It is impossible to separate any discussion of approaches to the performance of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (and therefore conducting Mendelssohn) from the thorny and troubled history of the reception of Mendelssohn’s music since his death in 1847. 1 The dynamics of listening are such that when a performer is determined to make a case for the music that is at odds with a reigning albeit reductive sense of a composer’s aesthetic, audience expectations will offer resistance. Whether a conductor implicitly or explicitly concedes an established construct of Mendelssohn or not, a particular set of prejudices is present, derived from the standard account of Mendelssohn in music history. In that standard view Mendelssohn is distinct, in terms of surface, sound, and meaning, from Wagner and late Romanticism. This assumption of a stark contrast between Wagner and Mendelssohn concedes the Wagnerian version of the development of nineteenth-century music. The consequences are that one should not expect to hear nearly so radical a disjunction in basic performance practices and sound between Mendelssohn and, for example, Beethoven and Schubert. Yet the audience expects such a contrast when it comes to Wagner, vindicating the idea that Wagner’s music and aesthetic contain a stark originality. This may apply as well in a subordinate way to Liszt. The self-justifying rhetoric of the “new” German school has been integrated into our approach to performance. Wagner and Liszt have been set apart from their predecessors by succeeding generations in a manner that suggests a fundamental paradigm shift, requiring a different approach to performance.
Indeed, we expect a lush string sound, flexible approaches to phrasing and tempo, greater gravity in the sound of the brass and winds. We date the modern normative orchestral timbre and sonority from Wagner. With this notion of a new and perhaps more intense and grander sound come allied implications about the meaning and profundity of the music. Mendelssohn is further damaged for the listener vis à vis his predecessors, particularly Beethoven and Mozart. We have accepted the Wagnerian reading that the great Classical repertory, including some Mozart, but mostly Beethoven, contains levels of meaning and an emotion comparable to later developments and adequate to Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian (e.g., Mahlerian) expectations. What Wagner succeeded in doing was to set Mendelssohn apart as essentially an epigone, a composer of superficiality, fashion, and virtuosity, whose command of the craft of musical composition, despite many overt claims to the contrary, did not result in music of profundity. In fact Mendelssohn’s music, in the wake of the watershed year of 1848, gradually lost stature as powerfully expressive (as opposed to being entertaining and elegant). The sort of emotionally compelling experience associated with hearing Wagner articulated by Nietzsche in the 1870s and Thomas Mann in the twentieth century – the image of a shattering affective interior and personal response – became an ideal that was applied – as in Mann – back to listening to Beethoven, but not Mendelssohn. 2
No successful revision of this derailing of Mendelssohn from the dominant trajectory of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics has taken place. In a host of versions, a post-Wagnerian privileged notion of the experience of all music, even instrumental music, in terms of its philosophical and psychological power that excludes Mendelssohn has remained with us. No matter how differently Brahms, even Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, and certainly Mahler, not to mention Schoenberg and Berg, are viewed, each seems adequate in terms of a late nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideal of musical communication that we implicitly endorse. That ideal permits listeners to sense something extraordinary that privileges the composer as artist. Within this model of musical communication, the listener is able to locate and appropriate some non-quotidian dimension of intensity or gravity in emotion and meaning. This ideal of musical communication has been, as already suggested, transposed backwards, into the works of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven and to music by certain contemporaries of Mendelssohn, notably Schumann and Chopin. The less intellectually prized late Romantic composers – notably Dvořák and Tchaikovsky – have also benefited from the idea that the hearing of the music contains an emotionally riveting and even exhausting encounter with the extraordinary, even though their music has suffered (in a way Mendelssohn’s has not) from accusations of formal and technical weakness.
Mendelssohn remains synonymous with refined easy listening, or, in the rare case that the sacred music is performed, a well-realized but emotionally distant evocation of historical models of the musical expression of piety. The neo-classical exterior of Mendelssohn’s music succeeds in concealing an interiority that we readily ascribe to Schubert. Other composers who have not fit well into the reception pattern and model of listening and musical meaning initiated by the Wagnerian polemic include Haydn and Stravinsky. But no case has remained as resistant as Mendelssohn to revisionism through performance. In no other circumstance is there such a wide gap between the intentionality and formal qualities of the music and the attitudes of modern audiences. Certainly a few of Mendelssohn’s works remain popular. However, the terms of approbation refer to a restricted image of concert music as decorative and pleasing – even beautiful and graceful, attributes that easily suggest little more than cultured superficial taste.
The radical reversal in the reputation and fortunes of Mendelssohn’s achievement began in earnest after 1850 when Richard Wagner published anonymously his Das Judentum in der Musik . Wagner was obsessed with Mendelssohn’s early success, talent, and wealth and the extraordinary popularity his music enjoyed in his lifetime. Mendelssohn’s music was already central to the repertory of the home, Protestant church, and concert hall when Wagner completed Das Liebesverbot in 1840. Mendelssohn was part of the repertoire of professionals – along with the music of Schumann and Chopin. Mendelssohn’s music added to the core materials of music instruction. The solo piano music, the songs, the trios, and the quartets – as well as the octet – despite shifting taste, received repeated exposure to succeeding generations of students. For the innumerable choral societies that flourished after 1848, in England and in German-speaking Europe Mendelssohn’s choral music, particularly St. Paul and Elijah , was indispensable. Mendelssohn’s persistence in the repertory – apart from the symphonies and the Violin Concerto – has depended unusually on amateurs who have continued to this day to enjoy playing and singing the music.
