Mendelssohn

“ A good composer will turn to account a suggestion from any source, however humble. Mendelssohn took pleasure in acknowledging his debt to nature in these matters. While Mendelssohn was not a Beethoven, while he could not so well depict the rugged, the grand, the heroic, as did that musical Jupiter, yet Mendelssohn was the tone poet of the forest and field, the bright sun, and the blue sky. ”

“ At the great Birmingham Festival several hundred ladies in the audience contrived at a given signal to shower the great conductor with bouquets. And Mendelssohn, entering into the spirit of the fun, dexterously caught the blossoms and tossed them to his players, not even forgetting the triangles and the boys who played the kettledrums.
Bayard Taylor has described the lustrous brown eyes of Mendelssohn, that seemed to send rays of light into your own: "Such eyes are the possession of men who have seen heavenly visions. Genius shows itself in the eye. ”

“ The whole was a grand elevating festival, and for Spohr a deeply-felt gratification. Mendelssohn was extremely amiable, and the whole evening as though intensely happy, which proved how foreign to his mind is every feeling of jealousy. This evening the last music party will meet at Vogt’s, where Mendelssohn proposes to himself an especial pleasure, not only in taking part in Spohr’s first trio as pianist, but as viol in his splendid third double quartet. ”

“ If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling of a sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in temperament,—correct, reserved, dispassionate,—is nevertheless also romantic by virtue of his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the pageantry of life, his delicate skill as an illustrator of nature and of imaginative literature. His "Songs without Words" reveal a strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or reckless, he never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far removed from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and Schumann. ”

“ Concerning Mendelssohn’s private character there have never been two opinions. As a man of the world he was more than ordinarily accomplished—brilliant in conversation, and in his lighter moments overflowing with sparkling humour and ready pleasantry, loyal and unselfish in the more serious business of life, and never weary of working for the general good. ”

“ Grove moralises thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:
"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure, aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony? It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But let us take the man as we have him. ”

“ Mendelssohn came in and joined in the games; then he went to the piano and set us all a dancing as only the rhythm of his improvisation could. When he ended, we clamoured for more. Give any child a Mendelssohn finger and no wonder it wants the ten. We got another splendid waltz that glided into a gallop, but when that too came to an end, we insatiable little tyrants would not let him get up from the piano. ”

“ The domestic and home-establishing influences of music might be pleaded even more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn. A more musical home than that in which Mendelssohn grew up, could hardly exist, nor one in which family life reached a higher level of comfort and delight. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn was especially devoted to his sister. Her death indeed grieved him so deeply, that he died shortly after. A man of the utmost cheer and wholesomeness, revelling in dancing, swimming, riding, sketching, and billiards ”

“ His ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, written when he was seventeen, has a place on modern concert programs analogous to that of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony.’ This work is equally the delight of the musical purist and of the untechnical music-lover. It is marked by all Mendelssohn’s finest qualities. Not a measure of it is slipshod or lacking in distinction. Its scoring is deft in the extreme. Its themes are fresh and charming. And upon it all is the polish in which Mendelssohn excelled; no note seems out of place, and none, one feels, could be otherwise than as it is. ”

“ We made a fire, a little way off it, in a thicket among the trees, Mendelssohn helping with the utmost zeal, dragging up more and more wood: we tired ourselves with our merry work; we sat down round our fire, the smoke went off, the ashes were glowing, it began to get dark, but we could not like to leave our bonfire. 'If we had but some music,' Mendelssohn said; 'Could any one get something to play on?' Then my brother recollected that we were near the gardener's cottage, and that the gardener had a fiddle. Off rushed our boys to get the fiddle. ”

“ Yet, in spite of all this, if we compare Mendelssohn with men like Beethoven, or Schumann, or Tschaïkowsky, in whom feeling is cordial and expression impulsive, we cannot escape the impression of a certain thinness of blood, straitness of sympathy, and inelasticity of mind. His personality is tenuous, over-rarefied; he seems more like a faun than a man. ”

“ Posthumously, Mendelssohn’s fate seemed like a strange reversal of his supreme idol’s, Bach. Bach passed into long eclipse, then, largely through Mendelssohn’s heroic efforts, underwent a miracle of resurrection which has grown more overpowering clear down to our own time. Mendelssohn, almost preposterously famous at his death, was before very long pronounced outmoded, overrated, virtually negligible. The whole history of music scarcely shows a more violent backswing of the pendulum. ”

“ Albert wrote in the book of words and sent to Mendelssohn a dedication: “To the Noble Artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of debased art, has been able by his genius and science to preserve faithfully, like another Elijah, the Worship of True Art, and once more to accustom our ears, amid the whirl of empty frivolous sounds, to the pure tones of sympathetic feeling and legitimate harmony: to the Great Master, who makes us conscious of the unity of his conception, through the whole maze of his creation, from the soft whispering to the mighty raging of the elements. ”

“ Schumann, apart from his not having the natural gifts of Mendelssohn, was a solitary student, unable by the use of his talents or his manners to make himself popular. Mendelssohn, endowed with every distinction nature and a refined education could bestow, happily balanced the requirements of the public with the dignity of the true artist, without yielding to vulgar tastes. ”

