Elijah, most popular of oratorios (after the Messiah), and most familiar, requires even less comment. Description or analysis would bore. The subject began to occupy his mind in 1838. It was finished for the Birmingham Festival of 1846, where, himself conducting, it was received with utmost enthusiasm. Yet it did not satisfy himself, and he at once set about revising and polishing. This was but a year before his death. When he returned to England for the last time to conduct it, the Prince Consort addressed him as another Elijah "faithful to the worship of true Art, though surrounded by the idolators of Baal." In greatness and variety of poetic and imaginative design, in wealth of musical ideas, in ripeness of consummate musicianship, in sure calculation of effects, it is a full expression of the composer's genius. It abounds in numbers which captivate alike refined and simple listeners. It betrays the dramatic element in the opening picture of the drought relieved and culminating in the wonderful "Rain" chorus; in the episode of the Widow who has lost her son; in the scene between the Prophet and the wicked Queen; in the Baal choruses, secular, impatient, boastful, impotently clamoring for miracle; in the sweet soliloquy and meditation of Elijah in the wilderness; in his ascension in the fiery chariot; and more or less in all the great choruses, all very graphic. Then what lovely restful choruses, like "He watching over Israel," followed by the perfect Angel Trio: "Lift thine eyes"! And arias full of meaning and of exhortation, like the soprano "Hear ye, Israel," in composing which, beginning with the high F sharp, his mind was haunted by that note as he had heard it in the voice of Jenny Lind!
Judging from the few fragments published, his unfinished oratorio Christus would have been his greatest sacred composition. From the first part, the Birth of Christ, we have the Trio of the Magi, teeming with wonder and anticipation; then the chorus: "There shall a star come forth," which has a sweet, pure, star-like beauty, ending with the choral: "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern!" From the second part, or Passion, the tenor narratives, the accusing choruses before Pilate, terribly dramatic, especially the multitudinous echoes of "Crucify him," and the inexorable pronunciamento: "We have a sacred Law," bring him into still closer affinity with Bach; and even more so the exquisitely plaintive weeping chorus at the end.
Reproduced from Frontispiece to E. Devrient's "My Recollections of Mendelssohn." Sculptor's name not given.
Much might be said of his one Catholic work, the Lauda Sion, composed in 1846 for the feast of Corpus Christi at Liège, very beautiful in spite of the dry dogmatic Latin text, strange text for him! Much, too, of the three Motets for female voices; of the Hymn: "Hear my Prayer," with its soaring, bird-like soprano solo: "O for the wings of a dove!" of his masculine, strong settings of eight or ten of the Psalms, mostly for chorus with orchestra, with their Old Testament flavor; and of numerous smaller sacred compositions.
Of course so sensitive a nature, subject to many moods, quick to take impressions and to turn them into music, was prolific in songs with piano accompaniment. From his earliest composing days, at intervals throughout his life, he produced sets of Lieder and duets, to the number of ninety or more. They are all musical, refined, full of feeling, some of them strikingly original; but before the few great ones of Beethoven, the numberless songs of Schubert, those of Schumann, and above all Robert Franz, they retreat into the shade. Yet they have been favorites in musical homes and concert rooms, especially in England, where they introduced the love of German song, tempting many feeble imitators, while awakening there some worthier responses from the kindred spirit, Sterndale Bennett.
More truly original, with more marrow in them, and more of the enduring quality, are his four-part songs, both for mixed and for male voices. These have been the staple and the best material on which the Liedertafeln all over Germany, and the part-song clubs of England and America have built. After more pretentious, ingenious, sensational part-songs of later origin, it is always refreshing to hear one of them; for they are sincere music, thoroughly artistic, with heart and soul and poetry in them. With them we may mention several larger pieces for male chorus, such as he composed to Schiller's Ode "To the Artists," with accompaniment of brass. The exhortation of the music is worthy of the poem; male choirs feel well when they lift their voices in a strain so manly and so edifying.
We come now to a lofty form of choral and orchestral music, which we owe to Mendelssohn. In setting two of the Greek tragedies of Sophocles he had no old Greek music for a model. The spirit of the dramas lay in the text of Sophocles. He had read the Antigone in the Greek, and so far got his inspiration at first hand. He took the suggestion from Frederic William IV., King of Prussia, during a summer residence in Berlin in 1841. The peculiar function of the Chorus in the Greek tragedies, as a mediator between the actors and the audience, commenting in some sort of rhythmical chant upon what was passing on the stage, and the sublimity of some of those choruses, make us feel that there could not have been a truer artistic idea than that of setting them to music, realizing and carrying out their vague embryonic musical aspiration as it could only be realized in these modern times after music had become an art. Mendelssohn's inspiration seems to have sprung congenially from that of Sophocles; and this music is of the freshest, manliest, most original and vigorous that he has left.
Antigone was the first experiment. He composed it in eleven days:—Overtures, single and double choruses for male voices, with full orchestral accompaniment for all that are lyrical in subject; melodramatic bits, as where Antigone descends into the vault; and chords here and there making expressive background to the spoken verse. The piece was first played on the royal stage at Potsdam; and afterwards on the King's birthday before a select audience, the venerable Tieck presiding. When it was given at Leipsic, a meeting of "learned Thebans" signed an address to Mendelssohn, thanking him "for substantially reviving an interest in the Greek tragedy." The music has since made its mark everywhere, whether given on the stage with action, or only sung and played in concert rooms,—at Athens in the original Greek. Nobler men's choruses are never heard than that rich, sweet, pensive moralizing one which sings of man's wondrous faculties and limitations; or that superb hymn to "Bacchus" (double chorus),—as full of pomp and splendor as the Wedding March,—in which the composer gave free rein to his enthusiasm; or the opening invocation to "Helios."
Oedipus at Colonos he composed at Frankfort in 1844, about the time when he began to finish Elijah, and write the Violin Concerto and the music to Athaliah. A favorite with the men's Choral clubs is the chorus which recounts the beauties of Colonos and the glories of Athens. The music is wonderfully faithful to the ever kindling enthusiasm of the words.