Wagner, however, was not alone in challenging the meaning and emotional character of Mendelssohn’s music. No one during the second half of the nineteenth century doubted that the music was refined and polished, all hallmarks of Mendelssohn’s legendary skills and command of the craft of composition. Somehow, however, beneath the brilliant surface, a lack in profundity was perceived. In the aesthetics of mid- and late nineteenth-century musical taste, when placed against the claims of Liszt and Wagner and the Wagnerian approach to the legacy of Beethoven, Mendelssohn – in contrast to Schumann – came to be viewed as a composer of complacent music. Even among staunch anti-Wagnerians, Mendelssohn was more respected and revered than loved. Ultimately Mendelssohn’s extraordinary popularity among middle-class amateurs came to be held against him. In the wake of a reaction against mid-nineteenth-century Victorian conceits, Mendelssohn emerged as emblematic of a musical culture of social affirmation, lacking in a necessary dialectical and problematic complexity adequate to modern life. His music therefore attracted little attention among twentieth-century modernists.
Aesthetic tastes, ideologies of culture, and politics have never been quite as independent of one another as sentimental advocates of the art of music have sought to argue. In Mendelssohn’s case, the politics of anti-Semitism and nationalism in Europe in the century between Mendelssohn’s death and the end of World War II were decisive. Therefore, in the twentieth century periodic efforts (some motivated by political objectives, as in post-1945 West Germany) to rethink Mendelssohn and peel away at the mix of incomprehension and slander have met with only limited success. Even the rediscovery of the early string symphonies and the reinterpretation of Mendelssohn through the medium of period instrument performances since the 1970s have not appreciably helped to recast the image of the composer. The notion of Mendelssohn as an exemplar of early nineteenth-century neo-classicism, allied at one and the same time with visual and literary Romanticism as well as with the anti-Romantic ideology of Goethe (and his friend and musical confidant, Mendelssohn’s teacher, Zelter) after 1815, is certainly appropriate. But if we can embrace (as we have done) the architecture and painting of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a figure whose career intersected with Mendelssohn’s and mirrors it, why cannot we do the same for Mendelssohn? 3 Indeed, the constructive revisionism now underway with respect to German painting and sculpture before 1848 offers an initial encouraging parallel. 4 Schinkel, in both his neo-classical and his neo-gothic work, communicates to contemporary audiences the subjective appropriation of the past. His work suggests not slavish imitation but a powerful model of historicism, an obsession with reconciling history and modernity . In contrast, the range of Mendelssohn’s historicism still obscures the expressive power of his music. Expanding the active repertoire within the composer’s output remains therefore a subordinate challenge to a basic rethinking, in terms of performance, of those key works that still remain part of the concert repertory.
Reductive as this quick summary of the career of Mendelssohn’s reputation may seem (after all, he had his strong defenders, particularly among leading late nineteenth-century composers and performers, notably Brahms and Reger), it is tragically all too close to the truth. By the end of the nineteenth century, despite the fin-de-siècle Mozart revival and a distinct reaction against Wagnerism within modernism, only a small fraction of Mendelssohn’s music retained wide currency. There was a conservative school of composition centered in Leipzig, under the leadership of Reinecke, that continued to honor the legacy of Mendelssohn. But by 1900 the works most performed on the concert stage were the Violin Concerto, the incidental music to A Midsummer’s Night Dream , the overtures, the octet, the trios, Elijah (which ultimately eclipsed St. Paul ) the G minor Piano Concerto and two symphonies, the “Scottish” and the “Italian.”
The question that faces the conductor vis à vis the orchestra members as well as the audience is whether even a favorable assessment of the standard account is indeed what Mendelssohn’s music is about. If it is not, then the task of overcoming the accepted view of Mendelssohn’s place in history and his aesthetic ambitions frames the interpretive challenge. 5 Rejecting conventional wisdom with respect to Mendelssohn is justified in terms of history and biography. It was not Mendelssohn’s intent to write music as mere entertainment for the privileged. His contemporary admirers, particularly Schumann, agreed with this assessment and placed him, in contrast to the Wagnerian argument, as a worthy heir to Beethoven, the first great Romantic. He did not consciously “step well out of the way of Beethoven’s shadow” but sought to take a step beyond Beethoven, just as Wagner would later claim to have done himself uniquely. 6
All this is well and good, but the quandary still remains. In my experience Mendelssohn sounds distant even to musicians, and perhaps bereft of some dimension of emotional depth and immediacy. The music seems too sentimental, without sufficient subjective complexity. However beautiful it is, when placed on the concert stage we anticipate delight in the deft use of orchestral effects, refinement, lightness, economy, and the sparkle of delicacy. The Mendelssohn audiences and conductors favor conforms neatly to that sensibility. Mendelssohn fails, for example, to convey a sense of the tragic through music. Although he wrote incidental music for Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus , even the once-popular concert version of Antigone has fallen out of the repertory. Subtly crafted, the music appears consistently optimistic, cheerful, and sunny without evidence of the conflict, self-critical reflection and mythic significance adequate to the text. Despite the composer’s own deep debt to the dramatic rhetoric of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, drama and power – the ecstatic qualities we seek in the works of his own models – elude us in dealing with Mendelssohn. The irony in this is, of course, that in Mendelssohn’s lifetime the music was not only celebrated and revered, it was understood as being dramatic, spiritual, and certainly more than pretty. It was heard as intense, emotional, and profoundly moving, and devotional in a religious sense. It was not only beautiful but, in the language of eighteenth-century aesthetics, sublime and therefore astonishing and deeply affecting. Consider for example the chorus “Mache dich auf, werde Licht” and the subsequent Wachet auf chorale in St. Paul .