“ I promised to supply a Tutti; and so we took the measure, embroidered, turned and padded, put in sleeves à la Mameluke, and at last, with our tailoring, produced a brilliant concerto. We shall have another rehearsal to-day; it will be quite a picnic, for Moscheles brings the cadenza and I the Tutti."
That golden thread of "great fun," as he calls it, goes through the history of Mendelssohn's life. It intertwined itself with the sensitive fibres of his nature, thus becoming an element of strength, a factor that illuminated his path and spread bright sunshine wherever he went. ”

“ In these works Mendelssohn is at his best; only the ‘Elijah’ and the violin concerto equally deserve long life and frequent repetition. For the overtures best show Mendelssohn the synthesist. In them he has caught absolutely the more refined spirit of romanticism, with its emphasis on tone coloring and its association of literary ideas, and has developed it in a classic mold as perfect as anything in music. Nowhere else do the dominating musical ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries come to such an amicable meeting ground. ”

“ I have received a delightful letter from Mendelssohn, dated Rome, March 5, which gives the most transparent picture of that rare young man. About him we need cherish no further care. The fine swimming-jacket of his genius will carry him safely through the waves and surf of the dreaded barbarism.
Now, you well remember that I have always passionately adopted the cause of the minor third, and was angry that you theoretical cheap-jacks would not allow it to be a donum naturæ. Certainly a wire or piece of cat-gut is not so precious that nature should exclusively confide to it her harmonies. ”

“ This, of course, annoyed Mendelssohn, who, unlike Schumann or Chopin, would never take a hint or advice from any one. Moreover, Mendelssohn, who, 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 open to him, he thought, was to vilify me as a musician. And, of course, whatever Mendelssohn did, Leipzig did also. ”

“ Yet this ‘controlled romanticism,’ which Mendelssohn doubtless hoped would found a school, had little historical result. The frenzied spirits of the time needed some more vigorous stimulation, and those who had vitality sufficient to make history were not the ones to be guided by an academic gourmet. The Mendelssohn concert overtures are a pleasant by-path in music; they by no means strike a note to ring down the corridors of time. ‘Controlled romanticism’ was not the message for Mendelssohn’s age ”

“ No ordinary boy could have escaped uninjured from the snares attendant upon such a life as that which Mendelssohn now lived. Notwithstanding his overwhelming passion for music, his general education had been so well cared for that he was able to hold his own, in the society of his seniors, with the grace of an accomplished man of the world. ”

“ A few months later Mendelssohn's dearly beloved sister, Fanny Hensel, suddenly died. It was a heavy blow from which he never quite recovered, for the brother and sister were bound together by the closest ties of affection, and the most striking artistic affinities. He spent the summer in Switzerland, but returned enfeebled in health and depressed in spirits. "His step is less elastic than before," says my father, "but to see him at the piano, or to hear him talk about art and artists, he is all life and fire." ”

“ Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at the age of forty-two she died.
Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men ”

“ I only recollect Schumann as a young man sitting generally in a corner of the orchestra, and listening to one of his works being performed under Mendelssohn’s direction. I remember his very large head, his drooping eyes; I hardly ever remember a smile on his face. And yet the man must have been satisfied, if not happy, who could write such music as his, who could write, “Wohlauf noch getrunken den funklenden Wein!” and he lived to see his own creations admired more even than those of Mendelssohn. He lived to see his critics turned into admirers ”

“ What is said here of the physical eye might with equal truth be applied to that mind's eye with which the artist envisages his work. Mendelssohn's attention, we feel, was never engaged with his own emotions, but played like a disembodied spirit about the impressions he was imagining. He himself is as elusive as the elves [Pg 180] and fairies he so loved to depict. He is always behind his work rather than in it.
The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we should expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent impersonality, are fluency, grace, and elegance. ”

“ Mendelssohn’s was always a handsome face, but later in life the sharpness of his features betrayed his Jewish blood. He excelled as an organ player, and while at Dessau he played on the organ in the Grosse Kirche, chiefly extempore. I was standing by him, when he took me on his knees and asked me to play a choral while he played the pedal. I see it all now as if it had been yesterday, and I felt convinced at that time that I too (anch’ io) would be a musician. Was not Weber, Karl Maria von Weber, my godfather, and had he not given me my surname of Max? ”

“ It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments and rebuffs,—being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as human lives go, one of complete felicity. ”

“ Mendelssohn’s noble character as a man, his earnest, aspiring devotion to his art, cannot be over-estimated. His remarkable gifts as composer, pianist, and conductor served to gain the attention of the public everywhere; and this advantage, combined with his personal magnetism, enabled him to accomplish more for the advancement of music than others of his time.
Mendelssohn’s genius was exercised in almost every form of musical composition, except the opera. ”

“ Written in the most idiomatic style for the solo instrument and containing186 real violin melodies it is still one of the few great works in its class. Any final critical estimate of Mendelssohn—no matter how earnest the effort to be absolutely fair—is inevitably involved with personal prejudices. If his music appeals to any one, it is liked extremely and no one need be ashamed of enjoying it, for it is sincerely felt and beautifully expressed. Mendelssohn, himself, doubtless knew perfectly well that he was not Bach, Beethoven or Schubert. ”