Felix the Great
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of composer Felix Mendelssohn.
Since January the media have been filled with tributes to his artistic accomplishments, and most of them take the same form: assuring us that Mendelssohn really is a great composer. Why do all these commentators feel a need to come to Mendelssohn's defense? When we celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth back in 2006, no one bothered to argue that he is a great composer; that was taken for granted. All the attention Mendelssohn is getting this year in the press and in concert halls around the world would seem to be sufficient evidence of his enduring reputation.
And yet there seems to be something odd about Mendelssohn's reputation, something not quite right, something that requires reassurance that he really deserves this bicentennial commemoration. I would put the paradox this way: Mendelssohn is the composer of a remarkable number of great works of music, but for some reason we hesitate to rank him among the great composers.
Consider the extraordinary range of his achievements in one form of music after another. His Violin Concerto in E minor ranks with Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky at the pinnacle of the genre, and has become a rite of passage for all aspiring violinists. Of Mendelssohn's symphonies, the Scottish (#3) and the Italian (#4) are staples of the orchestral repertory, as is his Hebrides (or Fingal's Cave) Overture, which amounts to an early example of a tone poem. His incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream magically captures the fairy atmosphere of the play and includes the famous wedding march, perhaps the most widely played piece of classical music ever written.
In chamber music, Mendelssohn's output equals the achievement of all but the greatest composers. His Octet in E flat for Strings is undoubtedly the most impressive work ever produced in that genre (eat your hearts out Joachim Raff, Niels Gade, Max Bruch, and George Enescu). But if the competition here seems weak, one can turn to the area of chamber music where it is strongest, the string quartet, and Mendelssohn still stands out.
His six string quartets constitute a major contribution to the genre. Especially in the Op. 13 and Op. 80, he was among the first to appreciate and make use of what Beethoven was doing in his enigmatic late string quartets. Mendelssohn's Piano Trio #1 in D minor rivals Beethoven's Archduke Trio in popularity and has been recorded by just about every famous piano trio since the early 20th century, from Cortot-Thibaud-Casals, Rubinstein-Heifetz-Piatigorsky, and Istomin-Stern-Rose to the Beaux Arts Trio, Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson, and Golub-Kaplan-Carr.
Although Mendelssohn's output in keyboard music does not match what he achieved in orchestral and chamber music, he did produce one masterpiece for piano, his Variations sérieuses. His Songs Without Words for solo piano contain many musical gems that demonstrate his ability to compete as a lyrical miniaturist with the likes of Chopin, Schubert, and Schumann.
Mendelssohn's reputation as a composer is probably weakest in the area of vocal music. Most people do not even know that he wrote operas. The Uncle from Boston and The Marriage of Camacho are not exactly household names, and are unlikely any time soon to displace La Traviata and Tosca from the operatic stage. But Mendelssohn did write many beautiful songs and choral compositions. His greatest achievement in the area of vocal music came in the oratorio. Elijah, with its rich, sonorous, and deeply moving part for its titular hero, and its dramatic choruses, can lay claim to being the best oratorio written since the days of Handel and Haydn. Indeed, it is one of the few works in the genre that comes close to the exalted level of the former's Messiah or the latter's The Creation.
With all these extremely popular and highly regarded compositions to his credit, why is Mendelssohn not automatically enrolled in the ranks of the great composers?
He was arguably the most celebrated composer in Europe during his lifetime, but soon after his death in 1847 his reputation began to take a turn for the worse when Richard Wagner attacked him in an essay called "Judaism in Music," first published in 1850. A serious anti-Semite, Wagner argued that Mendelssohn's Jewish origins prevented him from joining the ranks of the truly great composers:
He showed us that a Jew can possess the greatest talents, the finest and most varied culture . . . and that none of those qualities can help him even once to move us to the depths of our being as we expect to be moved by art, and as we are when one of our own great artists simply opens his mouth to speak to us.
Wagner's anti-Semitic remarks can be left in the rubbish bin of history where they belong, but unfortunately he introduced a motif that has been picked up by musicologists ever since: that Mendelssohn merely had talent as a composer, not genuine greatness.
Typical is this remark in Alec Robertson's Chamber Music by Andrew Porter about the D minor Piano Trio I was just praising: "On paper . . . it seems vapid. What was deft in the Octet has become glib; what was romantic has turned sentimental. Invention sparks freely, but at a low voltage." Charles Rosen's important book, The Romantic Generation, contains one of the most insightful and provocative analyses of Mendelssohn's music I have read, but it takes a similar attitude toward his Songs Without Words: They "have a Mozartean grace without Mozart's dramatic power, a Schubertian lyricism without Schubert's intensity. . . . They charm, but they neither provoke nor astonish. It is not true that they are insipid, but they might as well be."
