Musicon / Mendelssohn / Mendelssohn – He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes
-Mendelssohn – He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes
According to Goethe, Mendelssohn bore “the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child.” Even if Goethe got a bit carried away, his enthusiasm is understandable.
Mendelssohn began composing at the age of ten, and within a year or two he was producing pieces that were technically secure and, at times, strikingly imaginative. Two of his adolescent works—the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—have won permanent places in the repertory. Mozart reached a comparable level only in his early twenties.
By his mid-teens, Mendelssohn had found his own fiercely elegant voice. The Octet burns with a kind of happy fury; Larry Todd, Mendelssohn’s most authoritative biographer, has argued that its lunging themes and crackling counterpoint were inspired by scenes from Goethe’s “Faust.” Even more staggering is the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Overture, which offers one magical tableau after another: the opening harmonies of winds and horns, their notes gleaming like stars emerging from mist; an elfin scurrying of strings; opulent themes for the royals and a rugged dance for Bottom and the players; and the coda for Puck, which moves beyond comedy into some sphere of transcendent sadness. Rich in feeling, free of excess, it almost sounds like the statement of a wise old man—a musical Goethe, dreaming of youth. That it came from a boy of seventeen essentially defies explanation.
The question for Mendelssohn, as for all prodigies, was “What next?” He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes, at the age of thirty-eight. Works such as the “Hebrides” Overture, the “Scottish” and “Italian” symphonies, and the Violin Concerto showed no obvious falling-off of inspiration. He was lionized in Central Europe and also in England, where he became something like a guest national composer. But there were mutterings of discontent.
Hector Berlioz complained that Mendelssohn was “rather too fond of the dead.” Heinrich Heine mocked his “very serious seriousness,” saying that the music lacked the raw feeling, the “naïveté,” essential to the highest art. By 1900, critics were dismissing Mendelssohn as a relic of the Biedermeier and Victorian eras, of the bourgeois cult of comfort. George Bernard Shaw lambasted the composer’s “kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering.” Mendelssohn remained popular, but he seemed to slip from the ranks of the truly great.
One attack created particularly nasty resonances—that of Richard Wagner, whose pamphlet “Judaism in Music,” published in 1850, identified Mendelssohn as one of a number of insectoid Jewish entities who had infested the body of German art…
Wagner revered Mendelssohn in his youth, and behind the anti-Semitic bile lay an abiding, if grudging, admiration. In later years, Wagner played the overtures at the piano and sang melodies from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to his children. Mendelssohn even haunted Wagner’s sleep; one night Wagner dreamed that his older colleague had addressed him with du—the intimate second-person pronoun. “Parsifal,” Wagner’s final work, pays homage to Mendelssohn on more than one page of the score.
By Alex Ross, The New Yorker; excerpts, edited by Musicon