Just as the Queen was about to sing, she said ‘But the parrot must be removed first, or he will scream louder than I sing.’ Prince Albert rang the bell, and the Prince of Gotha said, ‘I will carry him out’, upon which Mendelssohn replied: ‘Allow me to do that,’ lifted up the big cage and carried it out to the astonished servants. In these days of unfavourable publicity for the royal family it’s nice to read Mendelssohn’s account of his musicale in 1842 at Buckingham Palace, ‘that friendly English house, really comfortable and where one feels at ease.’
A meeting of mutual admiration: Albert, the Prince Consort had been eager for the famous composer to try his new organ at Buckingham Palace, and Mendelssohn, always susceptible, found Victoria, pretty and most charming, looking so youthful and so shyly friendly and courteous, and who speaks such good German and – last but not least – ‘knows all my music so well.’ When Mendelssohn played a chorus from his oratorio St. Paul, Victoria and Albert joined in, while the prince managed the organ stops as well. Victoria also chose a song by Mendelssohn, who judged that he had never heard the sustained G better, more purely or more naturally sung by an amateur. ‘I hope,’ said the Queen in parting, ‘you will come and visit us soon again in England.’ Mendelssohn did.
England drew him again and again
But this was not his first visit to England – it was his sixth, and four of those had preceded Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837. There were to be three more visits before Mendelssohn’s early death in 1847. His stagecoach and ferry touring anticipated the jetset conductors of today, and it was exhausting, particularly on top of the heavy responsibilities of his permanent positions. Besides which, he was expected to bring with him new compositions of his own! England drew him again and again because he found something so stimulating. His letters contain some of the best travel writing penned by a musician:
London is the grandest and most complicated monster on the face of the earth…Not in the last six months in Berlin have I seen so many contrass and such variety as in these last three days. Could you but once, turning from the right of my lodging, walk down Regent Street and see the wide bright street with its arches (alas! it is enveloped in a thick fog today!)…there are beggars, negroes and those fat John Bulls with their slender, beautiful daughters in pairs on their arms. Ah, those daughters!…Last but not least, to see the masts from the West Indies stretching their heads over the housetops, and to the see the harbour as big as the Hamburg one treated like a mere pond, with sluices, and the ships arranged not singly but in rows, like regiments – to see all that makes one’s heart rejoice at the greatness of the world.
Berlin was a provincial backwater by comparison, and besides, Mendelssohn was no prophet ithe town of his infancy . The British writer about music Henry F. Chorley, visiting Berlin, encountered the attitude, ‘Mendelssohn? Ah! he had talent as a boy.’
Victoria’s subjects by contrast, were as enthusiastic about Mendelssohn as the Queen herself. His concerts were packed, his organ recitals were attended by throngs of cheering, handkerchief-waving enthusiasts who refused to leave the churches where he played, strangers approached him in the street wanting to shake his hand and society women doted on him.
Even Mendelssohn’s Jewish ancestry, a drawback in Berlin, was an advantage in the London of Rothschild and Disraeli. Sir George Grove in the first edition of his Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1879, wrote of Mendelssohn: ‘his look was dark and very Jewish’, and attributed to ‘his upbringing and ancient traditions of his Jewish race’ the composer’s ‘charm of manner…his business acumen, his appreciation of domestic propriety…his punctuality, his sense of religious duty and a somewhat moralising attitude.’ American Herbert Kupferberg, whose, The Mendelssohns – Three Generations of Genius (Scribner’s, New York 1972) is particularly illuminating on the subject of Mendelssohn’s Jewish connections, remarks that these qualities, if they actually existed at all in Mendelssohn, would make him a perfect Englishman no less than an excellent Jew. As virtual Mendelssohn worship developed in Britain after his death, Thackeray told a friend, ‘his face is the most beautiful I ever saw, like what I would imagine our Saviour’s to have been.’ (A Mendelssohn-like Christ certainly would have been more interesting than the effeminate blond Aryan variety apt to decorate ‘Victorian’ churches and Sunday Schools!)
It was common for Germans to refer dismissively to 19th century England as ‘das Land ohne Musik’ (the country without music). What they meant was that it didn’t have creative musicians of its own. As importers and consumers of great music, the English were second to none, richer and more enthusiastic than most. From the top of society down: Victoria knew all Mendelssohn’s published songs, and was keen to know whether he had any new ones. Felix had to admit – with wounded pride – that the song chosen by the Queen had been composed by his sister Fanny, though published under his name.