Compare the case of Mendelssohn in terms of reception past and present with a roughly parallel case, chronologically speaking, in literature. There is little doubt that the language, external events, social context, personal ambition, narrative conventions, and interpretive psychological world view of Jane Austen are as different from the later nineteenth-century novel, particularly Thomas Hardy and certainly the fiction of Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann, as Mendelssohn seems to us when compared to Wagner, Mahler, or even Strauss, who had considerable respect for and affinity to Mendelssohn. Yet the reading public, helped in part by the film medium, has found a way into Austen – a way of reading – that makes a body of work quite foreign and distant germane and engaging. Contemporary readers have lent Austen a gravity in meaning equal to that found in novels from a later, seemingly less restricted, naive, and simple era. The revived taste for Austen is not merely one of misplaced nostalgia and fantasy about a premodern world crafted to obliterate our consciousness of the ugly messiness of contemporary realities. The rage for Austen, even her least successful novel Mansfield Park , has sources beyond any cynical version of the consequences of postmodernism. In contrast to Hardy, for example, Austen deals with the privileged world of the landed gentry. This might appeal to readers seeking an alternative to modernism, or fiction that dwells on social marginalization and disenfranchisement. Yet a post-1960s regressive taste in today’s politics of culture is not sufficient to account for the current interest in Austen any more than is her status as a woman novelist. A late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetic has been successfully reconfigured. It appears congruent with, for example, Freudian and post-Freudian theory. Austen had been a figure like Mendelssohn, one routinely given a proper place of honor in history. The difference is that Austen has once again been embraced with enthusiasm and deemed relevant as more than the object of dutiful respect. No one, for example would suggest a performance of Mendelssohn’s Symphony no. 2, the “Lobgesang,” as an alternative to Beethoven’s Ninth for use in a celebratory or commemorative public event.
Austen is credited, particularly in Ian Watt’s account, with bridging the tradition of social critique in the sense of Fielding and other hallmarks of the eighteenth-century novel with the subjectivity and psychological and narrative techniques that would characterize the later nineteenth-century novel. Mendelssohn can be viewed the same way. 7 His music was innovative and integrated eighteenth-century Classical strategies with the subjective emotionality, formal inventiveness, and rhetoric of early Romanticism. Austen found a way to transpose the narrative from the first-person epistolary pattern of the eighteenth century into the third-person story-telling vantage point of the nineteenth . Mendelssohn altered symphonic form to accommodate a Romantic sensibility, that of personal experience. The circularity in form in several symphonies, the linkages of movements, the reconsideration of the relationship between exposition and recapitulation, novelty in thematic construction, and the shifting of weight and balance within traditional forms are present within his neo-classical appropriations, particularly from the Baroque.
A nearly contemporary subjectivity in Mendelssohn is found in his melodic material and in the listener’s awareness of a narrator in the sense of literature and painting. Although it has become fashionable to link Caspar David Friedrich as an intense early Romantic exponent of subjectivity with Beethoven, the comparison is more apt with Mendelssohn. Extending well beyond the example of the “Pastoral” Symphony of Beethoven, Mendelssohn forged a vocabulary of musical response to the human experience of time and space, as well as to the experience of reading and imaginative visualization through sound from texts. Landscape and the individual’s capacity to contemplate the world – particularly the sense of the divine – dominate Friedrich’s canvases. As a painter he permits the viewer to look, so to speak, over the shoulders and around the figures in his paintings whose backs are to us: faceless representations of ourselves looking out into the world. This occurs as well when the viewer is aware only of the absent painter, in landscapes that have no figures. The frame of the painting is like the frame around us. As we peer into the painting we become directly conscious of our own need to fashion a view of the world and define reality not as objective, as autonomous of observation, but as contingent on ourselves as inventors and viewers .
It was Mendelssohn, not Beethoven, who used instrumental music, particularly public instrumental music, to achieve this sensibility in the listener. Consider the overtures and the “Scottish” Symphony. Music, in his hands, becomes a vehicle through which the imposition or creation of meaning can be observed and appropriated by the listener. Even in the great choral works, the “Lobgesang,” for example, Mendelssohn rejects a forbidding monumentality in the manner of Beethoven. The symphonic and choral work of Beethoven, in contrast to Mendelssohn, suggests a self-sufficiency and objectivity in the work of art that does not seem to require the listener’s presence, much like a painting whose composition implies the illusion of indifference to the active presence of a viewer. The work of art is objectified. This might be said of even the great Velazquez painting Las Meninas , in which the figures look out directly from the canvas and where there is a mirror reflection within the painting, highlighting the virtuosity and objectivity of art as observation and representation. But as in Rubens and later in Goya (for example The 3rd of May in Madrid ), the paintings imply no need to be completed, or entered into by the viewer. They are self-contained and powerful objects in which the awareness of subjective vision is overwhelmed by the virtuosity of the representative power and imagination . But in Mendelssohn the intimate self is placed on stage. One example can be found in his setting of Psalm 114 op. 51. Indeed, the clearly modern adaptation of a historicist choral rhetoric, combined with the transparent simplicity, reveal the composer’s subjective hand. The composer, much like the painter Friedrich, reveals reality as his personal mediation of experience. But Mendelssohn achieves this subjectivity, as does Schinkel, through the use of neo-classical models.
