Mendelssohn and Certain Masterworks

by Herbert F. Peyser

MENDELSSOHN’S BIRTHPLACE IN HAMBURG

Abraham Mendelssohn, having severed the partnership with his brother, started a banking business of his own which soon prospered famously. Somehow even the myriad cares of running a bank did not prevent the father from scrupulously overseeing the education of his sons and daughters. If the young people were virtually bedded on roses, Abraham was of too strong a character and, indeed, too much of a martinet not to subject them to the discipline of a carefully ordered routine. Wealth and ease did not cause him to forget the privations and the conflicts which helped to forge the greatness of his own father’s soul. His children need not hunger, they need not be denied opportunities to develop what talents nature had bestowed on them. But given such opportunities they must labor unremittingly to make the most of them. They had to be up and about at five in the morning and, shortly after, repair to their lessons. Felix always looked forward to Sundays when he could sleep late! In some ways one is reminded of the manner Leopold Mozart supervised the training of Wolfgang and Nannerl. If Abraham Mendelssohn was not, like Father Mozart, a practising musician, he had an artistic insight which nobody valued higher than Felix himself. “I am often unable to understand”, he wrote his father when he was already a world celebrity, “how it is possible to have so accurate a judgment about music without being a technical musician and if I could only say what I feel in the same clear and intelligent manner that you always do, I should certainly never make another confused speech as long as I live”. It is easy to believe that some of the adoration Felix felt for his father above all others grew out of his unbounded respect for the older man’s intellectual superiority.

Business connected with war indemnities associated with the Napoleonic conflicts obliged Abraham in 1816 to go to Paris and on this journey he took his family with him. Felix and Fanny were placed for piano instruction under a Madame Marie Bigot de Morogues and both appear to have profited. Their first piano lessons had been given them at home by their mother who, in the beginning restricted them to five minute periods so that they ran no risk of growing weary or restive. Fanny no less than her brother disclosed an unusual feeling for the keyboard at an early age and even when she was born Leah noted that the infant seemed to have “Bach fugue fingers”.

When the Mendelssohns returned to Berlin the young people’s education was begun systematically. General tuition was administered by Karl Heyse, father of the novelist; the painter, Rösel, taught drawing, for which Felix exhibited a natural aptitude from the first; Ludwig Berger, a pupil of Clementi’s, developed the boy’s piano talents, Carl Wilhelm Henning gave him violin lessons and Goethe’s friend, Carl Zelter, taught thorough-bass and composition. Nor were the social graces neglected. Felix learned to swim, to ride, to fence, to dance. Dancing, indeed, was one of his passions all his life. Father Mendelssohn always found time to supervise his children’s studies and to guide their accomplishments. For that matter he never considered his sons and daughters—even when they grew up—too old for his discipline; and, certainly, Felix welcomed rather than resented it.

On Oct. 28, 1818, the boy made his first public appearance as pianist. The occasion was a concert given by a horn virtuoso, Joseph Gugel. Felix collaborated in a trio for piano and two horns, by Joseph Wölfl. He earned, we are told, “much applause”. But Abraham, though pleased, was not the man to have his head turned by displays of precocity, shallow compliments or noisy acclamations. Neither did Zelter flatter his pupil on his never-failing facility. No problem seemed excessive for the boy, who could read orchestral scores, transpose, improvise—what you will. “Come, come”, Zelter would grumble contemptuously, as if these feats were the most natural thing in the world, “genius ought to be able to dress the hair of a sow and make curls of it!” Yet to Goethe he made no effort to conceal his satisfaction. “Felix is a good and handsome boy, merry and obedient”, he confided in a letter; “his father has brought him up the proper way.... He plays piano like a real devil and is not in the least backward on string instruments...”. And the crusty contrapuntist saw to it that the ten-year-old genius entered the Singakademie and sang among the altos where he could learn to know, inside and out, works by Palestrina, Bach, Handel and lesser masters, distinguish between styles and observe the minutest technicalities of fugal construction.

It was only natural that Felix should, at this stage, have tried his own hand at composition. He wrote to his father, in Paris, asking for music paper. Abraham took the request as the text for a mild sermon: “You, my dear Felix”, he admonished his son, “must state exactly what kind of music paper you wish to have—ruled or not ruled; and if the former you must say distinctly how it is to be ruled. When I went into the shop the other day to buy some, I found that I did not know myself what I wanted to have. Read over your letter before you send it off and ascertain whether, if addressed to yourself, you could execute the commission contained in it”. Sooner or later he must have gotten his music paper for in 1820, when Felix began to compose, it is figured that he wrote fifty or sixty movements of one sort or another, solo and part songs, a cantata and a comedy. In every instance his methodical training caused him to inscribe the work with the exact date and place of its composition—a practice which saved no end of doubt and conjecture in later years, the more so as Felix remained quite as systematic his life long. These scores (of which he kept a painstaking catalogue) are headed in many cases with the mysterious formula “L.v.g.G.” or “H.d.m.”, which though never satisfactorily deciphered, reappears again and again in his output.

Some of these compositions, together with several by Fanny were dispatched to Abraham in Paris. The father was particularly pleased with a fugue and wrote home: “I like it well; it is a great thing. I should not have expected him to set to work in such good earnest so soon, for such a fugue requires reflection and perseverance”. He was perturbed over his daughter’s composing, though he appreciated her talent. It was well enough, he declared, for Felix to take up music as a profession but Fanny must bear in mind that a woman’s place is in the home. As a warning example he points to the sad end of Madame Bigot, who busied herself professionally with music and now is dead of consumption!

Mendelssohn at the age of eleven.
Sketch by an unknown artist.