So England provided Mendelssohn with a public not only appreciative, but often discriminating as well. The idea of Mendelssohn and the Victorians may bring to mind Mendelssohn’s disciples among the composers oflater 19th century hymn tunes, with their harmony completely inoffensive when it wasn’t saccharine. It is true that our grandparents’ generation had a struggle freeing themselves from the domination of respectable, not to say sentimental musical language. But is it fair to blame Mendelssohn himself for his imitators’ shortcomings? Asserting the greatness of Mendelssohn’s music is not my purpose here, but let anyone who doubts it take the first opportunity to listen with an open mind to the Octet for strings, the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, the Violin Concerto, and Elijah. Yes, Elijah! Is there a greater oratorio between Haydn and Elgar? And notice that of these compositions, all but the first mentioned date in a large part from the later years of Mendelssohn’s life. So much for the ‘he had talent as a boy.’
A moral quality
Despite their respect for him, Mendelssohn was not quite the person or the artist Victorians thought him to be. They admired in him his refusal to concede to any shoddy commercialism, to easy artistic solutions. This was a moral quality, as Mendelssohn’s contemporary, the Reverend H.R Haweis, in his Music and Morals, grasped all too firmly:
In this age of mercenary musical manufacture and art degradation, Mendelssohn towers above his contemporaries like a great moral light-house in the midst of a dark and troubled sea. His light always shone strong and pure. The winds of heaven were above his heard and the STILL SMALL VOICE was in his heart. In a lying generation he was pure, and not popularity nor gain could tempt him to sully the pages of his spotless inspiration with one meretricious effect or one impure association.
The artist as prophet indeed! Mendelssohn contributed to this perception by his occasional sententious arrogance, an inability to see the points of view of others. This seems to have been a characteristic of his family, illustrated when they resigned en masse from the Berlin Singakademie after it failed to appoint Felix musical director. They were never backward in passing judgement. Nor was he always sweet tempered: foreshadowing Toscanini, he once tore a score in two at rehearsal, and justified his behaviour to himself in the name of art: ‘they immediately played with more expression.’
A driven personality, a workaholic
Mendelssohn’s upbringing, in the bosom of his family, explains many of the character traits the Victorians ignored. He was a driven personality, a workaholic, with a disturbing inability to relax. He piled responsibility on responsibility. ‘No German till Herbert von Karajan in our time’, writes Kupferberg, ‘exerted so much influence over European orchestral playing and programming’; yet this was only one of Mendelssohn’s achievements. He was not only a conductor and musical director, but administrator, keyboard virtuoso, and composer. Much was expected of him, and above all by himself. This came at a price. His willingness was exploited; the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund extracted the Ruy Blas Overture from him, after he had first declined to write it, pleading pressure of work (but actually because he disliked the play), by cannily offering to give him more notice next time. They had their overture in two days.
Mendelssohn’s mother, Leah, when she heard her child chatting to his friends, would ask, ‘Felix are you doing nothing?’ He may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but this far from giving him an easy life, had the opposite effect. His friend Eduard Devrient considered Felix’s brain, from childhood, ‘had been taxed excessively.’ Unlike Mozart, Felix didn’t have to play for money, gold watches, snuffboxes or other princely forms of payment. He was regarded as a gifted amateur, and was surprised to find, later in life, that other musicians regarded him as unfair competition. This made him all the more committed to hard work.
Eventually Mendelssohn cracked. The deaths of his parents had a devastating effect on this man with a very bourgeois (and perhaps, at one generation’s remove, very Jewish) commitment to domesticity. Much greater still was the impact of the death of his sister Fanny, in 1847. She was as close to him as a twin, closer certainly than his wife Cécile. When Felix heard, he fell to the ground unconscious. He suffered what we would call a nervous breakdown, something which had threatened before. Many commitments stretched in front of him, but he could not look forward with any pleasure.
Mendelssohn’s last months were spent in a darkness of which little of his music had given any advance hint. The String Quartet in F minor, however, which he managed to write at this time, is an extraordinary document of his troubled state – the same mastery of means, a disturbing new sub-text. On 4 November, 1847, the last of a series of ‘little strokes’ carried Felix Mendelssohn off, at the age of 38. The pressured, nervous intensity which had made possible Mendelssohn, that phenomenon of creation and organisation, was largely forgotten in a posthumous beatification. Yet it prevented Mendelssohn from becoming a Victorian.
First published 1993