Why are many musicologists so negative in their appraisal of Mendelssohn?
To begin with, he made composing music seem too easy. He wrote his Octet when he was only 16 years old and the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream one year later. To put this accomplishment in perspective, the composer generally regarded as the greatest musical prodigy of all time--Mozart--arguably did not write anything of comparable quality until he was a few years older. He was, for example, 21 when he wrote the first of his great piano concerti, #9 in E flat major (K.271).
Contemporaries like Goethe who heard both Mozart and Mendelssohn performing their own compositions as children tended to rate Mendelssohn as the greater prodigy. Even Rosen is willing to concede: "Not even Mozart or Chopin before the age of 19 could equal the mastery that Mendelssohn already possessed when he was only 16."
Mendelssohn's preternatural facility at musical composition means that he does not fit the image of the struggling creative genius we have inherited from the Romantic era. Beethoven torturing himself to perfect the development sections of his symphonies has become our model of the truly great composer. We want out great composers to suffer for their art.
Moreover, again in contrast to Beethoven, Mendelssohn never developed as a composer over time in the way we have come to demand of our musical giants. By the age of 16 he was already writing music as good as anything he was ever to produce, and although his artistic career inevitably had its ups and downs from then on, it does not shape itself into any clear pattern, especially not the upward curve we expect from the musical greats.
On the contrary, many musical experts see a downward curve in Mendelssohn's career. In perhaps the most famous comment ever made about Mendelssohn, the conductor Hans von Bülow is reputed to have said: "He began as a genius, and finished as a talent." Rosen reformulates this assessment in seemingly more positive, but ultimately just as damning terms: "If the early works of Mendelssohn, from the age of 15 to 21, remain more satisfying and impressive than the products of his later years, it is not that he lost any of his craft or even his genius. What he renounced was his daring."
For musicologists, something is missing in Mendelssohn. They like to tell stories about the great composers, and, like all good storytellers, they prefer a dramatic narrative. Unfortunately for Mendelssohn's reputation, his career does not supply a neat beginning, a middle, and an end. He arrived fully formed as a composer in his early teens, and his career simply stopped with his premature death at the age of only 38.
Mozart also unfortunately died young (at 35), but from a narrative standpoint, he had the good fortune to die in the middle of writing one of his greatest works, and as we know from Amadeus, what could be more dramatic than a composer expiring while laboring on a Requiem? Moreover, looking at late Mozart works like the Requiem (K.626), we have a sense that he was on the verge of new artistic breakthroughs just when his life was cut short. Mendelssohn died soon after composing his greatest choral work, Elijah, but it does not seem to point in any new directions. As great as Elijah is, if anything, it points back to Handel and Bach, to the great achievements of Baroque choral music.
It is a composer like Beethoven who best fits the narrative needs of musicologists. His life offers the requisite Aristotelian plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, or as musicologists like to put it: Early, Middle, and Late Beethoven. The Early Beethoven carries the art he learned from Haydn and Mozart to new heights of musical power, while he showcases his talents as a piano virtuoso. The Middle Beethoven finds his distinctive voice as a composer in works such as the Third and Fifth Symphonies and the Razumovsky Quartets, as he pushes the art of his predecessors to its limits and breaks out of them to explore new musical territory. The Late Beethoven inhabits a private universe of his own musical imagination, pushing musical forms themselves to their limits and beyond, especially in the fugal movements of his late quartets, such as the Op. 130 and Op. 131.
The "early/middle/late" formula recurs with remarkable frequency in musicologists' accounts of great composers. It fits the career of Arnold Schoenberg perfectly, for example. The Early Schoenberg of works such as Verklärte Nacht, the Gurrelieder, and the String Quartet #1 operates in the post-Wagnerian world where classical tonality is beginning to dissolve. The Middle Schoenberg of the String Quartet #2, the Five Orchestral Pieces, and Pierrot Lunaire opens up the world of atonality for the first time, in one of the most radical breaks in the history of music. Finally, the Late Schoenberg of the Orchestral Variations, the opera Moses und Aron, and the String Quartets #3 and #4 perfects his dodecaphonic or 12-tone method of composition, the vanguard of the serial music that was to dominate much of 20th-century composition.
