OVERTURE TO THE LEGEND OF THE LOVELY MELUSINA: Op. 32
We know, on the testimony of Mendelssohn himself, that this overture, based on the ancient legend of the fair being who was part woman and part fish, was suggested to the composer by an opera on the subject which he saw at Berlin in 1833. Under date of April 7, 1834, he wrote to his sister Fanny: "You ask me which legend you are to read. How many, then, are there? And how many, then, do I know? And do you not know the story of the lovely Melusina?... Or have you really never heard of the beautiful fish? I have composed this overture to an opera by Konradin Kreutzer ["Melusine," libretto by Fr. Grillparzer, music by Kreutzer, produced at Berlin February 27, 1833] which I heard last year about this time at the Königsstadt Theatre.... Hähnel [the singer—Amalie Hähnel—who took the part of Melusine] ... was very charming, especially in one scene where she presents herself as a mermaid and dresses her hair; it was then that I conceived the idea of writing an overture.... I took what pleased me of the subject (and that is, precisely what coincides with the legend). In short, the overture came into the world, and this is its family history."
The Ouvertüre zum Märchen von der Schönen Melusine was finished November 14, 1833. Schumann wrote of it as follows in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, after a performance in Leipsic: "To understand it, no one needs to read the longspun, although richly imaginative, tale of Tieck;[108] it is enough to know that the charming Melusina was violently in love with the handsome knight Lusignan, and married him upon his promising that certain days in the year he would leave her alone. One day the truth breaks upon Lusignan that Melusina is a mermaid—half fish, half woman. The material is variously worked up, in words as in tones. But one must not here, any more than in the overture to Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' wish to trace so coarse an historical thread all through.... Always conceiving his subject poetically, Mendelssohn here portrays only the characters of the man and the woman, of the proud, knightly Lusignan and the enticing, yielding Melusina; but it is as if the watery waves came up amid their embraces and overwhelmed and parted them again. And this revives in every listener those pleasant images by which the youthful fancy loves to linger, those fables of the life deep down beneath the watery abyss, full of shooting fishes with golden scales, of pearls in open shells, of buried treasures, which the sea has snatched from men, of emerald castles towering one above another, etc. This, it seems to us, is what distinguishes this overture from the earlier ones: that it narrates these kind [sic] of things quite in the manner of a story, and does not experience them. Hence, at first sight, the surface appears somewhat cold, dumb; but what a life and interweaving there is down below is more clearly expressed through music than through words, for which reason the overture (we confess) is far better than this description of it." [109]
It has been said that the music illustrates "the loveliness and the loving nature of Melusina; the hardness of her fate and the anxiety caused by it. The waving motion [the flowing theme heard at the beginning] is indicative of her grace, and at the same time reminds us of the element with which she was connected." A more energetic theme is said to suggest Melusina's knightly consort; a third theme (in the violins) is a love-motive; later there is a return, fortissimo, of the energetic knightly theme of the beginning. There is a development of these themes; and "near the end we may recognize [Melusina's] cries on being discovered by her husband. The rest is like the vanishing of a beautiful reality into a beautiful memory."