During a second stay in Munich he became "on a brotherly footing" with
the very musical family of the Baermanns. For Heinrich Baermann, one of
the finest of clarinet players, he, as well as Weber, composed concert
pieces. It is his grandson, Carl Baermann, the admirable pianist, who now
adds to the musical prestige of Boston. There, too, he brought out his
G-minor Concerto (Oct. 17, 1831). And there he was commissioned to compose
an opera, and went to Düsseldorf to consult the poet Immermann about a
libretto with Shakespeare's _Tempest_ for a subject.
Early in 1832, his great friends Goethe and Zelter died. Mendelssohn
seemed to be the man of all others to succeed the latter at the
Singakademie; but he lost the election. As a proof of his wise and noble
loyalty to art about this period, read what he wrote to William Taubert
from Lucerne: "Don't you agree with me, that the first condition for an
artist is, that he have respect for the great ones, and do not try to blow
out the great flames, in order that the petty tallow candle may shine a
little brighter?"
In May, 1833, his success in conducting the Lower Rhine Festival
brought him an offer to take general charge of the Music in Düsseldorf
for three years at an annual salary of six hundred thalers ($450)!
But his father advised him to accept duties before emoluments. There
he brought out operas by Mozart and Cherubini; and in the church,
Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven: above all _Israel in Egypt_. There
he composed the greater part of _St. Paul_, and his _Melusina_ Overture.
Socially Düsseldorf was a delightful place to him; but musically it was
disappointing. In the spring of 1835 he conducted the Cologne Festival.
Soon we find him settled (from 1835 to 1844, and again from 1845 to the
end of his life) in the most genial home sphere of his artistic labors,
Leipsic, where he held the first conductor's post in Europe, at the head
of the famous _Gewandhaus_ Concerts. Hardly had he begun his notable
career there, when he was summoned to Berlin to the death-bed of his
father (Nov. 19, 1835). His grief was profound; for we have seen in
what respect and love he held him. He carried back to Leipsic two fixed
purposes: first, to finish _Paulus_, then to seek a wife. The Oratorio,
for which he selected the words himself, had lain complete before him a
year when it was first given at the Lower Rhine Festival in 1836 with
great enthusiasm. The wife was found in Frankfurt am Main. It was Cecile
Jeanrenaud, the lovely seventeen-year-old daughter of a deceased pastor
of the Reformed French Church there, who lived with her mother, _née_
Souchay, a highly respected, rich, patrician family of Frankfort. The
happy honeymoon ran over with fun and drollery in their joint diary full
of sketches.
In Leipsic his hands were soon full of most congenial tasks: conducting
the _Messiah_; the _Israel in Egypt_, with his own organ part; his own
_St. Paul_; besides a series of historical concerts; and composing his
Forty-Second Psalm, E-minor string Quartet, the D-minor piano Concerto,
the three organ Preludes and Fugues, etc. And is it not worth notice,
by the way, that here Mendelssohn commonly shines as the best of
programme-makers? Indeed, he seems to have been the first in whom that
function rose to the dignity of an art, when he was not balked by others.
Certainly the concerts, ("academies") which Mozart and Beethoven gave
mostly in noble houses, to make their new works heard, offered no models
of good programme-making, containing often far too much of a good thing,
say three great Beethoven Symphonies, with much other matter, in a single
evening! The democratic age of concert-giving had not yet come in.
In all this he was strong and happy in the sympathetic companionship of
his young wife, though often torn from her to fulfil engagements at the
Birmingham Festival and elsewhere. Thenceforth for several years he gave
his heart and soul to Leipsic, chiefly to the Gewandhaus concerts; he
worked with enthusiasm, and was rewarded by the enthusiasm he created.
In June, 1838, he conducted the Cologne Festival, and we have a cogent
letter in which he induced the committee to include "at least one
important vocal work of Bach" (a Church Cantata) in the programme,
besides pieces from Handel's _Joshua_. The summer was spent in the dear
garden-house at Berlin; and that was the young wife's first introduction
to her husband's family. He kept on composing noble things; among them
the Violin Concerto and a Psalm for eight voices: "When Israel," etc. And
he fell just short of giving the world another Symphony (in B flat). The
great event of the next Gewandhaus season was the first performance, at
the last concert (March 22, 1839), of the great Schubert Symphony in C. It
was played from the MS., which had been found in Vienna by Schumann.
It would require a volume to detail the programmes of those ten or eleven
years of Gewandhaus concerts under his direction,--to say nothing of
great musical enterprises outside of all that. In December, 1842, his
mother died, and then the Berlin house was his. Yet he lived for the most
part in Leipsic, aiding as a professor, with David, Hauptmann, Schumann
and the like, in the carrying out of his pet scheme of a Conservatorium
of Music. Since 1838 _Elijah_ had been in his mind as the subject of an
oratorio. It was finished for the Birmingham Festival of 1846. He was on
hand there to conduct it, all the world knows with what success. Yet his
own fastidious taste saw much in it to alter and polish, and he returned
to England for the tenth and last time to conduct it in the revised
edition, so to speak.
[Illustration: WILLIAM HENSEL.