Mendelssohn confronted the towering and imposing legacy of Beethoven not by avoiding it, but by adapting it to an intimacy of communication. In this sense, thinking of Mendelssohn’s music in terms of its relationship to the visual experience can help performers . Mendelssohn, by inviting the performer and listener into the construction of meaning, challenged the stability and autonomy of the artwork, evident in Beethoven, as a self-sufficient and objective representation. Monumentality in terms of sound (as in Elijah and St. Paul ) is handled in a manner that is not distancing from the listener just as the viewer’s relationship to a canvas can be rendered more intimate and direct. The listener is invited by directness in expression, an emphasis on comprehensibility, and the practicality of amateur participation. The listener is also made aware of the composer’s subjectivity – the centrality of the individual in creating meaning – much in the way a reader is linked by the narrator to the authorial voice in Austen or by the isolated figures (and indeed their absence) to the painter in the landscapes of Friedrich.
The issue here is not one of locating originality. Mendelssohn, unlike Beethoven, creates the space for the listener to become aware of his or her own need for engagement. The composer becomes, in this sense, less heroic (defined in a manner that applies to late Beethoven as well as the works of the middle period) and the listener more equal to the artist. The position of awestruck observer is replaced by a sense of community. The hearer, playing Mendelssohn or listening, becomes acutely aware of the personal need to follow suit, to reflect on how a sense of truth, the objective world, and external reality are formed only by the expression of subjectivity. This is what happens as viewers look at and beyond Friedrich’s figures and readers reflect on Austen’s characters. And there is, through art, the assertion of a normative, positive moral order.
The irony explicit in this analysis is that Wagner may have been right for the wrong reasons. Insofar as he and not Mendelssohn was the true heir to Beethoven, it was on account of his embrace of the aesthetic scale and ambition of Beethoven. Wagner, and Liszt before him, extended the Beethovenian theatrical sense of the dramatic in music. Intimacy and subjectivity once again became objects of observation on stage rather than the substance of musical expression; their work did not invite the listener to emulate and participate. Liszt, not Mendelssohn, sought to equal the Missa Solemnis ’s account of lyrical and dramatic faith in his Graner Messe . Wagner, as he himself correctly argued, restored a mythic and unapproachable level of aesthetic transformation derived from the Ninth Symphony that implied the artist’s unique access to objectivity and truth . He effectively hid, through a stunning command of the seductive potential of music and myth for the theatre, the transient, arbitrary, and necessarily subjective artificiality of aesthetic creation.
The contrast between Mendelssohn’s religious convictions and Wagner’s awkward and nearly tone-deaf engagement with Christianity, despite overt attempts to use subject matter with religious content from Das Liebesmahl der Apostel to Tannhäuser and Parsifal , is instructive. It can place the differences between the two composers in a manner that does not result in a judgment that Mendelssohn’s music is less profound or relevant. They held divergent notions of how music ought to function in the public sphere. The difference between Wagner and Mendelssohn becomes more understandable and less pejorative. Wagner, who failed to hide his lifelong and essentially secular and anti-Christian sensibility, sought in art a surrogate for traditional religious spirituality. Art, not faith, could provide the experience of loss of ego, an exit from the fear of death, and the connection to a divine teleology and metaphysical presence. Wagner’s moral universe is ambiguous . Mendelssohn, in contrast, understood art as a signal human achievement that revealed the presence of the divine in all humanity. The temporal experience of music, even in a completely secular context, following Friedrich Schleiermacher, permitted listener, performer, and composer to transcend the limits of ordinary language, shed the illusion of the sufficiency of human reason alone, and sense the grace of God. The love of God that was inexpressible in language was rendered communicable and even personal in choral and instrumental music. The clearly artificial aesthetic and structural requirements of musical form had to be highlighted and shared, so that in the Lutheran sense, music functioned as a universal, democratic medium. Music assumed, for Mendelssohn, a social function through which the individual established his or her own contact with God using a secular, non-sectarian analogue to ritual and prayer. Through music, the transient, the ugly, and the evil were transcended, highlighting the ultimate victory of moral truth. The making of music, for Mendelssohn, was an act of personal piety within a traditional Christian world view, not a surrogate for theology or faith that elevated artists into a new priestly class. Mendelssohn sought combine “ancient conceptions with modern means.” This informed Mendelssohn’s admiration for Bach, the music’s “pure, mild and vast power” and the “transparency of its depths.” 8
The accessibility of Mendelssohn’s music mirrored an ideal of the aesthetic and the beautiful as direct and economical, as inviting of personal engagement, just as the teachings of Jesus were susceptible of wide translation. This demanded a balance between historical standards of aesthetic beauty and craft and accessibility, for the listener was faced with an engagement with music beyond the role of passive spectator. Mendelssohn would later be accused of pandering to the philistine tastes of a well-to-do cultured middle class. From a Wagnerian perspective, he denied art its true capacity for meaning. That charge inverted Mendelssohn’s ambition to engage his public with ease using a clearly personal style imbedded, through learning and knowledge, in the evocation of tradition. Needless difficulty – even gratuitous virtuosity – needed to be resisted so that through music, the public might more readily sense the aesthetic in themselves, the power of the subjective and recognize, through music, the universality and rationality of the grace of God in the world.
