In June, 1838, he conducted the Cologne Festival, and we have a cogent letter in which he induced the committee to include "at least one important vocal work of Bach" (a Church Cantata) in the programme, besides pieces from Handel's Joshua. The summer was spent in the dear garden-house at Berlin; and that was the young wife's first introduction to her husband's family. He kept on composing noble things; among them the Violin Concerto and a Psalm for eight voices: "When Israel," etc. And he fell just short of giving the world another Symphony (in B flat). The great event of the next Gewandhaus season was the first performance, at the last concert (March 22, 1839), of the great Schubert Symphony in C. It was played from the MS., which had been found in Vienna by Schumann.
It would require a volume to detail the programmes of those ten or eleven years of Gewandhaus concerts under his direction,—to say nothing of great musical enterprises outside of all that. In December, 1842, his mother died, and then the Berlin house was his. Yet he lived for the most part in Leipsic, aiding as a professor, with David, Hauptmann, Schumann and the like, in the carrying out of his pet scheme of a Conservatorium of Music. Since 1838 Elijah had been in his mind as the subject of an oratorio. It was finished for the Birmingham Festival of 1846. He was on hand there to conduct it, all the world knows with what success. Yet his own fastidious taste saw much in it to alter and polish, and he returned to England for the tenth and last time to conduct it in the revised edition, so to speak.
WILLIAM HENSEL.
From a pencil drawing made by himself.
Meanwhile, near the end of 1840, he was prevailed on to accept a year's engagement at Berlin, and lend his labor and his genius to certain high artistic schemes of king Frederick William IV. Taking leave of Leipsic with a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion Music, he became Kapellmeister to the King. The first fruit of that was his noble music to the Antigone, and afterwards the Œdipus Coloneus of Sophocles; and in another vein, the Athalie of Racine. It was also by the king's request that he wrote the Midsummer Night's Dream music, into which the early overture fitted as if pre-ordained, and his both beautiful and wildly melodramatic setting of Goethe's Walpurgisnacht. Not far from the same time he was moved to make an overture, more dramatic than any of his early ones, to Ruy Blas.
MENDELSSOHN ON HIS DEATH-BED
From an English engraving.
On his last return from England a shadow came over that serene and happy life. He met the sudden news of his sister Fanny's death, and with a cry fell unconscious to the ground. He sought relief and rest in Switzerland that summer, painting in water-colors, and playing the organ all alone in a little village church—what a touching picture his letters give of it! His own hour was near at hand. A trouble in his head grew worse. He died in the evening of Thursday, Nov. 4, 1847. He was mourned by all Europe. In Leipsic it was as if the most beloved and honored, the soul and centre of all their higher life and aspiration, were withdrawn. Memorial concerts were organized in London, Manchester and Birmingham, even in Paris. To this day among English music-lovers Mendelssohn has been a name to conjure by, adopted as their own like Handel. Mendelssohn scholarships, busts, statues, became frequent. And a commission was appointed to publish selections from the mass of works he left in manuscript; nor could they keep pace with the impatient, almost angry outcry (at least in England) for every scrap of manuscript withheld.