MUSIC WITHOUT SHADOWS?

Text: Albrecht Selge, 04.09.2023

Dark shadow forms can lurk behind the seemingly harmless sentiments one hears in brightly lit concert foyers: The music of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy is beautiful to listen to, but it invariably lacks a certain depth and substance. Rather than having a voice of his own, this composer’s work is more akin to some form of mimicry. That is more or less what I have been privy to – not only from strangers overheard during an interval, but from my own circle of fellow concertgoers too.

Sometimes it is uncanny the voices that can still be found resounding within us. More than 170 years ago, the idea was already doing the rounds that »Mendelssohn lacked all formal productive-faculty« and that he was obliged »quite openly to snatch at every formal detail that had served as characteristic token of the individuality of this or that forerunner whom he chose out for his model«. For lack of originality, he »mimicked« Bach. And a good 80 years ago it was written, in all seriousness, that Mendelssohn »is a voice for nothing but Near Eastern racial traits: A gift for empathy with alien souls, for the exploitation of existing forms for mere superficial pleasure, for a lacking of the heavyweight which, to Nordic sensibilities, goes into making a ›great‹ man«.

The first remarks were written by Richard Wagner in his now infamous essay »Das Judenthum in der Musik« (»Jewishness in Music«), penned in 1850. The second quotation comes from a work published in 1937 with the telling title »Musik und Rasse« (»Music and Race«).

Aside from this fatal »Wirkungsgeschichte«, or history of influence, the US musicologist R. Larry Todd recounts in his extensive biography of Mendelssohn (2003) another line of abuse that has tarnished the composer’s image to this day: Namely the polemical criticism, first emerging in the early 20th century, of Victorianism – lambasted as being mendacious and prudish to its core. The same Victorianism that had celebrated Mendelssohn as one of its favourite composers. Indeed, Mendelssohn had even been invited to Buckingham Palace in 1842 on one of the numerous trips he made to England that he counted among the highlights of his life. On this particular occasion he had improvised on the piano while the still-young Queen sang. And when Victoria’s daughter, also called Victoria (vulgo »Vicky«), tied the knot with a Prussian prince in 1858, it was Mendelssohn’s famous Wedding March that was played on the organ in the chapel of St James’s Palace. Not the one from »Lohengrin«! At least when it comes to the pomp and popularity of the music chosen for marriage ceremonies, Wagner has remained inferior to Mendelssohn – whom he reviled – right through to the present day.

While Mendelssohn, born in 1809, still resembled an angel from the heavens with an unclear gender identity as a 13-year-old prodigy in Berlin, he appears soft and feminine in a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, the famed caricaturist of the Décadence period. But this depiction of Mendelssohn as a dandyish giant baby was in fact drawn in 1896, almost half a century after his death, thus revealing more about posterity than about Mendelssohn himself. But it does illustrate how Mendelssohn’s image could be undermined soon afterwards, even in England, where he enjoyed (even) greater fame during his lifetime than in Germany.

Incidentally, Mendelssohn’s complete music to Shakespeare’s »A Midsummer Night’s Dream«, which features the Wedding March, is well worth listening to. It is so enchanting as a whole in its fairylike cheerfulness and sense of shimmering revelry. It opens up a realm where there may not be an endless abyss around the next corner, as we usually fear, and that in fact a world of elves and airborne spirits await, the likes of which our child hearts once knew. If you cannot emerge from hearing the music of »A Midsummer Night’s Dream« with a smile in your soul, the only remedy left to you is wine.

All this notwithstanding, it is easy to see Mendelssohn’s limits: for example, his failure to recognise the phenomenon that was Berlioz, whose immoderateness and dissolution of boundaries he met with ignorance, perhaps to protect his own aesthetics of just the right measure. Elves and demons do not get along well. The ominous aspects also contained within Shakespeare’s »A Midsummer Night’s Dream« are missing from Mendelssohn’s incidental music. And even Chopin was – to quote Mendelssohn directly – too tactless for him.