How does one, in the early twenty-first century, redeem this spiritual project in modern performance? Religious fundamentalism in America has utilized music, much in the best spirit of Mendelssohn but without demanding the acquisition of tradition and learning. Commercial music easily bought and played is adapted. The music linked to faith is popular. It invites participation but it does not seek to use an aesthetic medium to communicate the optimism of faith. But contemporary religious popular music rejects, as did Mendelssohn, the arrogance of the Wagnerian notion of the artist as prophet or representative of a spiritual aristocracy. The non-trivial irony is that the Wagnerian spectacle, precisely in its success in rendering the operatic aesthetic a secular object of mythic and quasi-religious adoration, became a model for fascism and the enthusiastic abandonment, by masses in modernity, of the challenge of realizing both individuality and a common moral purpose through art. Perhaps it is still listening to Mendelssohn rather than to Wagner that demands an active sense of the aesthetic self, and therefore opens up each individual’s consciousness of the divine and unique subjectivity each person possesses in the eyes of God. What seems to make Mendelssohn bland and boring to the modern listener may reveal our post-Wagnerian dependence on spectacle, our resistance to intimacy, our passivity, our pessimism, and our collective susceptibility to manipulation through music. The failure to enter empathetically into the act of listening to Mendelssohn and locating his subjectivity may reveal our inability to participate in the task of the non-imitative personal assertion of gratitude, significance, and meaning through musical culture.
Lest this speculative and polemical excursus into the nexus between theology, music, and aesthetics in the nineteenth century seem irrelevant, let us return to the observation that we fail to identify with Mendelssohn’s construct of musical meaning and experience. Yet we have succeeded in finding a new means of access to Austen. The declarative monumentality of Beethoven or the mythic grandeur (and perhaps grandiloquence) of Wagner and Mahler seem easier to rehearse and perform. In the case of Mendelssohn conductors concentrate on the task of achieving polish, accuracy of ensemble, and a sense of lightness. Anything suggestive of spirituality is lost. We seem to have few means of communicating interiority, intimacy, and power in Mendelssohn.
How then, in the case of the orchestral and choral music, might the music of Mendelssohn be performed in a manner that confronts the old clichés, defeats the Wagnerian orthodoxy, represents the composer’s ambitions and aesthetic justly, and reveals the dramatic, spiritual, and emotional power of the music? One of the notorious strains in the anti-Semitic polemics is the notion that Mendelssohn’s music, in contrast to Beethoven, represents the effeminate and graceful (understood as a pejorative). Masculinity, power, and drama are seen as lacking, as are therefore any true originality and genuine creativity. The first task is to highlight intensity in drama and emotion in Mendelssohn. To this weight has to be added the sound: a non-Mozartian, period instrument weight. We need to resist the instinct to render the musical surface antique by modern standards. If spirituality and complexity seem to elude representation and communication in performance, then tempos and articulation need to be reconsidered. If tempos in Beethoven have been de-romanticized, then perhaps tempos in Mendelssohn need, particularly in movements that are not scherzos, to be less frantic in speed and rendered flexible.
An ironic starting point for rethinking Mendelssohn performances is a reconsideration of the normative assumptions we apply routinely in the performances of Mendelssohn’s posthumous nemesis, Wagner. Indeed Wagner’s debt to Mendelssohn, in terms of compositional strategies, ideas, and sound world was far greater than Wagner and his advocates have ever admitted. Wagner’s endless but occasionally ambivalent trashing of Mendelssohn may have been a classic case of an artist covering his tracks, leading future observers astray, and hiding his debts from posterity. Beneath all the contempt heaped on Mendelssohn lies a crucial clue: that Wagner, in his music, owed much to Mendelssohn’s influence and example and sought desperately to conceal it. Wagner’s critique of Mendelssohn as a conductor suggests this. A decisive deviation on Wagner’s part from the most celebrated musician of his day – Mendelssohn – was in performance style as a conductor. A clear distinction in the way Beethoven, for example, was performed helped keep a connection in composition between the two figures from being exposed. What if, then, one performed Mendelssohn as if it were what we think Wagner, as heir to Mendelssohn, should sound like? Wagnerian sonority, to this day, is construed as clearly different if not opposite from a Mendelssohnian sound. Perhaps this is mistaken. If it is, then the notion of contrasts in meaning, profundity, drama, intensity, and emotion is weakened, and in turn a path is opened to find a new way of hearing Mendelssohn. The task is not to make Mendelssohn a pale Wagnerian defined by the way we have become accustomed to hearing Wagner . Rather, the challenge is to restore the Mendelssohnian element to our performances of Wagner, thereby revealing the continuities in musical expression and meaning between two composers who have been traditionally been seen, by defenders of both, as polar opposites. By so doing we actually bring back from Wagner an aesthetic of drama he so masterfully employed in Lohengrin , for example, to its origins in Mendelssohn.
