By the Author of “German-American Housekeeping,” etc.
I wish this article could be accompanied by a pen and ink sketch made on the spot of Mendelssohn’s grave and that of his sister Fanny. The simplicity of it would surprise you, as it astonished me, on one Sunday afternoon when, in company with a friend, I wandered in search of the resting place of him whose songs need no words. We had both imagined some lofty monument would mark the spot, and that in order to find it, it would only be necessary to inquire of some one in the vicinity. Pursuing this plan, to our utter amazement we only received an ignorant stare from plebeian and patrician. Finally being told by an old gentleman, “if we would go beyond the Canal-strasse in the direction of the Belle-alliance Platz down the Schöneberger Ufer through a narrow street,” we would come to a gate opening into a cemetery, which we must pass through, before reaching a smaller cemetery, in which Mendelssohn was buried. After many efforts we roused the old porter who kept the key to the latter gate. We walked rapidly in, expecting to see something in monumental art worthy of the name, but the artless old porter pointed to a grave in the corner and there, overshadowed by some trees, stood the plain slabs with the names of Felix, Fanny and August Mendelssohn.
A curious sense of the incongruous came over us while standing by the simple stones and recalling the solemn and appropriate demonstration at the time of Felix Mendelssohn’s death, made in every city and town where his genius had been known. Was it true that here in this small, unknown grave-yard they had left him? Was it to yonder small gate the four horses in black accoutrements drew the carriage containing the coffin covered with palm-branches, laurel-wreaths and flowers? And did the great choirs and orchestras of the city pass through with the grand choral, “Jesus my trust,” preceded by all Germany’s musicians, the clergy, civil officers, professors, officers of the army, and the immense throng of admirers? Perplexed by such thought we followed the old porter, who had started with a watering pot to the grave beyond, and asked if a monument was to be erected to Mendelssohn’s memory. “Ach, nein, er war einer Jude, und deshalb ist er vernachlässigt.” A Jew, therefore is his grave neglected.
When Paul and Barnabas turned to the Gentiles it was because the Jews “had judged themselves unworthy of everlasting life.” But we are never told that a penitent Jew was treated differently from any one else in the days of the Apostles. Although a Jew by birth, Felix Mendelssohn’s character wanted no principle of the genuine Christian. Never was feeling more sacred and profound, expressed in harmonious strain than he expressed in his great oratorio of “St. Paul” and “Elijah,” nor can the praise of God be more grandly heard on earth than in the double chorus of his XLII. Psalm, when well rendered, or again, when with his pious heart he wished to show the triumph at the creation of light over darkness, which ends with a beautiful duet, “Therefore I sing thy everlasting praise, thou faithful God.”
We are told that Mendelssohn spent his last days laboring over a new oratorio—“Christ.” It was commenced during his stay in Italy, and while rambling among the mountains of Switzerland he is said to have been inspired with the theme for his work, which he hoped to make his best. Never was wealth used more wisely and religiously than his. Not only did he clothe the naked and feed the hungry, but every one who came near him with aspirations for an ennobling life he advanced. He undertook a tremendous amount of labor in giving concerts in Leipzig, the proceeds of which were devoted to the statue of Bach. At first he undertook to erect such a monument out of his own means, saying “that it was only right that John Sebastian Bach, who had labored so usefully and with such distinguished honor as cantor at the Thomas school at Leipzig, should have a monument in the streets of the city in which he had lived, as an immortal spirit of harmony.” At these concerts he allowed only Bach’s music to be produced, intending in this way, he said, to make the rising generations of musicians more familiar with the works of one to whom he felt under the greatest weight of obligation, and whom he is said to have resembled in the severity of his studies as well as the loftiness of his aims. But this is the expression of Mendelssohn’s best friends; adverse criticism has much to say, and while his motives were pure and his compositions genuine and vivacious, yet in sublime combinations and serious themes Bach and Beethoven can alone be compared.
Every winter in Berlin the oratorios of “Elijah” and “St. Paul” are given in the Sing-Academy. This old music hall is a place of memorial scenes, the directorship of which Mendelssohn once applied for, at the earnest solicitation of his friends, and was refused. The enthusiastic audiences which now assemble there to hear his music seem to be as forgetful of this as they are ignorant of the little secluded grave-yard in the outskirts of the city where his immense throng of friends and admirers left him twenty years ago.
In beautiful imitation of his noble efforts for Bach’s monument could an appropriation of the money secured by the rendering of his great oratorio be made—an idea which occurs to the mind of strangers in Berlin, but unfortunately not to the citizens, who are less disposed in this case than the Greeks to honor their dead, and who more readily ridicule in Mendelssohn’s death than praise such sentiment as the following:
“By the sea’s margin, by the sea’s strand,
Thy monument, Themistocles shall stand;