[11] See the Adagio of the Quartet, opus 41, no. 1. The accompaniment
is essentially a piano accompaniment, transcribed for 'cello and viola;
but without the pedal it lacks fluidity.
[12] "Studies in Modern Music," First Series, Essay on Schumann, p. 213.
[13] Essay on Schubert, p. 98.
IV
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
[Illustration: FELIX MENDELSSOHN From the painting by Edward Magnus]
IV
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
In studying the relations of a number of contemporary artists to
the general tendency of their age it is interesting to note how, in
spite of the influence exerted upon them all by prevailing conditions
and available opportunities, each responds to the occasion in his
own way, always maintaining, in the common enterprise, his own
particular ideals, tastes, and methods. Despite all the schools and
movements in the history of art, each artist remains himself. So it
was in the period of romanticism. The romantic tendency was in the
air--the tendency to subjectivism, to picturesqueness, to specialized
expression, to a richly sensuous embodiment of ideas; but nevertheless,
each individual composer approached music from his own standpoint,
seized upon those elements in it for which he had a native affinity,
and quietly ignored what did not attract him.
That Mendelssohn should have been a romanticist at all is a proof of
the strength of the romantic tendency in his day; he seemed born rather
for the severest, purest, most uncompromising classicism; and if he
did, as a matter of fact, come to share the ideals of his age, it was
in his own way and for his own ends. The crudities, the exaggerations,
the morbid self-involution of the extreme phases of the movement,
certainly never infected him. For this happy immunity he was indebted
largely to the fortunate conditions of his life, both personal and
artistic. Crudity is usually a result of narrowness of culture or of
a deficiency in technique; and Mendelssohn grew up in a singularly
refined domestic and social circle, and was a skilled musician before
he was breeched. Exaggeration springs from a lack of taste; and
Mendelssohn's taste, both by native endowment and by training, was
consummate. Self-consciousness, whether blessed or baneful, is the
child of suffering; how, then, should it come to one whose whole life
was so protected, so guided, so lapped in material prosperity, family
affection, and social respect?
Mendelssohn's life reads like the story of some fairy prince,
beautiful, brave, and virtuous, who is rocked in his cradle by the
gentle godmother, Good-fortune, who runs his race amid the plaudits of
admiring friends, and who dies young, untarnished, and full of honors,
as one loved by the gods. He never knew the squalor of poverty, the
paralysis of drudgery, the bitterness of inaptitude, the dull ache of
disappointment. In his bright, precocious childhood he was the idol
of a wise father, a fond mother, brothers and sisters who shared his
tastes and in some measure his abilities, and a circle of literary
and artistic friends at the head of which was the aged Goethe. In
later years he had all the advantages of university training, the
best teachers in music, foreign travel, varied friendships, a happy
marriage, and a fame extending to all corners of Europe. Appropriately
indeed was he named Felix.
The influence of a long-established, carefully bred, and highly
cultivated family played an important part in the formation of his
personality. Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt blazed out
suddenly, meteoric individuals, from respectable but obscure origins;
but Mendelssohn was the last bright flower put forth by an ancient
stock. Only as such can he be understood. His grandfather, Moses
Mendelssohn, an orthodox Jew of the old school and a self-made man,
was a famous scholar in his day. He was prominent in the intellectual
circles of Berlin in the middle of the eighteenth century, participated
in a famous controversy with Lavater, was a friend of Lessing, and
was the author of "Phædon, or the Immortality of the Soul," a work
translated into all European languages. His son Abraham inherited his
strong character and something of his mental power, without his genius.
An independent thinker, an unusually wise and devoted father, he was
yet singularly modest, and used to say that he began by being "the son
of his father" and ended by being "the father of his son." He married
Leah Solomon, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of Berlin. It was
her brother, a man of some reputation as an art critic, who, turning
Christian, adopted and induced Abraham Mendelssohn to adopt the name
of Bartholdy, as a distinction from the branches of their families
which retained the ancient faith. Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's sister,
was also an unusual person. She had a genius for music second only to
his, and would doubtless have become famous had it not been for her
father's prejudice against a professional life for women. Some of the
"Songs without Words" are of her composition, and her criticism was
always eagerly welcomed by her brother. She married Hensel the painter,
who added still further to the artistic interests and associations of
the Mendelssohn family.[14]
In Felix's sixteenth year his father bought the mansion known as
"Leipziger Strasse no. 3," in the suburbs of Berlin, which became the
scene of a most idyllic family and social life. There were separate
suites of apartments for the various groups of the clan, Fanny Hensel
and her husband occupying one side, and her sister Rebecca and her
husband, Edward Devrient, the other; there was a room suitable for
theatrical performances, which were frequently given; there was a
large garden, and in the middle of it a garden-house with a hall
accommodating several hundred persons, in which informal musicales
were arranged every Sunday afternoon. No pains were spared to grace
the everyday life. "In the summer-houses," we read,[15] "writing
materials were provided, and Felix edited a newspaper, called in the
summer 'The Garden Times,' and in the winter 'The Snow and Tea Times.'
