The Romantic Composers

by Daniel Gregory Mason

Figure XIV.

As a master of pigments like Monet knows how to set on the canvas spots of pure color which merge only in the eye of the beholder, so Mendelssohn builds Æolian harmonies with a few pure tones that fill but never cloy our ears.

So long as Mendelssohn maintained his instinctive aloofness from human emotion, so long as, dwelling in his heaven of imagination, he painted delicate aquarelles of fairyland and romantic natural scenery, he was an incomparable master. In that rarefied atmosphere sentiments, like objects, were quite properly somewhat ghostly, tenuous, impalpable; the cheerful Mendelssohnian contentment sufficed for joy, the tender Mendelssohnian melancholy for sorrow. But as time went on it was perhaps inevitable that he, too, like Schubert and Schumann, and indeed all sincere romanticists, should strive to leave his fanciful boyish world behind him, and to express something of those deeper realities with which the years were making him acquainted. Accumulating experience may well have brought to the man of forty a distaste for the gracious insubstantiality which was entirely charming in the work of a youth of seventeen. But, unfortunately, a serious difficulty presented itself at this point.

From the outset a thoughtful observer might have doubted whether so artificially protected a life as that of Mendelssohn's youth would develop his character and genius, in the long run, so favorably as it at first promised to do. There is such a thing as a good fortune so unrelieved that, by removing the prick of adversity, the challenge of obstacles, the illumination of sympathy, it becomes in truth misfortune. This is the fate that seems to have overtaken Mendelssohn. The smile of Destiny, constant from his youth, became at last fixed and vacuous. As in his boyhood he had been the pet of his family, so in manhood he became, as conductor of the famous Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipsic, and general dictator of musical affairs, the pet of a larger but still almost invariably indulgent circle. As his fame as a composer, conductor, pianist, and organist increased, the admiring audience widened until it comprised all Germany; and when in his last years he turned to oratorio writing he had England too at his feet. A wit has vividly pictured the atmosphere of adulation in which he lived in the remark: "Mendelssohn could not stick his head out of the window but some one would shout 'Hurrah!'"

The tendency of such an environment is to cramp the sympathies, smother the sense of humor, and intrench the petty pride of the most magnanimous of men; Mendelssohn was peculiarly at its mercy, because extreme sensitiveness inclined him to be wounded rather than enlightened by such adverse criticism as he got, because consciousness of real merit put him off his guard against the exaggerations of hero-worshippers, and because the innate bias of his mind was more toward a fastidious distinction than toward a rugged catholicity. Even in his youth his affections, as we have seen, were exclusive and jealous; and on the intellectual side a similar narrowness showed itself in a certain preciosity that we should call bigotry had it been less amiably expressed. That is a significant incident that Berlioz relates of his sojourn with Mendelssohn in Rome in their student days. "One evening," he says, "we were exploring together the Baths of Caracalla, debating the question of the merit or demerit of human actions, and their remuneration during this life. As I replied with some enormity, I know not what, to his entirely religious and orthodox opinions, his foot slipped, and down he rolled, with many scratches and contusions, in the ruins of a very hard staircase. 'Admire the divine justice,' said I, helping him to rise; 'it is I who blaspheme, and it is you who fall!' This impiety, accompanied with peals of laughter, appeared to him too much, it seemed; and, from that time, religious discussions were always avoided." The lack of plasticity here shown in a religious matter is also observable in his literary and musical opinions. Lampadius quotes his comment on Shelley's "Cenci": "No, it is too horrible! It is too abominable! I cannot read such a poem." Mr. Hadow tells how he "praised the treatment of the double-basses in Berlioz's Requiem, just as he afterwards told Wagner that 'a canonic answer in the second act of "Tannhauser" had given him pleasure,'" and remarks, "There was always a little touch of Atticus in Mendelssohn's relations to his fellow-composers."

In the artificial air he was condemned to breathe, this pallor of intellectual anemia gradually became habitual. As a rare plant, kept always under glass, withers at a breeze which would invigorate the hardy weed so he could but shiver and shrink from those winds of impartial opinion which ruder natures inhale with zest. His youthful exquisiteness of taste thus grew peevish and fretful with advancing years. Too frequently we read of incidents like his studied coldness, throughout a long rehearsal, toward a favorite singer, and his curt explanation at the end: "Your curls provoke me, Fräulein Schloss. Wear your hair smooth; curls ought never to be black, but light brown or fair." Great, however, was the provocation. To set yourself a pace no mortal could maintain by writing the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture" at seventeen; to marry an angelic creature who agreed with your most casual word and kissed your hand when you improvised in public; to move among admiring friends, relatives, pupils, and acquaintances as a king might move in a never ending triumphal procession; to find all qualms you might feel from time to time as to the superiority of your work immediately drowned by the immemorial habit of passive self-acceptance; to see other men, with other ideals, winning a success which your universally recognized fair-mindedness would not let you deny,—all this might bring pangs of bitterness to a saint.

