly displays a weakness characterizing so many of Mendelssohn’s slow movements—it is sentimental rather than searching or personal, since with Mendelssohn grief is “only a recollection of former joys”. Yet the _finale_ is superbly vital and the sonorous coda with which it concludes has a regal stateliness and a bardic ring.

Whatever honours, labours, irritations and unending travels and fatigues were his portion on the Continent (and they seemed steadily to increase) it was to England that Mendelssohn continually turned to refresh his spirit. Not that his toil there was lighter or his welcome less hectic! But there was something about it all that filled his soul. People presented him with medals, commemorative addresses, they organized torchlight processions, sang serenades—and almost killed him with kindness. Yet we are told that “he never enjoyed himself more than when in the midst of society, music, fun and excitement”. “A mad, most extraordinary mad time ... never in bed till half-past one ... for three weeks together not a single hour to myself in any one day ... I have made more music in these two months than elsewhere in two years”. He ordered a huge “Baum Kuchen” from Berlin (though usually, Grove informs us, he made no great ado over “the products of the kitchen”, his chief enjoyments being milk rice and cherry pie). His power of recovery after fatigue was said to be “as great as his powers of enjoyment”. With it all “he was never dissipated”; the only stimulants he indulged in were “music, society and boundless good spirits”. Seemingly it never occurred to him that even a strong constitution can have too much of these.

When Mendelssohn became conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra he appointed as his concertmaster his old friend, the violinist Ferdinand David, who it will be recalled was born in the same house at Hamburg. As early as 1838 Felix had written to David: “I should like to write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E minor runs through my head the beginning of which gives me no peace”. Actually, he had tried his hand at a violin concerto accompanied by a string orchestra during his boyhood though this was only a kind of student effort. But David took the promise seriously and when nothing came of it for a time determined not to let Mendelssohn forget it.

Fully five years elapsed before the composer finished in its first form the concerto which to this day stands with the violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky as the most enduring of the repertoire. For the various technical problems of the solo part and even of the orchestration David was constantly at the disposal of his friend. He offered numberless hints of the utmost value and is even believed to have shaped the cadenza in the first movement as we know it. Even after the score was presumably complete David advised further changes and improvements, so that the work did not acquire its conclusive aspect till February, 1845. On the following March 13 it was performed by David at a Gewandhaus concert. Not under the composer’s direction, however. The latter was in Frankfort, in poor health and greatly worn out, and had no stomach for the excitements of another premiere. The conductor was his Danish friend, Niels W. Gade. It was not till two weeks later that David apologized by letter for his delay in describing the triumph of the concerto. “The work pleased extraordinarily well and was unanimously declared to be one of the most beautiful compositions of its kind”. In more than a century there has been no reason to alter this verdict.

Mendelssohn’s constitution may have been resilient and his recuperative powers as remarkable as his friends imagined, but it should have been clear to the more far-sighted among them that sooner or later these incessant journeys, this interminable business of composing, conducting, playing, teaching, organizing must exact a stern penalty. It is not surprising that, at the time the violin concerto was given in Leipzig, he preferred to remain in Frankfort with his wife and the children (who had gone through quite a siege of juvenile illnesses) and make a serious effort to rest. But truly efficacious rest is a habit that must be systematically cultivated. Felix did not possess it in his earlier years, nor could he acquire it now when overwork promised to consume the sensitive fibre of his being.

Yet in the summer of 1845 he was approached once more with a scheme of major dimensions. The Birmingham Festival Committee offered him the direction of a festival planned for August, 1846, and asked him to “compose a performance”—in this case, a new oratorio. He was sensible enough to refuse to conduct the whole festival but he was willing to produce such an oratorio, even if only ten months remained to compose most of the score and rehearse the performance.

The prophet Elijah had engrossed his imagination as an oratorio subject ever since he had completed “St. Paul” and discussed the new work with his friend Klingemann. In 1839 he had corresponded with Pastor Schubring about a text and he had even made rudimentary sketches for the music. Other obligations crowded it out of his mind. Now, six years later, he returned to it. He realized that the time was short but his heart was set on “Elijah”, although he was prudent enough to suggest some other work if the oratorio should by any chance strike a snag.

Mendelssohn could write fast—too fast, perhaps, for his artistic good. Still, “Elijah” was a heart-breaking assignment. It is only just to say that he realized certain inadequacies of the first version and revised not a little of the score after hearing it. His labours were complicated by the lengthy correspondence he was obliged to carry on with William Bartholomew, the translator. Mendelssohn insisted on a close adherence to the King James version of the Bible, with the result that the English words often conform neither to the accent nor the sense of the German originals. The choice of a soprano offered another problem. The composer wanted Jenny Lind, whom he admired extravagantly (he loved her F sharp and the note seems to have haunted his mind when he wrote the air, “Hear Ye, Israel”). But Jenny Lind was unavailable and he had to be satisfied with a Maria Caradori-Allan, whom he disliked and whose singing he afterwards described as “so pretty, so pleasing, so elegant and at the same time so flat, so unintelligent, so soulless that the music acquired a sort of amiable expression about which I could go mad”. Be all of which as it may, Caradori-Allan was paid as much for singing in the first “Elijah” as Mendelssohn was for composing it! The precious creature actually told him at a rehearsal that “Hear Ye, Israel” was “not a lady’s song,” and asked him to have it transposed and otherwise altered.

However, the first performance in Birmingham, Aug. 26, 1846, was a triumph for the composer though, to be candid, the uncritical adulation of the audience had settled the verdict in advance. The report of Mendelssohn’s boyhood friend, Julius Benedict, is typical: “The noble Town Hall was crowded at an early hour of that forenoon with a brilliant and eagerly expectant audience.... Every eye had long been directed toward the conductor’s desk, when, at half-past eleven o’clock, a deafening shout from the band and chorus announced the approach of the great composer. The reception he met from the assembled thousands ... was absolutely overwhelming; whilst the sun, emerging at that moment, seemed to illumine the vast edifice in honour of the bright and pure being who stood there, the idol of all beholders”!