On his last return from England a shadow came over that serene and happy
life. He met the sudden news of his sister Fanny's death, and with a cry
fell unconscious to the ground. He sought relief and rest in Switzerland
that summer, painting in water-colors, and playing the organ all alone in
a little village church--what a touching picture his letters give of it!
His own hour was near at hand. A trouble in his head grew worse. He died
in the evening of Thursday, Nov. 4, 1847. He was mourned by all Europe. In
Leipsic it was as if the most beloved and honored, the soul and centre of
all their higher life and aspiration, were withdrawn. Memorial concerts
were organized in London, Manchester and Birmingham, even in Paris. To
this day among English music-lovers Mendelssohn has been a name to conjure
by, adopted as their own like Handel. Mendelssohn scholarships, busts,
statues, became frequent. And a commission was appointed to publish
selections from the mass of works he left in manuscript; nor could they
keep pace with the impatient, almost angry outcry (at least in England)
for every scrap of manuscript withheld.
Mendelssohn stands as the best modern representative of sound, many-sided,
conservative, and yet progressive musical culture. He was artist to
the marrow. Gifted with original creative genius--a genius not so deep
and absolute, so elemental, so Titanic as that of Bach and Handel and
Beethoven, nor of so celestial temper as that of Mozart;--trained to
consummate musicianship through earnest study and personal absorption
of the world's great musical inheritance; compelling himself to daily
exercise of his own productive faculty, he summed up in himself the
rounded whole of musical art down to his own time. He was the ripe
musical scholar. Haunted by original and beautiful ideas, he resisted all
extravagant solicitations of the ambitious passion for sensation-making
novelty. He kept within bounds of reason and good taste; he respected
"Terminus, the god of bounds." Standing at the height of the musical
culture of his age, he won all his triumphs without setting up new
theories, new forms of art, without resorting to questionable ways. He
was nothing if not sincere, frank, simple in his art. Within the approved
forms and principles of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he found free air
and scope for the expression of what was in him. He never dreamed of
questioning the validity of absolute, pure music,--music in itself,
without words or programme. On the contrary, he maintained that music is a
language far more definite and less ambiguous than speech; that speech is
the gainer by translation into music, but that music is the loser by any
attempt to translate or "interpret" it in words.
[Illustration: Fac-simile autograph letter from Mendelssohn containing
corrections of a four-hand arrangement of one of his symphonies]
[Illustration: [Music]
Fac-simile autograph manuscript of Mendelssohn's most popular song for
male voices, "Farewell to the Forest" Composed in 1840.]
Of his complete musicianship there is no question. As a performing artist,
an interpreter, he was a masterly pianist. We do not measure him by the
phenomenal virtuosity of the Liszts, von Bülows, Rubinsteins, and Tausigs,
who came after him. Such comparison would be irrelevant; he was not of
their kind; not primarily a virtuoso, but essentially an artist and
interpreter. In that sense his playing was remarkable; fluent, brilliant,
vital, full of fire and feeling; his touch sensitive, decided, strong or
delicate as the phrase required; his technique free and faultless; its
perfection seemed to be spontaneous. Hiller said his playing was what
flying is to a bird. Mme. Schumann said: "Of mere _effects_ of performance
he knew nothing; he was always the great musician; in hearing him one
forgets the player in the full enjoyment of the music." Joachim says:
"His playing was full of fire, which could scarce be controlled, and yet
was controlled and combined with the greatest delicacy." His adherence to
strict time and to his author's meaning is said to have been absolute.
He had a rare faculty of playing at sight from a MS. orchestral score,
characterizing each instrument by a peculiar quality of tone. He rarely
played from book, trusting to his prodigious memory. His improvisations
astonished all; they were no vague, random excursions over the keyboard,
all digression, with which so many flashy finger-knights dazzle their
audiences; they were consistent, well-planned compositions, in which
the themes were not merely touched and set in shifting lights, but were
contrapuntally worked and carried out; thematic development was with him a
second nature. This was partly owing to his early practice in counterpoint
under Zelter.
He deeply loved the organ, and was one of the most masterly organ players
and composers of his time. For intrinsic worth and beauty his Organ
Sonatas rank only next to Bach and Handel.
For conductorship he showed a passion and a gift from boyhood, when he
improvised little private concerts in his father's house. Older musicians
did not disdain to play under his bâton. Charming pictures are given
by his biographers of the overtures and symphonies, as well as his own
juvenile operas, performed there under his enthusiastic lead. Later
he became one of the first conductors living, whether in symphony or
oratorio. He had the magnetic quality; all the grace and flexibility of
his attractive person, the electric eloquence of look and gesture, made
each point of the music felt by performers and hearers. The former never
could mistake his meaning, which was the meaning of the music. We have
heard it said by those who knew him, that in the rendering of orchestral
music, even movements of his own, he was subject to his moods, would take
the same movement at one time much quicker, with more fire than at others;
but it was all genuine, all loyal; there was a reason for it, and the
essential music never suffered from this elasticity.
His seemingly instinctive and spontaneous command of counterpoint,
already seen in his improvisation, is manifest in his organ music, in his
psalms and oratorios, in his fugues as such, in the clear, symmetrical
development of his orchestral and chamber works, in fact in all his
compositions of whatever form. He was happily at home in this soul secret
of the plastic tone-art. For the truth is, he was musically, spiritually,
a true child of Sebastian Bach: who more fit than he to be the first
exponent to our century of the long-shelved Matthew _Passion_ of that
mighty master? Through Mendelssohn has Bach gained a foothold in the more
modern world of music.
His instrumentation is a model in its way, neither too much nor too
little. Never dry and meagre, it is never bloated and excessive, weighed
down to monotony by superfluous multitude of heavy instruments, which give
each other scarcely room to vibrate freely, like so much in the "advanced"
instrumentation of to-day. It is never extravagant, bent on sensational
surprises and effects, if sometimes droll for cause. It is chaste, simple,
clear, while it is vivid, graphic, and expressive. There is no false,
exaggerated coloring, only just what suits the subject. Now it is airy,
delicate, and fairylike; now bold, majestic, or sublime; now fraught
with changing atmospheric quality, as in the "Rain" chorus in _Elijah_,
in the _Hebrides_ overture, and the _Becalmed at Sea_ and _Prosperous
Voyage_, now light-hearted and elastic, as in the "Italian" Symphony and
the youthful overture to the _Return from Abroad_. If he does not touch
the spiritual depths, nor strike with the lightning suddenness and fire of
Beethoven, it is because he is himself, not Beethoven. But alike in his
purely instrumental and his choral works, his instrumentation is always
interesting, always clear and telling, and in keeping with the whole,
always original, poetic, full of life and power.
We might discourse upon his mastery of Form. Enough to say, that with him
all is in "good form," yet not formal, at least to a fault.
So much of his musicianship, his technical equipment, of what might be
learned from masters. In him it all ministered to a creative genius of an
original, rare order, as we shall see in a slight, cursory survey of his
productions.
[Illustration: MENDELSSOHN IN HIS TWELFTH YEAR.[A]