Perhaps this spiritual and professional exclusiveness, and the isolation it resulted in, did not really grow with the years, but only seems more anomalous in age, which should be mellow, than in naturally arrogant youth. Certainly there were not lacking many evidences of a more wholesome development, of a growth toward larger ideals, of cordial services to fellow-artists. True self-respect, a very different thing from narrow conceit, is shown in the following passage from a letter. "As time goes on I think more deeply and sincerely of that—to write only as I feel, to have less regard than ever to outward results, and when I have produced a piece that has flowed from my heart—whether it is afterwards to bring me fame, honors, orders, or snuff-boxes, does not concern me." A fine modesty prompts the confession: "All I have done appears to me somewhat miscellaneous.... I know what ought to be, and is not." And in spite of the reserve that always impeded his social efforts, there is plenty of evidence that he put himself to much trouble to help such brother musicians as Liszt, Berlioz, and Spohr to gain a hearing.[19]

Above all, he was raised quite above all petty personal considerations by his whole-souled enthusiasm for the great ancient masters. His efforts to educate popular taste by familiarity with classical works were as unremitting and as disinterested as Schumann's. He was the most active of all the champions of Bach, at that time so shamefully neglected. His performance of the great "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin, in March, 1829, the first since the composer's death in the middle of the eighteenth century, is one of the most important events in musical history; the significance of it, and of his other labors in behalf of Bach propaganda, to the entire subsequent progress of music, and especially to the romantic movement, of which Bach is one of the corner-stones, cannot be exaggerated.

Yet, in spite of all this, if we compare Mendelssohn with men like Beethoven, or Schumann, or Tschaïkowsky, in whom feeling is cordial and expression impulsive, we cannot escape the impression of a certain thinness of blood, straitness of sympathy, and inelasticity of mind. His personality is tenuous, over-rarefied; he seems more like a faun than a man. And hence it comes about that when, leaving his world of fairies, elves, visionary landscapes, and ethereal joys and sorrows, he tries to sound a fuller note of human pain and passion, he is felt to be out of his element. His style is too fluent, too suave, too insinuating and inoffensive, to embody tragic emotion. It lacks the rugged force, the virile energy, the occasional harshness and discordance even, of the natural human voice; its reading of life, in which there is ugliness, crudity, and violence as well as beauty, is too fastidiously expurgated. Which are the best of his piano works? Certainly not the "Songs without Words," with their facile melody, their monotonous rhythms and their cloyingly consonant harmony; nor the respectable, harmless, unexciting sonatas, cut from the same stuff, but by the yard instead of the square inch. Rather the "Variations Sérieuses" and the "Preludes and Fugues," in which there is some of the vigor of Bach, and the elusive immaterial whimsies, in the true Mendelssohn vein, such as the "Capriccio," opus 118, the scherzos, the "Spinning Song," the "E-minor Fantasie," and the "Rondo Capriccioso." Similarly, in the chamber music, it is the Canzonetta of the E-flat quartet, the scherzos of the trios, and the finale of the violin concerto, that most please us. As for the symphonies, even the noble adagio of the "Scotch" is just the least bit soporific; but the scherzo or the Scottish jig, and the fresh allegro vivace and stirring saltarello of the "Italian" are delightful. Mendelssohn gay and gracious is the best of company; Mendelssohn sentimental makes us "begin to loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a little is by much too much."

The effeminate element in his work is probably chiefly responsible for the indifference, boredom, or distaste with which it is nowadays so often received. Since his romanticism was a matter of imagination rather than of passion, of fancy and delicate sentiment rather than of turbulent feeling, it is inevitably voted dull by a generation given over like ours to the pursuit of thrills, tolerant of any turgidity that can excite, and preferring intensity to clarity of emotion. He represents a mild, tentative, and restrained application of artistic principles that have been much more brilliantly and thoroughly illustrated by bolder spirits like Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, who have accordingly somewhat eclipsed him. His conservatism also made him retain many of the traditional formulæ and mannerisms of classicism, which have become repugnant to our less conventional age. The result is that it has become almost a fashion to sneer or to smile at his music. But it is conceivable that we err in one direction as much as his contemporaries did in the other. It may be that we call his art stale and vapid merely because our palates are jaded by over-indulgence in spices and condiments. Mendelssohn is undeniably, for the present, among the fallen gods; but whether a maturer and less sophisticated taste than our own may some day set him up again is a question we must be content to leave unanswered.