Passing over the intermediate years with a simple reference to the "Meeresstille," "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," which was then composed, and a fine performance of Bach's "Passion Music," for which he had been long drilling the members of the Berlin Singakademie, the next event is a visit to England in 1829, where he was received with extraordinary warmth, playing at the Philharmonic Concerts, conducting his C minor Symphony, which he dedicated to the Philharmonic Society, they in their turn electing him one of their honorary members; going to dinners, balls, and the House of Commons, and enjoying himself most hugely. His letters from England at this time are brimming over with fun and graphic description; there is one especially amusing, in which he describes himself with two friends going home from a late dinner at the German Ambassador's, and on the way buying three German sausages, going down a quiet street to devour them, with all the while joyous laughter and snatches of part songs. There is also a little incident of this time showing the wonderful memory he possessed. After a concert on "Midsummer Night," when the "Midsummer Night's Dream" had very appropriately been played, it was found that the score had been lost in a hackney-coach as the party were returning to Mr. Attwood's. "Never mind," said Mendelssohn, "I will make another," which he did, and on comparison with the separate parts not a single difference was found in it.
At the beginning of December he was at home again, and that winter he wrote the "Reformation Symphony," intended to be produced at the tercentenary festival of the "Augsburg Confession" in the following June. This symphony, with which Mendelssohn was not entirely satisfied, was only once performed during his lifetime, but since his death it has frequently been performed, and though not one of his most perfect works, is recognized as a noble monument in honor of a great event. The next spring he again set out on his travels, this time southward to Italy.
In 1833 Mendelssohn accepted an official post offered him by the authorities of Düsseldorf, by which the entire musical arrangements of the town, church, theatre, and singing societies were put under his care. Immermann, the celebrated poet, being associated with him in the direction of the theatre. Things, however, did not go on very smoothly there. Mendelssohn found all the many worries of theatrical management—the engagement of singers and musicians, the dissensions to be arranged, the many tastes to be conciliated—too irksome, and he did not long retain this appointment; but the life among his friends at Düsseldorf was most delightful, and the letters written at this time are exceedingly lively and gay. It was here that he received the commission from the Cæcilia-Verein of Frankfort for, and commenced, his grand oratorio "St. Paul." The words for this, as also for the "Elijah" and "Hymn of Praise" afterward, he selected himself with the help of his friend Schubung, and they are entirely from the Bible—as he said, "The Bible is always the best of all." Circumstances prevented the oratorio being then produced at Frankfort, and the first public performance took place at the Lower Rhine Festival at Düsseldorf, in May, 1836.
But his visits to Frankfort had a very important result in another way. Mendelssohn there met Mademoiselle Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a pastor of the French Reformed Church, and, though he had frequently indulged in the admiration of beautiful and clever women—which is allowable, and indeed an absolute necessity for a poet!—now for the first time he fell furiously in plain unmistakable and downright love. But it is more characteristic of the staid Teuton than the impulsive musician, that before plighting his troth to her he went away for a month's bathing at Scheveningen, in Holland, for the purpose of testing the strength of his affection by this absence. On his return, finding his amatory pulse still beating satisfactorily, he proposed to the young lady, and, as it must be presumed that she had already made up her own mind without any testing, he was accepted. On March 28, 1837, they were married, and the wedded life that then began was one of pure, unclouded happiness to the very end. Cécile Mendelssohn was a beautiful, gentle-hearted, and loving wife, just the one to give a weary and nervous artist in the home-life, with herself and the children near him, the blessed solace of rest and calm that he so needed. It is thus that Edward Devrient, the great German actor, and one of Mendelssohn's most intimate friends, describes her: "Cécile was one of those sweet womanly natures whose gentle simplicity, whose mere presence, soothed and pleased. She was slight, with features of striking beauty and delicacy; her hair was between brown and gold, but the transcendent lustre of her great blue eyes, and the brilliant roses of her cheeks, were sad harbingers of early death. She spoke little, and never with animation, in a low, soft voice. Shakespeare's words, "My gracious silence," applied to her no less than to the wife of Coriolanus."
