The Mendelssohn Greek choruses are far beyond and above the ordinary part-song, which is a much smaller, humbler affair,—simply, as its name denotes, a song, harmonized in four parts. But these are themes worked up, for single and double choir, with as complete art as the choruses in great oratorios, only avoiding the Fugue form, which is Gothic, Christian, suggestive of the Infinite, not Greek.
Racine's Athalie, often called his greatest drama, is constructed after the old Greek model, with choruses similarly employed. Mendelssohn's music for it, compared with St. Paul and Elijah, the Lobgesang, or the Greek plays, must to many seem monotonous, in some parts dry and tame. The musical work, bound by the text, lacks climax. Yet there is much beautiful and some majestic, splendid music in it. Has it a Jewish, as its congeners a Greek flavor? The overture is very noble, with the two parts finely contrasted.
During the last years of his life the dramatic tendency in Mendelssohn, which we have traced all along through so many of his works in many forms, from his child operettas in his father's house to the Walpurgis Night, grew upon him with an irresistible momentum. His deep interest in Jenny Lind (Goldschmidt), who was his ideal of a singer, and to whom he became a most devoted friend, led him as the last musical problem of his life to write an opera for her in which she was to take the principal rôle in London. That was Die Lorelei, a theme as legendary and romantic, while more poetic and more inviting to music, than the monster Norse mythology. The composition was cut short by his early death. The fragments which he left of the unfinished work are of such rare excellence, that one wonders what might have been, had that ideal been achieved! Might not the German theatre have then possessed an opera, a lyric drama, which would have forestalled the paradoxical solution of the problem which so many, whether musical or not, appear so overready to accept? And how long will the fashion hold?
Greatly unlike in temperament, in character, in quality of genius, in outward circumstances and environment, largely, too, in their ideal aim and tendency, Mendelssohn and Schumann seem to be destined to be thought of together. They lived at the same time, and were intimate associates and friends in Leipsic. Each had the warmest admiration for the other. The two together were a double morning-star in music; yet "one star differeth from another star in glory." Opinions will not soon agree which in his works is the more significant or glorious, which the more potent and far-reaching influence. We do not discuss the point. If the sweetness of Mendelssohn's music does sometimes cloy; if with all the strength of his orchestral works, his oratorios and Greek plays, with all the Jewish masculinity of his Psalms, his male choruses and his part-songs, one feels the feminine, the sentimental minor vein predominate upon the whole; if his struggles with his formidable art-problems were less Titanic than those of Beethoven, and consequently his triumphs less complete; if his resolution of the discord was a joy less absolute, less wholesome and perennial (for with Beethoven Joy, joy—Freude—is ever the last word,—Joy as of the gods, admitting of no surfeit, no corruption), still there is no denying, except by some weak caprice of fashion, the essential greatness of the composer Mendelssohn. The most serious deduction to be made is, that he was to a certain extent imitable. Swarms of imitators sprang up, both in his own country and in England. Hence a certain sense of sameness began to attach to his music,—a sameness not fairly chargeable to the master, but to the imitators, with whom it was too easy to confound him, or through their fog to see him falsely. Well might he have said: "Save me from my friends!"
MENDELSSOHN'S LAST PLACE OF RESIDENCE IN LEIPSIC.
In the Königsstrasse.
Once Mendelssohn was overrated, in a most partisan and partial spirit, especially in England. Now it is too much the fashion, with young critics and "disciples of the newness," to estimate him far below his real worth. But all new fashions bring their own reaction. In this case the reaction will be purifying and salubrious. A reviving interest in Mendelssohn's music will be so much new guaranty against all false, extravagant, or morbid taste.—While music remains music, whatever may be the ups and downs of fashion, whatever the novelties of style or method, however startling the juggleries of brilliant execution, the genius and the art of Mendelssohn will still hold good. Their fascination may be lost awhile amid the louder clamor of phenomenal new comers; in more sane, reposeful hours, it surely will return with many a sweet surprise. What oratorio society, of high aim and standing, can afford to let the St. Paul and Elijah, or the Hymn of Praise, lose any of their lustre through neglect of frequent practice? What orchestra can fill out a worthy season without one or more of his symphonies and of his poetic overtures? Is any properly ambitious male chorus or part-song club well equipped without the Antigone and Oedipus music, or the Ode to the Artists, or the part-songs of Mendelssohn? Can any chamber music club dispense yet with his string quartets, quintets, or octet? And where is the pianist, however far advanced in virtuosity, who does not like to play sometimes his compositions for pianoforte with orchestra, or who fails to find grateful audience for the Lieder ohne Wörter? Indeed to ignore all this is to convict oneself of a very youthful bumptiousness of spirit, an arrogant fanaticism of unreasoning modernness in taste.
Four we count above all others in the temple of tone-art and genius:—Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. Can we fill out a second four without the name of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy? Choice may vary as to one or two names in that second quartet; of Schubert and Schumann there can be no question; some may have preference for Haydn, or for Gluck, or Weber, Cherubini, even for Rossini; but when with the other distinctions we take into account that of many-sidedness, all-round musicianship, can any other four compete with Mendelssohn except to his advantage?