But it is equally easy to identify the infamy of the eternal accusations made against Mendelssohn. For example, that he was denounced for his fervent adoration of Bach. He, of all people, who – as the driving force behind the revival of the »St. Matthew Passion« in 1829 – played a crucial role in the creation of the identity-forming German Bach myth. Mendelssohn’s merit here though almost pales in comparison to the fact that his own oratorios »Paulus« and »Elijah« are far superior in power and poetry to the majority of other works written in this hackneyed post-Handel genre in Germany in the 19th century. After his appointment as Music Director at the »Leipzig Gewandhaus« in 1835, he also set new standards as a conductor, becoming one of the first to conduct with a baton, rehearsing extensively, and introducing the custom of conducting instrumental works from the podium. Last but not least, he also founded the genre of »historical concerts« in this capacity, based on the London model.

Then there is that – undoubtedly ambivalent – cultural miracle of assimilation. Felix’s wealthy father Abraham (a son of that great philosopher of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn) assumed the surname Bartholdy after converting to Protestant Christianity in 1822. He had already had his four children, including seven-year-old Felix, baptised in 1816. The attempt by the musicologist Eric Werner in the 1960s to prove a continuity of Mendelssohn’s conscious Jewish identity was controversial. It seems tempting to interpret the choice of the Old Testament theme of Elijah and the conversion subject par excellence, the figure of Paul, in such a way that a coming together and perhaps even a crossing of borders were central themes for Mendelssohn. It is worth bearing in mind here though that the great master of the oratorio, George Frideric Handel, had already demonstrated a preference for »Old Testament« themes, from Deborah, Esther and Susanna to Jephta, Joseph, Joshua, Samson, Saul and Solomon. (By way of an aside, Mendelssohn, who managed to track down the score in London, had Handel’s »Israel in Egypt« performed several times in Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Berlin). Wagner’s nasty tirades against the »Jew« Mendelssohn were directed at a baptised Protestant, who even wrote a Reformation Symphony complete with a final Luther chorale: »A Mighty Fortress is our God«.

In diametric contrast to the dark sentiments quoted at the beginning of this essay is Mendelssohn’s own professed brightness, the light voice of his music. Robert Schumann declared him »the brightest musician« in 1840. So what about the darkness, the shadow forms in Mendelssohn’s work? Are there conceivably any abysses, fractures contained within?

These questions are misleading because they set up false polarities. Certainly, the emergence of man from darkness is a central preoccupation for Mendelssohn. In his hymn of praise, the »Lobgesang« in B-flat Major from 1840, half symphony and half cantata, the pleading tenor question repeated several times forms the pivotal point of the entire work: »Watchman, will the night soon pass?« That said, Schumann labelling him the brightest musician is also, and perhaps predominantly, concerned with the dark forces that Schumann was sensing within himself. What he and Mendelssohn did indeed have in common though was the uneasy challenge: how to compose after Beethoven – especially symphonies?

Even the numeration of their symphonies, usually involving several different versions, is confusingly jumbled up in the case of both composers: Schumann’s Second and Third were written after the Fourth, Mendelssohn’s Fifth was written before the Second, Third and Fourth. The epithets are another matter. In the middle movements of the »Italian« Symphony in A Major (especially in the Trio), it is equally ordered German »Waldromantik« that resounds. And the final Saltarello once again has something fairy-like about it, and certainly more than ecstasy or Dionysian excess. On his grand tour of Italy in 1830/31, Mendelssohn travelled no further south than Naples; how would he have found archaic Calabria or Sicily? Whatever the case, the »Italian« was premiered in 1833 in – London!

It is worth mentioning that the »giant marching behind us«, as Brahms later complained, does not really have a traumatic impact on Mendelssohn. The momentum of his entire Symphony in A Major can be listened to as an eloquent dialogue with the symphony of its great predecessor in the same key, Beethoven’s Seventh. If one listens particularly closely, the kinship between these two works literally jumps out. The only difference is that Beethoven makes us want to dance along, while Mendelssohn makes us want to sing along.

