He had arrived at the height of the season. The wife of Moscheles took him about in a carriage (“me in my new suit, of course!”) He went to the opera and to the theatre, saw Kemble in “Hamlet” and was incensed at the way Shakespeare was cut. Still “the people here like me for the sake of my music and respect me for it and this delights me immensely”. He made his first London appearance with the Philharmonic on May 25, 1829, and even at the rehearsal found two hundred listeners on hand, “chiefly ladies”. The program contained his C minor Symphony, though later an orchestrated version of the scherzo from the Octet was substituted for the original minuet. J. B. Cramer led Mendelssohn to the stage “as if I were a young lady”. “Immense applause” greeted him. This was soon to be an old story. When people spied him in the audience at a concert someone was sure to shout: “There is Mendelssohn!”; whereupon others would applaud and exclaim: “Welcome to him!” In the end Felix found no other way to restore quiet than to mount the stage and bow.
He played piano for the first time in London at the Argyll Rooms on May 30. His offering was Weber’s “Concertstück” and he caused a stir by performing it without notes. One might say he was heard before the concert—for he had gone to the hall to try a new instrument several hours earlier but, finding it locked, seated himself at an old one and improvised for a long time to be suddenly roused from his revery by the noise of the arriving audience. Whereupon he dashed off to dress for the matinee in “very long white trousers, brown silk waistcoat, black necktie and blue dress coat”. Not long afterwards he gave concerts with Moscheles and with the singer, Henrietta Sontag. The Argyll Rooms were so crowded that “ladies might be seen among the double basses, between bassoons and horns and even seated on a kettle drum”.
London life, for that matter, seemed made to order for Felix, the more so as he was received with open arms by those influential personages to whom he brought letters of introduction. Yet the whole spirit of London was vastly to his taste. Writing later from Italy he confided to his sister that, for all the luminous atmosphere of Naples, “London, that smoky nest, is fated to be now and ever my favorite residence. My heart swells when I even think of it”!
The admiration was mutual! England of that age (and for years to come) adored Mendelssohn quite as it had Handel a century earlier and peradventure even more than it did Haydn and Weber. Musically, the nation made itself over in his image. And Felix loved the rest of the country as he loved its metropolis. The London season ended, he went on a vacation in July, 1829, to Scotland, accompanied by Klingemann. The travelers stopped first at Edinburgh, where they heard the Highland Pipers and visited Holyrood Palace. Like any conventional tourist Felix saw the apartments where Mary Stuart lived and Rizzio was murdered, inspected the chapel in which Mary was crowned but now “open to the sky and ... everything ruined and decayed; I think I found there the beginning of my ‘Scotch’ Symphony”. And he set down sixteen bars of what became the slow introduction in A minor. It was to be some time, however, before the symphony took its conclusive shape. If Holyrood quickened his fancy “one of the Hebrides” (which he saw a few days later) struck even brighter sparks from his imagination. A rowboat trip to Fingal’s Cave inspired him to twenty bars of music “to show how extraordinarily the place affected me”, as he wrote to his family. He elaborated the overture—than which he did nothing greater—in his own good time and recast it before it satisfied him. For in the first form of this marine mood picture, he missed “train oil, salt fish and seagulls”. Yet the twenty bars he set down on the spot form its main subject.
Back in London his mind was occupied with numerous compositions, among them the first stirrings of the “Scotch” and “Reformation” Symphonies and the “Hebrides” Overture. But before developing these he wanted to write an organ piece for Fanny’s marriage to the painter, Wilhelm Hensel (whom Leah Mendelssohn had put on a five years’ “probation” before she consented to give him her daughter’s hand!); and a household operetta for the approaching silver wedding of his parents. Klingemann wrote the libretto of this piece (“Heimkehr aus der Fremde”, which the critic Chorley in 1851 Englished as “Son and Stranger”). It contained special roles for Fanny, Rebecka, Devrient and Hensel—the last-named limited to one incessantly repeated note, because he was so desperately unmusical.
Hebrides, August 7, 1829.
... in order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there:
Felix returned to Berlin for the parental festivities. But Fanny’s wedding he missed, having injured his leg in a carriage accident and being laid up for two months. He might, had he chosen, have accepted a chair of music at the Berlin University in 1830, but he preferred to continue his travels. It seemed almost a matter of routine that he should stop off at Weimar to greet Goethe once more. He may or may not have suspected that he was never to see the poet again. Another friend he visited was Julius Schubring, rector of St. George’s Church in Dessau. Nürnberg, Munich, Salzburg, the Salzkammergut and Linz were stations on the way to Vienna, where his enjoyment was poisoned by the depressing level of musical life and the shocking popular neglect of masters like Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. He made a side trip to nearby Pressburg to witness the coronation of the Austrian crown prince as King of Hungary. The most exciting incident of the day was the smashing of Mendelssohn’s high hat by a spectator whose view it obstructed!
Italy was another story. “The whole country had such a festive air”, he wrote in one of the first of those Italian letters which are among the gems of his correspondence, “that I seemed to feel as if I were myself a prince making his grand entry”. To be sure, there was not much music worth listening to and he was horrified by some of the things he heard in the churches. But there were the great masters of painting, there was the beauty of the countryside, the unnumbered attractions of Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, the fascination of Italian life and the charm of the Italian people. He heard the Holy Week musical services in the Sistine Chapel with works of Palestrina, Allegri and lesser men; wrote long and detailed letters to Zelter about the technical aspects of church singing in Rome, composed industriously, saw his boyhood playmate Julius Benedict and became acquainted with a wildly eccentric young French musician named Berlioz. On his way northward, in Milan, Felix met Beethoven’s friend, Dorothea von Ertmann; also, Karl Mozart, whom he delighted by playing some of his father’s music.
With his incredible dispatch he had managed to accomplish a great amount of creative work in Italy, despite his social and sight-seeing activities. He had finished a version of the “Hebrides” Overture, had made progress with his “Scotch” and “Italian” Symphonies, written a Psalm, several motets, the “First Walpurgis Night” (later recast), piano pieces, songs. Returning to Germany via Switzerland he stopped off in Munich and gave a benefit concert on Oct. 17, 1831. It was for this event that he composed his G minor Piano Concerto. In a letter to his father Felix referred to it, somewhat contemptuously, as “a thing rapidly thrown off”. It has been assumed that Mendelssohn may have had Paris in mind composing this concerto. At any rate, the first three months of 1832 found him once more in the French capital, where he made new musical acquaintances. One of these was the conductor, Habeneck; others, Chopin, Liszt, Ole Bull, Franchomme. Yet Mendelssohn found it difficult, even as he had earlier, to adjust himself to some musical insensibilities of Paris. He was appalled on one occasion to learn that his own Octet was given in a church at a funeral mass commemorating Beethoven. “I can scarcely imagine anything more absurd than a priest at the altar and my Scherzo going on”, he wrote his parents. Habeneck, who had him play at one of the Conservatoire concerts, wanted to produce at one of them the “Reformation” Symphony, which Felix had composed in 1830 for the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession. The performance never took place; the orchestra disliked the work, finding it “too learned, too much fugato, too little melody”.