Last week, we revealed the profound connection between the young Felix Mendelssohn and (especially) the late Beethoven. That connection was so deep that one might think it admitted no other. Yet, for Felix, as for the best of the post-Beethoven classical composers, the tradition must be anchored in Bach.
Historian David Shavin has documented the connections of the Mendelssohn family to Bach from early on. Although Mozart revived Bach's polyphonic method, after participating in the 1782 salons of Baron van Swieten, it was Felix Mendelssohn who decided to revive not just Bach's method, but Bach himself—and he did it in a big way.
In 1828, at age 19, Mendelssohn organized what was thought to be the first performance of Bach's “St. Matthew's Passion” in 100 years. It was a huge risk. If it did not succeed, his career would have been doomed.
Once again, music and science were wed. The great scientist Lejeune Dirichlet was married to Felix' youngest sister Rebecka. All things worked for The Good on the Mendelssohn estate. To quote historian David Shavin:
“When Lejeune Dirichlet, at 23 years of age, worked with Alexander von Humboldt in making microscopic measurements of the motions of a suspended bar-magnet in a specially-built hut in Abraham Mendelssohn’s garden, he could hear, nearby in the garden-house, the Mendelssohn youth movement working through the voicing of J. S. Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion.”
How wonderful! Imagine the excitement in the mutual interchange between scientific and artistic thought! Mendelssohn was not just a composer. He was a painter, and scholar. After a meeting in 1837, Franz Liszt exclaimed that: “Mendelssohn draws wonderful sketches, plays the violin and the viola, can read Homer fluently in Greek and speaks four or five languages.”
Felix Mendelssohn sought to keep Bach alive. He was an accomplished organist. Many composers imitated Bach's “Preludes and Fugues”, and ended up with just that, imitations. Mendelssohn's Op. 37, No. 1, does not imitate, but captures Bach's spirit, and combines it, with advances made in the classical spirit.
As enthusiastic as this writer might be, his enthusiasm cannot surpass that of Robert Schumann, who said that Mendelssohn's Fugues "planted beautiful flowers, in the same forests where Bach had planted mighty oaks!"
Mendelssohn and the Voice
One of the advances made after Beethoven was in vocal music (though Beethoven's music is in no ways as unvocal as sometimes assumed). Schumann once remarked that the only progress that had taken place since Beethoven, was in Lieder (poetry set to music.)
Perhaps one of the reasons why Mendelssohn composed his "Songs without Words" for piano, is his statement that "music begins where poetry leaves off." That is true in a way. Poetry is implicitly polyphonic, but lacks the explicit polyphonic development of music. The reciprocal relation between poetry and music is not over though. The Scottish poet Robbie Burns, took Irish melodies and wrote poems to fit them. He remarked that he could not get away with humdrum singing of the tunes. He had to sing them with utmost passion to find the right words (Thomas Moore did that as well with Irish melodies that lacked words). Perhaps Mendelssohn's "Songs without Words" does something similar, encourage the listener to envision the poetry behind the melodies (was Mendelssohn was encouraging a more vocal approach to the keyboard than the virtuosos that dominated Paris?Though these virtuosos made variations on opera arias, their overall approach was mechanistic.)
It takes a special touch to make Mendelssohn's “Songs without Words” truly sing. You can play them so that they are shaped like a song, but to breathe life into them requires nuance. These nuances are shaped by what pianists often call illusion. A far better word is metaphor. How can a piano achieve crescendo and diminuendo on a single note? Listen to a 1930 performance by Polish-Jewish pianist, Ignaz Friedman, an expert in Chopin.
This may seem like a silly song, but in the hands of a master, how it sings!
The question of Liszt, as pianist, remains open. He played Mendelssohn's G Major Concerto, to the composer's dismay.
Liszt reports: “Mendelssohn, on one occasion, drew a picture on a blackboard of the devil playing his G minor concerto with five hammers on each hand instead of fingers. The truth of the matter is that I once played his Concerto in G minor from the manuscript, and as I found several of the passages rather simple and not broad enough, if I may use the term, I changed them to suit my own ideas. This, of course, annoyed Mendelssohn, who, unlike Schumann or Chopin, would never take a hint from anyone. Moreover, Mendelssohn, although a refined pianist, was not a virtuoso, and never could play my compositions with any kind of effect, his technical skill being inadequate to the execution of intricate passages. So the only course laid open to him, he thought, was to vilify me as a musician.”