The case of Schoenberg helps to highlight the peculiarity of Mendelssohn's reputation among musicologists and music theorists. Most of them would call Schoenberg a great composer, while many deny Mendelssohn that status. This is so despite the fact that Mendelssohn has been and remains far more popular than Schoenberg with the music-listening public. In fact, in polls of the most unpopular classical composers, Schoenberg has long held, and seems to have secured for all time, the #1 spot.
I myself actually like much of Schoenberg's music, including all the works listed above. But despite decades of devoted performers trying to accustom audiences to Schoenberg's music, very few of his works have entered the active concert repertory, and those which have almost all come from his Early Period, when he still resembles more accessible and popular composers like Mahler and Strauss.
Clearly, academics are not allowing success with the listening public to factor into their evaluation of musical greatness. If anything, popularity like Mendelssohn's seems to work against a composer's reputation among academics. Particularly when they get to the 20th century, they pride themselves on championing precisely the composers the public has rejected. They view the public as too unsophisticated to appreciate the complexity of genuinely avant-garde composers, the composers who make music history. If Schoenberg ranks higher than Mendelssohn among musical academics, the primary reason is that Schoenberg fits their narrative needs better.
Indeed, Schoenberg's music comes as the culmination of the grand historical narrative musicologists wish to tell, which follows the line of Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Schumann-Brahms-Wagner-Bruckner-Mahler-Strauss, and tells a story of the continuing exploration of larger and larger musical forms and remoter and remoter regions of tonality.
Ideologically, musicologists are generally historicists; they are interested in the history of music and thus obsessed with the concept of historical development. They do, of course, value individual pieces of great music, and have much to teach us about how to appreciate them. But they always want to arrange musical compositions into large narratives, specifically stories of development, the development from work to work within an individual composer's career, and then the larger story of the development from one composer to another.
For these kinds of historical narratives, Schoenberg is ideal. He moves from work to work in his own career with a relentless developmental logic, and he is the key transitional figure in the climactic development of Western music from the chromaticism of Late Romanticism to the atonality of High Modernism.
Here is where Mendelssohn lets the musicologists down. In their view, his music is basically all Early and never makes it to Late. His career as a composer fails to follow any clear pattern of development, and, perhaps more important, although he can be placed at a particular moment of music history, he is not any kind of key transitional figure. All he offers is individual and isolated great works. What I suspect leads many musicologists to deny greatness to Mendelssohn is the feeling that one could remove him from the grand narrative of the history of Western music without much loss. The textbook I was assigned when I took a college course in the history of European music, Cannon, Johnson, and Waite, The Art of Music, mentions Mendelssohn only three times, and each time only in passing. (By contrast, they give Schoenberg almost half a chapter.)
This fascination with the career arcs of composers and their contributions to the history of music is the reason we celebrate events like the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth in the first place. But this interest in the composer rather than the composition may mislead us. We have already seen that Wagner's obsession with a biographical fact about Mendelssohn--his Jewish origins--led him foolishly to reject in principle the idea that his predecessor could be a great composer. As much as biography may add to our appreciation of music, it is ultimately an unreliable guide. Learning that Mendelssohn was only 16 when he composed the Octet may spice up our enjoyment of the piece as the work of a remarkable prodigy. But suppose, in some alternative musical universe, we learned that the Octet was written by an 80-year-old man on his deathbed. We would then undoubtedly marvel in a different way: that an octogenarian had managed to recapture such youthfulness in his last work. And yet the Octet would be the same marvelous piece of music whether it turned out to be composed by a 16-year-old or an 80-year-old.
In the end, it is the music itself that matters.
Musical anniversaries are fun to celebrate and provide a welcome opportunity to reevaluate beloved composers like Mendelssohn. I enjoyed listening again to much of his music while writing this article, and discovered a few works I had failed to appreciate before, such as his incidental music to Sophocles' Antigone. But anniversaries can have a bad effect if they make us focus too narrowly on a composer's place in music history and lose sight of the more fundamental issue, the intrinsic quality of his works.
Ultimately great music is great precisely because of its ability to stand above history and appeal to listeners of all ages. By that standard, many of Mendelssohn's works obviously deserve to be called great. He may not have changed the course of music history, but think of how much poorer that history would be without the likes of the Octet, the Violin Concerto, the Italian Symphony, and Elijah. Anyone who knows classical music understands what it means to call a piece of music "Mendelssohnian." Perhaps having his name made into an adjective is the truest measure of a composer's greatness.
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