His productive activity during the six early years from 1820 to 1826 was incessant, many-sided and prolific. In 1820, among other compositions named by Grove, are a Trio for piano and strings; a Sonata for pianoforte and violin; another for pianoforte solo; four organ pieces; a Cantata, bearing the earliest date of all (Jan. 13); a Lustspiel for voices and pianoforte, in three scenes, beginning: "Ich Felix Mendelssohn," etc. In 1821, five Symphonies for strings, songs, one-act operas. This was the year when Zelter first took him to Goethe at Weimar.
The next two years were no less productive. In the summer of 1822 the whole family made a leisurely tour in Switzerland, visiting on the way Spohr at Cassel, on the return Schelble, conductor of the famous Cäcilien-Verein at Frankfort, and Goethe again at Weimar. Near Geneva he wrote the first (Op. I) of three Quartets for pianoforte and strings. In the two years six more quartet Symphonies, making twelve in all, which do not figure in the catalogue, although they were not mere exercises. Then, too, an opera, "The Uncle from Boston," in three acts. He was then nearly fifteen, growing fast, his features and expression altering and maturing, and his hair cut short.
It is pleasant to read of the Sunday morning music in his grandmother's large dining-room, with a small orchestra, Felix conducting, Fanny or himself at the piano, Rebecka singing, and the young brother Paul playing the 'cello. Some composition of his own had place in every programme. Noted musicians passing through Berlin were often present. For critic there was his own father, besides the wise old Zelter. Every evening, also, more or less, the house was enlivened by music, theatrical impromptus, and "constant flux and reflux of young, clever, distinguished people, who made the suppers gay and noisy, and among whom Felix was the favorite." Among the intimates were Moscheles and Spohr.
MENDELSSOHN'S FATHER.
Abraham Mendelssohn—from a pencil drawing made by his son-in-law William Hensel.
A great advance was shown in the compositions of 1824. In the summer Felix, with his father and Rebecka, visited a bathing place on the shores of the Baltic, where he got his first impressions of the sea, afterwards reproduced in the Meeresstille overture. In the next spring father and son were in Paris. There Felix met all the famous French musicians. Their devotion to effect and superficial glitter, their ignorance of German music (Onslow, for instance, having never heard a note of Fidelio), the insulting liberties they took with some of its masterpieces, enraged the enthusiastic lad. With Cherubini his intercourse was more satisfactory. On the way home they paid a third, short visit to Goethe. The fiery Capriccio in F sharp minor, and the score of the two-act opera, Camacho's Wedding, from Don Quixote, were fruits of that year.
That summer Abraham Mendelssohn purchased the large house and grounds (ten acres) at No. 3 Leipziger Strasse, which became the sumptuous abode of the family, until the death of Felix, when it was occupied by the Herrenhaus, or House of Lords of the Prussian government. As described by Hensel, it was a dignified, old-fashioned, spacious palace, then in the suburbs of Berlin, near the Potsdam gate, on the edge of the Thiergarten. Behind the house was a court with offices, then gardens and a park with noble trees,—just the ideal seat for such an artistic family! There was a room for large musical parties and private theatricals. Between the court and the garden stood the Gartenhaus, the middle of which formed a hall large enough to hold several hundred persons, with glass doors opening on the lawns and alleys. It was a delightful summer house, but rather bleak in winter. There the Sunday music found new life; there Felix composed the Octet for strings; there, too, in the fine summer of 1826, the work with which he "took his final musical degree," astonishing the world as a full-fledged composer, a master of original, imaginative genius, the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. He had been reading with his sisters the Schlegel and Tieck version of Shakespeare's play. In this and many instances Fanny, herself a good musician and composer, was her brother's confidante and critic. The fairy vein, which had cropped out in earlier works (the Quintet in A, the Octet, etc.), seemed to have reached its full expression here. And the wonder is that the motives of the Overture all came in place when he wrote music for the whole play seventeen years later.
MENDELSSOHN'S MOTHER.