MENDELSSOHN’S SONGS AND CHORAL WORKS
MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY MONUMENT, LEIPSIC
While the songs of Mendelssohn enjoyed for a generation as wide popular favor as his “Songs without Words,” it is not likely that they will ever recover their lost ground,—ground which they lost because, though tuneful, most of them are superficial. There is no doubt a good deal of “small talk” in many of Mendelssohn’s works, and small talk has no enduring value. But while the songs of this master are now neglected, his choral works, “St. Paul” and “Elijah,” still awe and thrill modern audiences, because in them, as in the oratorios of Handel and Bach, religious fervor is expressed in terms of noble music.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY
From a portrait painted by Horace Vernet. This is considered an excellent likeness of the composer. The face reflects his sunny disposition.
It is a curious and somewhat paradoxical fact that, while Mendelssohn’s personal sympathies were on the whole rather with the conservative classicists in the matter of form than with the modern progressives, by far the greatest of his works, particularly for orchestra, are those in which he heeds the modern craving for realism and program music, as illustrated in his “Fingal’s Cave” overture, the “Scotch” symphony, and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” music. The overture to this is one of the marvels of music; for it is amazingly original from every point of view, though written by him when he was only seventeen years old.
It is commonly assumed that Italy is the land of melody; but Theodore Thomas used to maintain, and rightly, that the prince of melodists was the Austrian, Franz Schubert. Tunes flowed from his brain as spontaneously as water flows from a gushing well. He slept with his spectacles on, so as to lose no time when he jumped out of bed to jot down the melodies that came to him like inspirations from above. While he read a poem, the music suitable for it often sprang from his brain, Minerva-like.