This can happen more often than not with Mendelssohn: In the overflowing treasure trove of his chamber music, for example, in the slow movement of the Piano Trio in D Minor. This Andante con moto tranquillo is often regarded as a kind of »song without words«, after that genre for the piano that brought such lifelong success (eight volumes between 1829 and 1845!), about which even Mendelssohn himself is said to have once grumbled that it was »only for ladies«. The mockery of these hits of the day is misguided though, and underlaying these short pieces with texts, as was commonplace in the 19th century, does not really work. In a letter written in 1842, Mendelssohn himself mused on the limits of language: »People usually complain that music is too many-sided in its meanings; what they should think when they hear it is so ambiguous, whereas everyone understands words. For me it is precisely the opposite, not only with entire speeches, but also with individual words. They too seem so ambiguous, so vague, so subject to misunderstanding when compared with true music, which fills the soul with a thousand better things than words. What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.«

So it should be seen as much more than a formality when one notes that Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 in E Minor, for example, is not only one of the most famous violin concertos in music history, but perhaps the most reminiscent of singing of all. Despite this though, Mendelssohn’s music is eloquent and also descriptive. In the third movement of the aforementioned Trio in D Minor, it is quite possible that one might encounter one of those fairy creatures that Mendelssohn was so fond of: friendly otherworlds as opposed to abysses.

More traditional than Schumann in terms of form, Mendelssohn follows the symphonic ideas of an ideal Classicism. But what makes him romantic at the same time, if you will, is the fact that »the invention is determined repeatedly by extra-musical ideas« (Hans Christoph Worbs). The sketches that Mendelssohn drew on when composing his »Scottish« Symphony in A Minor in 1841 were made on the spot in 1829 while travelling in the far north, and one can hear that. Alfred Einstein, in his book published in 1950 »Die Romantik in der Musik« (»Music in the Romantic Era«), coined the wonderful term »romantic glimmer« to capture this quirk of Mendelssohn’s, which shone through above all his even-tempered expressions as something subjective.

Behind Mendelssohn’s melancholies there is always a glimmer of light rather than a dark downfall lying in wait. Conversely, there is always a glimmer of melancholy behind the brightness. The short and deliciously bizarre Funeral March following on from the famous Wedding March in »A Midsummer Night’s Dream« is just one of many examples of this.

Perhaps one should simply let Mendelssohn’s music shimmer in its own right, without exploiting it for other purposes. With this in mind, Mendelssohn also needs to be defended from some of his own defenders. When Eduard Hanslick came out in defence of him against Wagner’s accusations in 1858, he was directly confirming the antagonism that Wagner had constructed: »Without his beauty of form, his pure, clear shaping, (...) the savagery that we are currently experiencing in ›future music‹ would have fallen upon us much earlier and in a much more pernicious way.« But anyone who reduces Mendelssohn to the brake block tethered to the wild tendencies of the Wagner pack is also managing to finish him off in the process. Without having to be useful in the face of anything, Mendelssohn’s music, with its brightness and romantic shimmer, holds its value entirely in itself.

And yet there is doom and gloom. That which Felix’s older sister Fanny, who was at least as talented as her brother (just listen to her string quartet), had to endure seems like a dark chapter in the otherwise glistening Mendelssohn saga. It may be conceded that, generally speaking, Prussian-German conditions were particularly narrow-minded and authoritarian for women. In France there were quite different freedoms, as testified by the example of Louise Farrenc, who was around the same age and went on to become a great symphonist. Nevertheless, it is depressing to read how Fanny Mendelssohn was told by her father in a letter that music »for you will always remain but an ornament: never can nor should it become the foundation of your existence and daily life« – and never a profession, as it was for Felix.