After giving up his official position at Düsseldorf, in 1835, Mendelssohn was invited to become the conductor of the now famous Gewandhaus concerts at Leipsic, a post which he gladly accepted, and which, retained by him for many years, was to be one of the greatest delights of his artistic life. Not only was he loved and appreciated in Leipsic—far more than in Berlin, his own city—but he had here an opportunity of assisting many composers and virtuosi, who otherwise would have sought in vain for a hearing. Thus, after Liszt, when visiting the town, had been first of all received with great coldness, owing to the usual prices of admission to the concerts having been raised, Mendelssohn set everything straight by having a soirée in his honor at the Gewandhaus, where there were three hundred and fifty people, orchestra, chorus, punch, pastry, Meeresstille Psalm, Bach's Triple Concerto, choruses from St. Paul, Fantasia on Lucia, the Erl King, the Devil and his Grandmother, the latter probably a mild satirical reference to Liszt's stormy and often incoherent playing. It is also pleasant to find how cordially Mendelssohn received Berlioz there, as told in the "Memoirs" of the latter, spending ungrudgingly long days in aiding in rehearsals for his "Romeo et Juliette," though Mendelssohn never sympathized much with Berlioz's eccentric muse.
The "Lobgesang," or "Hymn of Praise," a "symphonie-cantata," as he called it, was his next great work, composed in 1840, together with other music, at the request of the Leipsic Town-Council, for a festival held in that town in commemoration of the invention of printing, on June 25th. None who have heard this work can forget the first impression produced when the grand instrumental movements with which it commences are merged in the majestic chorus, "All men, all things, praise ye the Lord," or the intensely dramatic effect of the repeated tenor cry, "Watchman, will the night soon pass?" answered at last by the clear soprano message of glad tidings, "The night is departing, the day is at hand!" This "watchman" episode was added some time afterward, and, as he told a friend, was suggested to the composer during the weary hours of a long sleepless night, when the words, "Will the night soon pass?" again and again seemed to be repeated to him. But a greater work even than this was now in progress; the "Elijah" had been begun.
In 1841 began a troublesome and harassing connection with Berlin, a city where, except in his home life, Mendelssohn never seems to have been very fortunate. At the urgent entreaty of the king, he went to reside there as head of the new Musical Academy. But disagreements arose, and he did not long take an active part in the management. The king, however, was very anxious to retain his services, and a sort of general office seems to have been created for him, the duties of which were to supply music for any dramatic works which the king took it into his head to have so embellished. And, though it is to this that we owe the noble "Antigone," "Œdipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing music to the choruses of Æschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would do it by the yard, why not he?
Passing rapidly over the intervening years filled with busy work, both in composition and as one of the principals of a newly started Conservatorium in Leipsic, we come to 1846, when his great work "Elijah" was at last completed and performed. On August 26th, at the Birmingham Festival, the performance went splendidly. Staudigl took the part of the prophet, and a young tenor, Lockey, sang the air, "Then shall the righteous," in the last part, as Mendelssohn says, "so very beautifully, that I was obliged to collect myself to prevent my being overcome, and to enable me to beat time steadily." Rarely, indeed, has a composer so truly realized his own conception as Mendelssohn did in the great tone-picture which he drew of the Prophet of Carmel and the wilderness.
"I figured to myself," he says, "Elijah as a grand, mighty prophet, such as might again reappear in our own day, energetic and zealous, stern, wrathful, and gloomy, a striking contrast to the court myrmidons and popular rabble—in fact, in opposition to the whole world, and yet borne on angel's wings!" Nothing can be finer than this, with that exquisite touch in the last words, "in opposition to the whole world, and yet borne on angel's wings."
After returning to Germany he was soon busily employed in recasting some portions of "Elijah" with which he was not satisfied; he had also another oratorio on even a grander scale, "Christus," already commenced; and at last, after all his life-long seeking in vain for a good libretto for an opera, he had begun to set one written by Geibel, the German poet, "Loreley," to music. But his friends now noticed how worn and weary he used oftentimes to look, and how strangely irritable he frequently was, and there can hardly be a doubt that some form of the cerebral disease from which his father and several of his relations had died, was already, deep-seated and obscure, disquieting him. The sudden announcement of the death of his sister, Fanny Hensel, herself a musical genius, to whom he was very fondly attached, on his return to Frankfort from his last visit to England in May, 1847, terribly affected him. He fell to the ground with a loud shriek, and it was long before he recovered consciousness.