Take for example, the locus classicus of Wagnerian originality and aesthetic meaning, the Prelude to Tristan . Imagine that it would be performed at a brisker tempo than commonly anticipated. Perhaps the string fingerings would favor lower positions and a thinner sound. Bow use would be lighter, more flautando and vibrato would be sparing. A smaller string section would result in a less thick orchestral texture. Transparency favoring wind sound over string color could lighten the overall balance. If one performed the Prelude as if it were the opening of the “Scottish” Symphony, what insights might emerge? The possible answers to this question are dependent in part on how one construes, in general, connections between Wagner and Mendelssohn in terms of the character of their music, as well as how one understands Mendelssohn’s own ambitions when composing for large forces. This latter issue can be usefully explored by reflecting on differences between the first 1833 and second, incomplete 1834 versions of the “Italian” Symphony. This unique window on the composer’s workshop is indispensable in developing a convincing approach to conducting Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn found the earlier version too thin.
But by bringing the orchestral performance strategies closer together, making Wagner Mendelssohnian, we can discover shared attributes of musical expression and meaning. On the matter of spirituality and lyricism – the generation of sound that creates the impression of time suspended and the presence of prayer, devotion, and the divine – a key model for Wagner was St. Paul . A useful point of comparison is between the prelude to St. Paul and the preludes to Lohengrin and Parsifal . Furthermore, the use of brass and choir, and the dramatic structure of Part I of St. Paul have parallels in these two Wagner works. Wagner was overwhelmed by St. Paul ; his Liebesmahl is a failed effort to set Christian material directly using the secular oratorio model. Mendelssohn’s adaptation of recitative, his characterization of the figures of St. Paul and Jesus are key influences on Wagner, audible in the Ring and the figure of Wotan. If, in performance terms, one rejects the Wagnerian claim of originality, acknowledges his debt to Mendelssohn, and assumes a shared aesthetic, a new set of possibilities may emerge.
It is with respect to how music evokes nature that Wagner owed his greatest debt. The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage , and Die schöne Melusine are necessary precursors to the opening of Rheingold , and descriptive nature-related musical rhetoric in the Ring , particularly Siegfried . Mendelssohn provided Wagner with a model of how the eighteenth-century symphonic experience that sought to characterize experience and external reality, from storms to battles, could be adapted to fit the aesthetic expectations of Romanticism. Wagner’s model was not Weber in terms of musical construction and orchestration. Neither was it Beethoven. Mendelssohn’s orchestral music may be the most powerful sonic guide for inner sight, for an internal journey of associated symbolic and visual images. When, in rehearsal, one invokes this idea a new intensity in the playing emerges. The visual is a key to memory. Therefore the use of historical models, the evocation of Handel and Bach become keys to a central emotional experience shared by all: the fragmentary recall, from the ear to the eye, of past experience.
Although the “Pastoral” Symphony of Beethoven, or even Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ , can be understood as prefiguring a Romantic approach to using music to represent the temporal experience of the external world, these works remain squarely within a complex and subtle eighteenth-century tradition, as Richard Will has demonstrated. Instrumental ensemble music, notably symphonic music, was used in the act of representation of the material and the “ineffable.” Sound alone, without text or picture, created a communicative medium of illustration between composer and listener. Instrumental compositions evoked static and dynamic experiences, as well as personal figures, and imaginary states of mind, using techniques such as tone painting. The infinite as well as the earth-bound were depicted. In the most complex versions of the eighteenth-century tradition of characteristic symphonic music, such as Beethoven’s “Pastoral” (and perhaps even the “Eroica”) music depicted real events – lighting, thunder, shepherd’s pipes, processions, dances, battles, and scenes. Music developed rhetorical conventions designed to depict the characteristics of personalities. Even in the Missa Solemnis , Beethoven used rhythmic gestures and keys to characterize theological meaning .
It was Mendelssohn, more than Berlioz or Spohr, who redirected the way in which the experience of being in the world can be expressed through music. This innovation extended to the indirect encounter through literature. In the case of Fingal’s Cave , the direct experience of a landscape takes on a musical language that effectively communicates personal response. Mendelssohn subordinates but does not eliminate musical gestures that imply natural events. But depiction is replaced by implication. The musical subject becomes the composer’s reflection and response, not the event or object itself. The peaceful, the idyllic, the turbulent, the presence of water or mountains are evoked only with echoes of an earlier musical realism. But the composer’s task, in Mendelssohn’s hand, is no longer descriptive or painterly. The reaction to experience, its memory, or even its anticipation assumes musical form first and foremost in thematic and melodic construction. The thematic material is formed in a manner that does not reveal, in some illustrative fashion, the subject of its depiction, with the possible exception of moving water. For example, in the opening of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage , the sense of stillness and expanse is orchestrated and evoked by the tempo and sonority. The listener in the characteristic symphony of the eighteenth century would be invited to follow the narrative, as Beethoven did in his own setting of the Goethe text. Music acts in an illustrative manner offering a parallel experience. In Mendelssohn, however, the listener is introduced to composer’s internal reaction evoked by visual scene. We encounter a musical diary, so to speak. We hear the composer as reader, or as dreamer, responding in the time of memory to images generated by poetry. This brings us closer to Tristan .
