And all has vanished."
The same kind of intention was carried out even more brilliantly in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," of which it is not too high praise to say that it is worthy of its Shaksperian inspiration. In the immaterial dance of the violins and the strange calls of the trumpets and wood-wind instruments, as if from some cloudy No-man's-land, of this wonderful work, conceived by a genius and executed by a master only seventeen years old, a new type of music is born.
It is worthy of remark that in neither of these works is there the slightest trace of the turgidity so often observable in youthful productions. On the contrary, one of their most prominent traits is a cool dispassionateness, as of the deliberate, detached artist, remarkable in so young a man. The more one studies Mendelssohn's music the more one becomes convinced that this cool dispassionateness is one of his fundamental qualities. Everywhere it reveals itself—in the suavity of his melody, in the purity of his harmony, in the smooth fluency of his part-writing. Violence of contrast, dramatic trenchancy of expression, the overemphasis of hysterical eloquence, he punctiliously avoids; he is always clear, unperturbed, discreet, harmonious. The lavish sensuousness of Schubert, the impulsive sincerity of Schumann, are impossible if not distasteful to this Addisonian temperament; personal sentiment, self-revelation, the autobiographic appeal, he avoids as the purist in manners avoids a blush, an exclamation, or a grimace. If he is romantic in his love of the picturesque, in his sense of color, and in his fondness for literary motives, his emotional reticence is entirely classic. He is more observant than introspective, and his art is more pictorial than passionate.
Compare, for a moment, by way of illustration, the overtures "Manfred" and "Hebrides." Schumann's work is intensely human from the opening onslaught of syncopated chords to the final, deep-drawn sighs of the contrabasses. There is unassuagable desire in the melody so appropriately marked "In leidenschaftlichem Tempo," there is the very accent of a lover's longing in the beautiful Astarte theme. The music constantly rushes on into feverish excitement, only to expend its force and die away to tender sadness, whence in a moment it lashes itself again into new fury. From this so human world—
"Of infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn"—
Mendelssohn transports us, in his "Hebrides," to an island set in a boundless expanse of the sea, where we watch only the rise and fall of great billows and hear the long sigh of the wind and the cries of sea-birds. The fierce dissonances of Schumann, his ceaseless modulation, his never resting movement, give place to clear ethereal harmonies, to high, pure trumpet calls, poising violin melodies, and the thin note of the oboe suggesting infinite distance, and to an undulating movement like the ebb and flow of winds and waves. These two works are typical. If Schumann is incomparable in his insight into the storm and stress of the human heart, Mendelssohn is one of the greatest of landscape painters.
What is true of the "Hebrides Overture" is in greater or less degree true of all Mendelssohn's compositions which can be called really successful. They charm us not by their personal appeal, their introspective veracity, as Schumann's so constantly do, but precisely by their freedom from personal bias, their objective truth, their universal interest. When he makes us see the winds and waves of the "Hebrides Overture," the marching pilgrims of the "Italian Symphony," the dancing fairies of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, it is not as through a temperament, but as in the white light of pure imagination. It is such a view of the world as some visitant from another planet might get—some gentle, happily organized being, whose intelligence was unperturbed by human passions and undistorted by practical interests. It is the view rather of a Tennyson than of a Browning. "In the eyes of Mendelssohn," a keen observer has recorded, "there was none of that rapt dreaminess so often seen among men of genius in art. The gaze was rather external than internal; the eye had more outwardness than inwardness of expression." What is said here of the physical eye might with equal truth be applied to that mind's eye with which the artist envisages his work. Mendelssohn's attention, we feel, was never engaged with his own emotions, but played like a disembodied spirit about the impressions he was imagining. He himself is as elusive as the elves and fairies he so loved to depict. He is always behind his work rather than in it.
The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we should expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent impersonality, are fluency, grace, and elegance. His melody, lacking to an unusual degree the suggestion of impassioned utterance, is more decorative than expressive—a sort of tonal arabesque, often exquisitely wrought, but curiously unexciting. There is no boldness in the physiognomy of his tunes; they conform closely to the average type of traditional German melody; and their charm is due to the neatness and facility with which they follow the paths of least resistance. His harmony is solid and correct, but hardly ever unconventional; he prefers an authorized to a novel progression, values clearness above richness, and treats dissonances with the utmost circumspection. His attitude toward modulation is conservative. Certain of his works, such as the "Scotch Symphony," with its endless A-minor and D-minor, have justly been charged with monotony, so fond he is of hovering gently about among a few closely related keys. In polyphony his ideal is smoothness of progression. Those daring momentary collisions between different voices, each progressing independently, which give Bach's fabric such a stoutness, he shrinkingly avoids. His part-writing is almost too conciliatory, too considerate of the prejudices of the ear; the natural roughnesses are all ironed out or glossed over. In a word, whenever he has a choice between the original and the established, he chooses the latter; he is too urbane to risk startling his hearer, and prefers to ingratiate himself with familiar charms; but so deftly does he manage these that he constantly gives us the pleasure of recognizing "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
In the matter of orchestration his delicate ear and fine taste made him a great master. His instinct for proper balance and fusion of timbres is unerring, he knows how to be sonorous without becoming opaque or blatant, and his scores abound in the purest, clearest, and freshest colors. Where shall we find a parallel for that ethereal shimmer of the violins in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or for the magical chord of the wood-wind that arrests it? or for the serene beauty of the violin melody, so airily poised, at the end of the same overture? or for the liquid coolness of the flutes, violins, and trumpets in the "Hebrides"? or for the elastic vitality of the violins at the opening of the "Italian Symphony"? Here, we cry with delight, is a master who can make flutes and clarinets and violins in their upper register, and trumpets playing piano, sound not like mere orchestral instruments, but like angelic voices in remote skies. This magical charm is largely due to the limpid transparency of his coloring. He never overscores, never surfeits the ear and confuses the mind by laying on the tints too thickly or piling up colors that will not coalesce. Few composers have so fully realized how little an effect is due to the mere quantity of the sounds, how much to their skilful composition.[18] As an example may be cited the last page of the "Con moto moderato" movement in his "Italian Symphony," where the same motive is sounded first by horns and bassoons, then by trumpets and drums, then by flutes and oboes, all together building up the loveliest, most diaphanous fabric of tone.