To this all comers were invited to contribute, and the young people
were joined in their fun by their elders, including such distinguished
personages as Humboldt and Zelter." We can readily imagine that music
was the constant accompaniment of all that went on; for not only
did Felix and Fanny play the piano and compose, but Rebecca and her
husband were singers, and Paul, the youngest of the family, was a good
violoncellist. For the Sunday afternoon musicales Felix constantly
wrote new things, of which the most important was the "Midsummer
Night's Dream Overture," played before a crowded audience in the
garden-house at the end of 1826.
Had Mendelssohn not been surrounded, thanks to the wealth and
cultivation of his parents, by this atmosphere of social friendliness
and artistic charm, he might have had reason to regret the nervous
sensibility he had inherited from them. The abnormal delicacy of
constitution indicated by the fact that his grandfather, father,
mother, and sister all died of cerebral paralysis took in him the form
of such an excitability, physical, emotional, and mental, as would
have brought much suffering upon a youth whose conditions of life had
been less ideal. Extreme sensitiveness was the most radical trait of
his character and temperament. His affection for his relatives was
of passionate intensity; a slight misunderstanding or coolness would
reduce him to tears, he could not work when his brother or sisters were
ill, and the death of his sister Fanny was a shock from which he never
recovered. His friendships were romantic in their ardor and in their
exacting demands; he showed in them, indeed, the childish egotism
of the oversensitive. "Write soon, and love me," he ends one of his
letters; and a friend said of him, significantly, "He loved only in
the measure that he was loved."[16] His brother-in-law, Devrient, in
his reminiscences, says that when crossed or disappointed he sometimes
lost all self-control, and in illustration tells the story of some
theatricals planned for the silver-wedding celebration of his parents,
for which he had written the music, and in which Devrient was to sing
the principal part. At the last moment Devrient was summoned to sing
at the Crown Prince's on the very evening appointed. With singular
blindness to everything but his own plans, Mendelssohn begged him
not to go, and when all were assembled began to talk incoherently,
and in English. "The stern voice of his father," says Devrient, "at
last checked the wild torrent of words; they took him to bed, and a
profound sleep of twelve hours restored him to his normal state." It
was the same sensitiveness, doubtless, that underlay his vanity in
regard to his work, and made indifference so intolerable to him. "The
atmosphere of love and appreciation," says Devrient, "in which he had
been nurtured was a condition of life to him; to receive his music
with coldness or aversion was to be his enemy, and he was capable of
denying genuine merit in any one who did so. A blunder in manners, or
an expression that displeased him, could alienate him altogether."
But fortunately, at least for the moment, the cold winds of the outside
world rarely invaded the quiet garden of art and friendship in which
he passed his youth. Inside the barriers which his father's wealth and
devotion, his mother's tender solicitude, and his sisters' comradeship
and admiration reared about him, he composed, studied, and dreamed in
idyllic peace. For variety there were conversations with men skilled
in art and literature, studies in the classics and modern languages,
harmless flirtations, letter-writing, water-color sketching, and tours
in Italy and Switzerland. For recreation there were bowling, fencing,
and swimming. And if the disagreeable could not be entirely eliminated,
if there must be an occasional headache or fit of lassitude, or if,
in spite of one's personal charm and graceful, lovable nature one's
friends would not always take the trouble to understand one, then one
could resort to a sort of Epicurean stoicism, refuse to attend to the
painful and the annoying, and dwell insistently on all that was bright,
gracious, and delightful.
Mendelssohn's earliest compositions reflect all the freshness
and gaiety of his youthful nature, all the ease and charm of the
circumstances in which it developed. From the first their technical
skill is perfect; for Mendelssohn had had no distracting struggles
for daily bread, like Schubert, no moiling in arid, uncongenial
studies, like Schumann; he had been placed under the best masters,
and had assimilated harmony, counterpoint, and fugue as unconsciously
as most boys assimilate reading, writing, and arithmetic. What was
even better, their style was entirely individual; for the spirit of
Ariel had never before been incarnated in a musician--or, if it had
been, it had smothered under impeding conditions. In the scherzo of
the octet written at sixteen there are all the Mendelssohnian traits:
fluent melodiousness, correct harmony, carefully polished detail,
and an inimitable delicacy, finesse, and lightness of style. "The
whole piece," wrote his sister Fanny, "is to be played staccato and
pianissimo, the tremulandos coming in now and then, the trills passing
away with the quickness of lightning; everything new and strange, and
at the same time most insinuating and pleasing, one feels so near the
world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up
a broomstick and follow the aërial procession. At the end the first
violin takes a flight with a featherlike lightness, and--all has
vanished."[17] The last words are quoted from a stanza of the Walpurgis
Night Dream in "Faust," of which it was Mendelssohn's intention to give
a musical illustration:--
"The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist
Are lighted from above.
