Moses Mendelssohn changed the world. His profound discoveries forced King Frederick the Great (1712-1786), to grant him the status of "Protected Jew."
Frederick undoubtedly had profound respect for Moses, although the culture of the time could not have allowed him to accept a Jew as his equal. Stories abound. Moses critiqued Frederick's enamoration with French romanticism. When the King grew angry, Moses simply responded, "Your majesty, I am like a pin-boy. Every bowler needs a pin-boy to tell him what the score is."
A hearty laugh can change much.
Today, we appreciate the Jewish people as intelligent, cultured and refined. That was not always the case. In the 18th century, the people were largely illiterate. They mostly spoke Yiddish. In 1755, Moses Mendelssohn began publishing Qohelet Musar "The Moralist", regarded as the beginning of modern writing in Hebrew, and the very first journal in the language. In his last years, Moses Mendelssohn translated the first five books—the Pentateuch of the Old Testament (Torah)—into high German. By doing so, he expressed his wish to "dedicate the remains of my strength for the benefit of my children or a goodly portion of my nation", which he did, by bringing the Jews closer to "culture, from which my nation, alas! is kept in such a distance, that one might well despair of ever overcoming it". He gave a gift of culture to a people who were impoverished in more ways than one.
His efforts were a success. Jewish emancipation in Germany, as in Italy, was related to progress in the unification of the German nation, the advance of culture, and humanist reform. (After much debate, the National Assembly of revolutionary France voted in 1791 for the complete emancipation of the Jews, on the ground that the Jewish people had to be given equality if the promise of equality was to mean anything. Ft 1)
In this maelstrom of creativity, sometimes known as the “Haskalah”, or Jewish Enlightenment, Lewis Lewandowski (1821-1894), became head of music at the Jewish institutions. Here are two works by him that integrate Hebrew chant with modern polyphony, a huge step forward. It may remind readers of similar efforts by Russians and Ukrainians discussed in the June 1st, 2022 posting.
In this piece, the chant is prominently featured, but is transformed by surrounding voices.
Such works reveal facts relatively unknown to us. German Jews went from poverty and relative illiteracy, to playing a major part in advancing German culture, largely flowing out of the work of Moses Mendelssohn. Classical artists were drawn up in this motion. Beethoven was asked to compose the music for the opening of a new synagogue in Vienna. He was given copies of the Kol Nidre and other Jewish music, in order to immerse himself in the mindset. Although his commission was never fulfilled, listen to this recording.
https://drive.google.com/.../129tWzu9.../view...
The emancipation of the Jews was inextricably wound up with the efforts to end feudalism and usher the people of Europe into an Age of Reason. Several positive steps took place, including removing the restrictions against the Jewish people and moving closer to equality, which occurred through the Prussian Edict of Emancipation in 1812. When Germany was unified as a nation in 1871, Jews in all of Germany gained full rights of citizenship.
Would you not think that all true artists would welcome such progress?
Romantic Opposition to the Mendelssohns
A: Franz Liszt
Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of Moses Mendelssohn first heard a Liszt performance at a concert in Paris in 1825, when both were teenagers. In his opinion: “Liszt had many fingers but few brains, and his improvisations were absolutely wretched." There was a lot of debate over whether Liszt's performances lacked artistic beauty, and his compositions, creativity. Liszt struck back, reporting:
“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.”
Please listen to this performance of the first movement of that same Piano Concerto in G Minor (1830-31) by Mendelssohn. Tell us whether you think he was a virtuoso or not. Please tell us how Liszt might have improved the concerto, as a virtuoso work, without undermining its lyrical beauty.
At a later date, Liszt reports:
“Mendelssohn most graciously condescended to sit down at the piano, and to my astonishment, instead of treating us to one of his own compositions, he commenced my Rhapsody No. 4, which he played so abominably badly, as regards both the execution and the sentiment, that most of the guests, who had heard it played by myself on previous occasions, burst out laughing. Mendelssohn, however, got quite angry at their mirth, and improvising a finale after the thirtieth bar or so, dashed into his Capriccio in F-sharp minor, No. 5, which he played through with elegance and a certain amount of respect. At the conclusion we all applauded him.”
Liszt had his revenge and played the same Capriccio by Mendelssohn. He reported:
“Mendelssohn, instead of bursting out with indignation and rage at my impudence and liberty, took my right hand in his, and turned it over, backward and forward, and bent the fingers this way and that, finally remarking laughingly that since I had beaten him on the keyboard, the only way of vindication was to challenge me to a boxing match. However, since he had now examined my hand, he would have to abandon that particular course of action.”
It’s doubtful that events went quite that way. Perhaps Mendelssohn was not playing Liszt badly, but making fun of him. Perhaps the audience was not laughing at Felix' playing but the parody of Liszt. Liszt seems to be somewhat lacking in a sense of humor here.
Just to get an idea, here is Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 4:
and Mendelssohn's Scherzo a Capriccio in F#, Op. 5:
How Mendelssohn might have morphed one to another, we can only guess. Historian David Shavin reports that shortly after Robert Schumann had served as a pall-bearer at Mendelssohn's funeral, Liszt appeared and made veiled anti-semtic remarks.
"Liszt then proceeded to attack Mendelssohn as not up to Meyerbeer's level... Liszt knew that claim could not be taken seriously. However, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn were distant cousins, both being descended from the famous Rabbi Isserles of Samocz. Liszt was lumping them together, implying to Schumann that Jews are to be compared with Jews, and we non-Jews can resume our own activities. The normally taciturn Schumann rose from the back of the room: "Meyerbeer is a pigmy compared with Mendelssohn ... an artist who has done great work not only for Leipzig but for the whole world, and you would do better to hold your tongue!"
