If I ever was agreeably surprised by any letter, it was by yours, which I received here yesterday. Your kind and immediate compliance with my request, and also the very handsome present you make me for my “Songs without Words,” render it really difficult for me to know how to thank you, and to express the great pleasure you have conferred on me; I must confess that I had not expected such ready courtesy, and satisfactory compliance with my letter of solicitation. I now doubly rejoice in having taken a step which a feeling of false shame, and that odious worldly maxim, “Don’t interfere in the affairs of others,” which occurred to me while writing, nearly deterred me from carrying out. Your conduct, as displayed in your letter of yesterday, has confirmed me more than ever in what I esteem to be good and right; so I intend to lay aside for ever the (so-called) highly-prized worldly wisdom, and henceforth to pursue a straightforward course according to my own first impulse and feeling; if it fails a hundred times, still one such success is ample compensation. What artist, too, would not, at the same time, be highly delighted by the kind manner in which you allude to my compositions, and evince your approbation? Who would not prize and esteem this beyond all other recognition? I ought especially to feel thus, and by hereafter producing better works, strive to deserve the good and friendly feeling shown to me for my present ones. I hope one day, in some degree at least, to succeed in doing so; and if not, you will at all events know that neither goodwill nor earnest efforts were wanting. So I thank you for the fulfilment of my request, I thank you for the flattering and handsome present, and, above all, I thank you for your kindly sentiments about myself and my music, both of which are so much indebted to you, and which will fill me with gratitude and pleasure so long as I live.—I am, with esteem, your
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
To Marc-André Souchay, Lübeck.[57]
Berlin, October 15th, 1842.
... There is so much talk about music, and yet so little really said. For my part I believe that words do not suffice for such a purpose, and if I found they did suffice, then I certainly would have nothing more to do with music. People often complain that music is ambiguous, that their ideas on the subject always seem so vague, whereas every one understands words; with me it is exactly the reverse; not merely with regard to entire sentences, but also as to individual words; these, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so unintelligible when compared with genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to be put into words, but, on the contrary, too definite. I therefore consider every effort to express such thoughts commendable, but still there is something unsatisfactory too in them all, and so it is with yours also. This, however, is not your fault, but that of the poetry, which does not enable you to do better. If you ask me what my idea is, I say—just the song as it stands; and if I have in my mind a definite term or terms with regard to one or more of these songs, I will disclose them to no one, because the words of one person assume a totally different meaning in the mind of another person, because the music of the song alone can awaken the same ideas and the same feelings in one mind as in another,—a feeling which is not, however, expressed by the same words.[58] Resignation, melancholy, the praise of God, a hunting-song,—one person does not form the same conception from these that another does. Resignation is to the one, what melancholy is to the other; the third can form no lively idea of either. To any man who is by nature a very keen sportsman, a hunting-song and the praise of God would come pretty much to the same thing, and to such a one the sound of the hunting-horn would really and truly be the praise of God, while we hear nothing in it but a mere hunting-song; and if we were to discuss it ever so often with him, we should get no further. Words have many meanings, and yet music we could both understand correctly. Will you allow this to serve as an answer to your question? At all events, it is the only one I can give,—although these too are nothing, after all, but ambiguous words!
To Wirklich Geheimrath Herr von Massow.
Berlin, October 23rd 1842.
Your Excellency,
Permit me respectfully to ask whether you will be so good as to assist in procuring me an audience of his Majesty, to place before him my present position here, and my wishes with regard to it.
Your Excellency is aware that I am not so situated as to be able to accept the proposal of Herr Eichhorn to place myself at the head of the whole of the Evangelical Church music here. As I already told the Minister (and your Excellency quite agreed to this in our last conversation), such a situation, if considered practically, must either consist of a general superintendence of all the present organists, choristers, school-masters, etc., or of the improvement and practice of the singing choirs in one or more cathedrals. Neither of these, however, is the kind of work which I particularly desire. Moreover, the first of these functions is superfluous if such places are properly filled; and the second, to be really effectually carried out, demands more vast and comprehensive regulations, and greater pecuniary resources than could be obtained at this moment.