A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds,
And all has vanished."
The same kind of intention was carried out even more brilliantly in
the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," of which it is not too high
praise to say that it is worthy of its Shaksperian inspiration. In the
immaterial dance of the violins and the strange calls of the trumpets
and wood-wind instruments, as if from some cloudy No-man's-land, of
this wonderful work, conceived by a genius and executed by a master
only seventeen years old, a new type of music is born.
It is worthy of remark that in neither of these works is there the
slightest trace of the turgidity so often observable in youthful
productions. On the contrary, one of their most prominent traits is
a cool dispassionateness, as of the deliberate, detached artist,
remarkable in so young a man. The more one studies Mendelssohn's music
the more one becomes convinced that this cool dispassionateness is
one of his fundamental qualities. Everywhere it reveals itself--in
the suavity of his melody, in the purity of his harmony, in the
smooth fluency of his part-writing. Violence of contrast, dramatic
trenchancy of expression, the overemphasis of hysterical eloquence,
he punctiliously avoids; he is always clear, unperturbed, discreet,
harmonious. The lavish sensuousness of Schubert, the impulsive
sincerity of Schumann, are impossible if not distasteful to this
Addisonian temperament; personal sentiment, self-revelation, the
autobiographic appeal, he avoids as the purist in manners avoids a
blush, an exclamation, or a grimace. If he is romantic in his love
of the picturesque, in his sense of color, and in his fondness for
literary motives, his emotional reticence is entirely classic. He is
more observant than introspective, and his art is more pictorial than
passionate.
Compare, for a moment, by way of illustration, the overtures "Manfred"
and "Hebrides." Schumann's work is intensely human from the opening
onslaught of syncopated chords to the final, deep-drawn sighs of
the contrabasses. There is unassuagable desire in the melody so
appropriately marked "In leidenschaftlichem Tempo," there is the very
accent of a lover's longing in the beautiful Astarte theme. The music
constantly rushes on into feverish excitement, only to expend its force
and die away to tender sadness, whence in a moment it lashes itself
again into new fury. From this so human world--
"Of infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn"--
Mendelssohn transports us, in his "Hebrides," to an island set in a
boundless expanse of the sea, where we watch only the rise and fall
of great billows and hear the long sigh of the wind and the cries
of sea-birds. The fierce dissonances of Schumann, his ceaseless
modulation, his never resting movement, give place to clear ethereal
harmonies, to high, pure trumpet calls, poising violin melodies, and
the thin note of the oboe suggesting infinite distance, and to an
undulating movement like the ebb and flow of winds and waves. These two
works are typical. If Schumann is incomparable in his insight into the
storm and stress of the human heart, Mendelssohn is one of the greatest
of landscape painters.
What is true of the "Hebrides Overture" is in greater or less degree
true of all Mendelssohn's compositions which can be called really
successful. They charm us not by their personal appeal, their
introspective veracity, as Schumann's so constantly do, but precisely
by their freedom from personal bias, their objective truth, their
universal interest. When he makes us see the winds and waves of the
"Hebrides Overture," the marching pilgrims of the "Italian Symphony,"
the dancing fairies of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, it is
not as through a temperament, but as in the white light of pure
imagination. It is such a view of the world as some visitant from
another planet might get--some gentle, happily organized being, whose
intelligence was unperturbed by human passions and undistorted by
practical interests. It is the view rather of a Tennyson than of a
Browning. "In the eyes of Mendelssohn," a keen observer has recorded,
"there was none of that rapt dreaminess so often seen among men of
genius in art. The gaze was rather external than internal; the eye had
more outwardness than inwardness of expression." What is said here of
the physical eye might with equal truth be applied to that mind's eye
with which the artist envisages his work. Mendelssohn's attention,
we feel, was never engaged with his own emotions, but played like a
disembodied spirit about the impressions he was imagining. He himself
is as elusive as the elves and fairies he so loved to depict. He is
always behind his work rather than in it.
The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we
should expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent
impersonality, are fluency, grace, and elegance. His melody, lacking
to an unusual degree the suggestion of impassioned utterance, is
more decorative than expressive--a sort of tonal arabesque, often
exquisitely wrought, but curiously unexciting. There is no boldness in
the physiognomy of his tunes; they conform closely to the average type
of traditional German melody; and their charm is due to the neatness
and facility with which they follow the paths of least resistance.