Romantic Opposition to the Mendelssohns
B. Richard Wagner
If Liszt hinted at anti-semitism, Wagner trumpeted it from the rooftops. In 1850, he published an article called "Das Judenthum in der Musick" ("Jewishness in Music"). Lest one think that this was an excess that he later regretted, he republished it verbatim with some additional thoughts in 1869. In 1876 he met Comte Arthur de Gobineau, author of "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races." In it, he argued that aristocrats were superior to commoners, and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races. He insisted that the white race had created all of the great culture on the earth. Despite secondary differences, Wagner embraced de Gobineau's theories, and wrote, after meeting him:
“We asked Count Gobineau, returned from weary, knowledge-laden wanderings among far distant lands and peoples, what he thought of the present aspect of the world; to-day we give his answer to our readers... he proved the blood in modern manhood's veins, and found it tainted past all healing. (Ft 2)
That represents at least 29 years of continuous racism on the part of Wagner. But what did Wagner say in this famous essay? His hatred of the Jews is scorching. He was the first, before the Nazis, to compare them to vermin eating the vitals of a healthy body:
"So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it ... there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer.... Only when a body's inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgement in it, merely to destroy it. Then, indeed, that body's flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect life.”
Yet, had they "remained in their place", he might have passed on the matter. What Wagner most objects to, is the Renaissance—the emancipation that uplifted Jews, Germans, and others around the world. Ft 3
“...our modern Culture was before accessible to no one but the well-to-do, ... When we strove for emancipation of the Jews, however, we virtually were more the champions of an abstract principle, than of a concrete case: just as all our Liberalism was a not very lucid... since we went for freedom of the Folk without knowledge of that Folk itself, nay, with a dislike of any genuine contact with it — so our eagerness to level up the rights of Jews was far rather stimulated by a general idea, than by any real sympathy; for, with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.”
He rails against the change in status for the Jews.
“Henceforward, then, the cultured (rich) Jew appears in our Society; his distinction from the uncultured, the common Jew, we now have closely to observe. The cultured Jew has taken pains to strip off all the obvious tokens of his lower co-religionists: in many a case he has even held it wise to make a Christian baptism wash away the traces of his origin.”
What Wagner hates more than the Jews themselves, is the ongoing Renaissance that was transforming the lives of Jews, Germans, and the world. Germans, he feels, have their roots and deep feelings in pagan myths, feudalism, and ancient Nordic Gods. Here is an attack on language:
“The Jew speaks the language of the nation in which he dwells...but always speaks it as an alien... far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech; and this is the essential point at which to sound the Jewish influence upon Music. The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle : add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases — and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber; so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.
“Now, if the aforesaid qualities of his dialect make the Jew almost incapable of giving artistic enunciation to his feelings and beholdings through talk, for such an enunciation through song his aptitude must needs be infinitely smaller. Song is just Talk aroused to highest passion.”
Wagner then zeroes in on his main target:
“All these are intensified to a positively tragic conflict in the nature, life, and art-career of the early-taken FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY. He has shewn us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and the tenderest sense of honour—yet without all these pre-eminences helping him, were it but one single time, to call [94] forth in us that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from Art... , in hearing a tone-piece of this composer's, we have only been able to feel engrossed where nothing beyond our more or less amusement-craving Phantasy was roused through the presentment, stringing-together and entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished figures —as in a kaleidoscope's changeful play of form and colour.”
This was the unkindest cut of all. For many years, even people who considers themselves anti-racists have sometimes played Mendelssohn as though he were merely clever and gifted, but superficial.
Let us put this myth to rest with one piece. Felix composed his “String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80”, at the death of his beloved sister and musical collaborator Fanny. He called it a “Requiem for Fanny”. After a passionate and distraught first movement, we might expect a playful scherzo or a beautiful Adagio. Instead, the second movement is a Scherzo that is even more heart-rending.
A kaleidoscope?
We live in a time of intense consciousness to be anti-racist. Yet, the defenders of Wagner went to great lengths to write off all of his indisputable hatred. Their chief argument is that you can separate his racism from his music. We will return to this theme somewhere down the road. Some very capable researchers have found evidence of his social theories in his music.
A Bientot!
Ft 1 A similar argument was made during and after the American Revolution, about the status of African-American slaves. Unfortunately, that battle took another 100 years to become law..
Ft 2 De Gobineau and Wagner were two of the greatest influences on Nazi race theory. Hitler did not only admire Wagner, he told the author of "Hitler Speaks", Hermann Rauschning: "I RECOGNIZE in Wagner my only predecessor. ... I regard him as a supreme prophetic figure ":
Ft 3 There is an old saying that a Leopard cannot change its spots. Is this true? In a Renaissance, many people do challenge their own prejudices., and do change their axioms. A dyed-in-the-wool racist seldom does.
Classicists love the advancement of downtrodden people. Felix loved his grandfather Moses, whom he had never met, and identified with his cause. When collaborators intervened and demanded that his “Oratorio Elijah” be Christianized, Felix, though an ardent Lutheran since 1 year old, objected, and said: "No this is about my people." When visiting England with his father Abraham, he grew excited about freedoms being granted to the Jews, while Abraham did not.