Nature in music, indeed external reality, is suggested by Mendelssohn, as are events and the act of reading in the “Italian” and “Scottish” symphonies only through the audible subjectivity. The use of music as the narrative medium for communicating characteristics of human experience is restricted to a species of psychological and autobiographical self-representation. The way Wagner constructs leitmotifs – invented, distilled, and repeated musical variables that signify everything from real objects (swords) to characters to metaphysical concepts (fate) – reveals a direct link to Mendelssohn’s manner of creating themes in the orchestral music. As in Fingal’s Cave , the “Scottish” and “Italian” symphonies, as well as in Calm Sea and Melusine , the composer tells of his experience by fashioning his own characteristic musical symbolism using distinct and pithy themes that are not illustrative but yet evocative, particularly of distance and light. Mendelssohn’s thematic ideas mark the starting point in the development of parallels between the visual and the musical that are elaborated by Wagner and after, well into the era of sound film music. Mendelssohn’s musical ideas orient the listener to the external referent explicitly through the subjective vantage point of the composer. Mendelssohn adapts the expectations of musical time of the Beethovenian symphony and alters it to fit the personal narrative. He does not borrow from a set of commonly understood rhetorical devices (e.g., keys) or clearly understood techniques of tone painting. The integration of the musical and visual imagination is achieved by Mendelssohn’s exploitation of music’s power to suggest associations, rather than its capacity to describe or compete with linguistic notions of clarity and specificity. Psychologically speaking music, as Wagner also believed, penetrated more deeply than language or pictures. But Mendelssohn achieves this result without the operatic apparatus. When an orchestra begins to think that it is projecting an internal sequence of visual experiences, then the obsession with neoclassical formalism recedes and the consideration of the emotional character of the music begins .
Nothing is more striking in this regard than Mendelssohn’s brilliance and originality as an orchestrator of thematic material. From the first page of the Overture to A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream to the E minor Violin Concerto, the segregation of instrumental groupings, the employment of wide registration, the highlighting of single voices reveal the capacity to use the orchestra to evoke a sense of the encounter between the composer and lived experience. Therefore Mendelssohn perfects the use of music to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. The use of sound as evocative of the space in which the individual narrator found himself was path-breaking and essential to Wagner’s craft. The residue of the tradition of music as evoking characteristics of reality persists in Mendelssohn as transfigured into the creation of theme and melody as markers of told experience. In contrast to the “Pastoral,” the presence of the viewer, not the event, is primary. Although the connection to experience remains susceptible to translation into language by the listener with an accurate sense of the primary references (e.g. Goethe, Scotland), finding those references is not indispensable for the listener to enjoy or grasp the musical experience per se.
Wagner learned from Mendelssohn how to make music narrate independent of text; the referents can be garnered from a context in which the characterization of the narrator through music alone is required. Each of Wagner’s characters gains a distinct musical personality through thematic and harmonic elaboration. This process of using music to mediate experience Wagner gleaned from Mendelssohn. The aesthetic gestures both composers use often refer to an object of extramusical meaning apart from the personality of the narrator that is not obvious in some tone painting sense. The same can be said for the musical characterization of ideas or mental states achieved by both composers. One can listen to Wagner without linking music to a precise representation of external action or inner thought, as in Mendelssohn. In this sense Mendelssohn did not write so-called “absolute music” in the manner in which it became defined in the mid 1850s. Rather he, as Wagner would, used music as a means of refracting ordinary meaning. The music that accompanies Wotan in the orchestra is dependent on the successful command of the Romantic habit of creating a song without words. Wagner’s orchestra, using patterns of thematic construction, characterization, repetition, and transformation pioneered by Mendelssohn, narrates; the musical content of the drama extends a logic of thematic construction that is linked to the subjective representation of experience characteristic of Mendelssohn, not Beethoven. 9
Turning to the way in which music in the nineteenth century managed to evoke humor and the playful – indeed, even the lyrical – Wagner, especially in Die Meistersinger , revealed another Mendelssohnian influence. The “Italian” Symphony and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture have future parallels in the way in which Wagner characterizes joy and youthfulness. Wagner’s evocation of how crowds gather and move about in apparently good spirits also reveals Mendelssohnian origins. With respect to the melodic characterization of optimism and lyrical beauty, a comparison of Walther’s Prize Song – in terms of character rather than a fingerprint style match up – with the interlude between the second and third movements of the E Minor Violin Concerto might be suggestive. Indeed, that work, particularly in the first movement, demonstrates a long evolving melodic line that can be set alongside the Prize Song and the solo material given to Hans Sachs. The close of Act III is indeed, ironically, Mendelssohnian in its employment of the chorus; it also suggests some debt to Mendelssohn’s experiments in structuring drama. The stately elongated and affirmative uses of chorale-like endings (and the use of the chorus in the “Lobgesang,” and, for example, the final moments of the symphonies, particularly the Third and the Fifth) are models of the kind of Wagnerian closing found in Meistersinger . Indeed, one of Wagner’s greatest debts is in the manner in which he employs a chorus as a dramatic vehicle. His ear betrays an adherence to the choral texture and sonority cultivated by Mendelssohn.