His harmony is solid and correct, but hardly ever unconventional; he
prefers an authorized to a novel progression, values clearness above
richness, and treats dissonances with the utmost circumspection. His
attitude toward modulation is conservative. Certain of his works, such
as the "Scotch Symphony," with its endless A-minor and D-minor, have
justly been charged with monotony, so fond he is of hovering gently
about among a few closely related keys. In polyphony his ideal is
smoothness of progression. Those daring momentary collisions between
different voices, each progressing independently, which give Bach's
fabric such a stoutness, he shrinkingly avoids. His part-writing is
almost too conciliatory, too considerate of the prejudices of the ear;
the natural roughnesses are all ironed out or glossed over. In a word,
whenever he has a choice between the original and the established, he
chooses the latter; he is too urbane to risk startling his hearer, and
prefers to ingratiate himself with familiar charms; but so deftly does
he manage these that he constantly gives us the pleasure of recognizing
"what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
In the matter of orchestration his delicate ear and fine taste made him
a great master. His instinct for proper balance and fusion of timbres
is unerring, he knows how to be sonorous without becoming opaque or
blatant, and his scores abound in the purest, clearest, and freshest
colors. Where shall we find a parallel for that ethereal shimmer of the
violins in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or for the magical
chord of the wood-wind that arrests it? or for the serene beauty of
the violin melody, so airily poised, at the end of the same overture?
or for the liquid coolness of the flutes, violins, and trumpets in the
"Hebrides"? or for the elastic vitality of the violins at the opening
of the "Italian Symphony"? Here, we cry with delight, is a master who
can make flutes and clarinets and violins in their upper register, and
trumpets playing _piano_, sound not like mere orchestral instruments,
but like angelic voices in remote skies. This magical charm is largely
due to the limpid transparency of his coloring. He never overscores,
never surfeits the ear and confuses the mind by laying on the tints too
thickly or piling up colors that will not coalesce. Few composers have
so fully realized how little an effect is due to the mere quantity of
the sounds, how much to their skilful composition.[18] As an example
may be cited the last page of the "Con moto moderato" movement in his
"Italian Symphony," where the same motive is sounded first by horns and
bassoons, then by trumpets and drums, then by flutes and oboes, all
together building up the loveliest, most diaphanous fabric of tone.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XII.
An even more striking instance, remarkable both for the economy of the
means employed and for the indescribable charm of the resultant effect,
is the passage for violins and two flutes, in the "Pilgrim's March" of
the same symphony.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XIII.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XIV.
As a master of pigments like Monet knows how to set on the canvas
spots of pure color which merge only in the eye of the beholder, so
Mendelssohn builds Æolian harmonies with a few pure tones that fill but
never cloy our ears.
So long as Mendelssohn maintained his instinctive aloofness from human
emotion, so long as, dwelling in his heaven of imagination, he painted
delicate aquarelles of fairyland and romantic natural scenery, he was
an incomparable master. In that rarefied atmosphere sentiments, like
objects, were quite properly somewhat ghostly, tenuous, impalpable;
the cheerful Mendelssohnian contentment sufficed for joy, the tender
Mendelssohnian melancholy for sorrow. But as time went on it was
perhaps inevitable that he, too, like Schubert and Schumann, and
indeed all sincere romanticists, should strive to leave his fanciful
boyish world behind him, and to express something of those deeper
realities with which the years were making him acquainted. Accumulating
experience may well have brought to the man of forty a distaste for the
gracious insubstantiality which was entirely charming in the work of a
youth of seventeen. But, unfortunately, a serious difficulty presented
itself at this point.
From the outset a thoughtful observer might have doubted whether so
artificially protected a life as that of Mendelssohn's youth would
develop his character and genius, in the long run, so favorably as it
at first promised to do. There is such a thing as a good fortune so
unrelieved that, by removing the prick of adversity, the challenge
of obstacles, the illumination of sympathy, it becomes in truth
misfortune. This is the fate that seems to have overtaken Mendelssohn.
The smile of Destiny, constant from his youth, became at last fixed
and vacuous. As in his boyhood he had been the pet of his family, so
in manhood he became, as conductor of the famous Gewandhaus Orchestra
in Leipsic, and general dictator of musical affairs, the pet of a
larger but still almost invariably indulgent circle. As his fame as
a composer, conductor, pianist, and organist increased, the admiring
audience widened until it comprised all Germany; and when in his last
years he turned to oratorio writing he had England too at his feet. A
wit has vividly pictured the atmosphere of adulation in which he lived
in the remark: "Mendelssohn could not stick his head out of the window
but some one would shout 'Hurrah!'"