If one returns to the comparison between the opening of Tristan and the opening of the “Scottish,” intensity and interiority of a similar nature can be found. What this suggests is that one might resist, as an interpreter, conducting Mendelssohn with too much stylistic adherence to his neo-classical models. Expressive intensity developed through use of varied colors in string sound, some tempo rubato, and an effort to phrase the melodic material as if it were narrating might lead to a less undifferentiated impression. It is not that one wishes to make Mendelssohn sound more the way we are now used to hearing Wagner; but more expressive freedom in delivering the dramatic account of the subjective that the music narrates is necessary. This includes the sense of awe. Consider the opening of St. Paul . Here, as in Parsifal , is a stunning sonic transformation of the sense time is present. The piety is personal, not doctrinal. The entire oratorio does not lack for operatic ambition. Performing it calls for highlighting the operatic contrasts and pacing it as if it were a work for the stage. Indeed, St. Paul was performed with tableaux vivants in the nineteenth century. The oratorio becomes, as does Elijah , a far different medium than the one used by Handel or Haydn, and as removed from the Bach of the St. Matthew Passion .
When one compares the two versions of the “Italian” Symphony one is humbled by the standards the composer set himself. He had none of Wagner’s bravura. Why was Mendelssohn dissatisfied with what posthumously became regarded as a near-perfect work? That judgment was already unsympathetic to a view of Mendelssohn as having an aesthetic ambition that might have placed him closer to Liszt and Wagner. The 1834 version is more elaborate, with more development of material, fuller recapitulations, and a less light-hearted sensibility. Indeed, it appears that Mendelssohn sought to shift the balance from a direct response to landscape and the Grand Tour to creating an inward musical narration of the personal, if not spiritual reflection on the experience of the people and culture of Italy. As in Calm Sea , the place of Goethe, of a musical analogue to literary transformation, is suggested by the 1834 version in the composer’s desire to provide the work with gravity, interior intensity, greater formal balance, and wider harmonic color that render the mood more differentiated. Furthermore, Mendelssohn’s determination to transform historical models without abandoning them and to modernize tradition is stronger in the 1834 version. The subjective and personal is not lost but rendered seemingly more universally accessible by corresponding more closely to aesthetic expectations, thereby building more points of reference for the audience.
The lesson for conductors, from both the comparisons to Wagner and the contrasts between the two versions of the “Italian,” is indeed to follow Mendelssohn’s lead as charted by his revisions. The music, first and foremost, must be understood as an aspect of religious faith and piety; its embracing and affirmative spiritual content is never far from the surface, audible in the transparency of the ease of communication. Second, the music is intensely personal and foregrounds the subjective experience of life through thematic construction and musical form. Third, the thematic content mirrors meaning and emotional valence. Mendelssohn’s music cannot be understood from the vantage point of absolutist aesthetics or aestheticism. Fourth, transparency does not demand loss of intensity or gravity. The music, even in moments of rapid figuration, lightness, and grace (for which the composer is noted), benefits from deepening contrasts, highlighting expressivity and avoiding a mechanical application of a static model of neo-classicism immune from improvisation in interpretation. Mendelssohn did not write imitations of eighteenth-century music, even as a teenager. Fifth, Mendelssohn’s orchestral music – like the choral music – utilizes its forces uniquely to evoke space and distance. Few composers have so commanded the shifts between far and near, the grand and the intimate, the monumental and the personal. Sixth and last, the intimacy and interiority of the music are optimistic and reflective. They are not manipulative or morbid and require both performer and listener to engage the musical experience with a personal spiritual commitment. There is, therefore, a less restricted set of adequate solutions vis à vis the musical texts. Profundity and emotional complexity are not necessarily tied to a Wagnerian sense of the tragic or of fatalism.
Conductors should not be afraid of taking risks with Mendelssohn. The first step is to reject the conventional contrast between Mendelssohn and Wagner and locate the expressive intensity they both share. The second is to articulate one’s sense of Mendelssohn’s dramatic and emotional character to players in rehearsal and to the audience. Conductors are advised, rightly so, against speech making or vague pronouncements in rehearsal. Yet in Mendelssohn there is an opportunity to make the point by changing the way phrases are shaped, balances set and, with choruses, texts delivered. Once the link between the musical and the visual and the spiritual is established in the musical materials, a different sound emerges. A few key words and detailed observations have worked in assisting musicians to locate in Mendelssohn’s music the immediacy and depth it usually lacks in performance. Given the significance of the revival of a reactionary religious fundamentalism in contemporary life and politics, the balance between emotionalism and humanism in Mendelssohn’s sacred music makes that portion of the repertory particularly timely for revival in concert.
There is in Mendelssohn that perhaps unique combination: a powerful control of time and the dramatic, an unerring sense of pace and arrival, and, in the choral music, an unrivaled capacity to move humanity through a Raphael-like translucent beauty and a palpable enthusiasm for the divine in the human community. An idealist, Mendelssohn wrote music for public performance that used the norms of the aesthetic, in the sense of Schiller, on behalf of civilization and tolerance, toward moral and ethical education and the betterment of community. There was never a greater composer who had as much confidence in continuities between past and present, human universals, and the potential of progress, tolerance, and reason. Delivering Mendelssohn’s message in performance convincingly is something contemporary life might well benefit from. There is nothing naive or superficial at work. Owing to its resistance to spectacular theatricality there is more at stake in the effort to generate affection for the full range of Mendelssohn’s large-scale works than the reputation of a composer or his music. Redeeming our affections for Mendelssohn can strengthen our belief that music and its performance can be forces on the side of enlightenment, tolerance, and peace. There is more at stake here than music.