Sunday Classics: Mr. Mendelssohn explains it all for us

Sarah Chang was only 15 when some evil genie stuffed her into that hideous green dress to perform Mendelssohn's E minor Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, one of the composer's longest-serving successors as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. We hear (for a change -- ha-ha!) the Andante.

by Ken

For reasons I suggested last night, being 15 isn't necessarily an insuperable obstacle to finding the profound simplicity of this movement. We heard how hard it is even for the greatest violinists to "come off it" -- to set aside the whorish habits of wanting to please an audience and just hear and try to pass on what's happening in the music. Going by the Parsifal Principle, a "pure fool" might actually have an advantage stumbling onto the truth of this music. (I'd be very much surprised if it happened in that green dress, though.)

As I mentioned last night, by the time I had my revelation, I must have heard the Mendelssohn E minor Concerto at least a hundred times. When it suddenly "landed" on me, it really seemed as if I'd never heard the Andante. That pretty much blew my mind, but as I've revisited performances that I would have heard, I've been less surprised. I'm not sure that I ever did hear the movement.

Once I did, it occurred to me -- and the feeling has only deepened since -- that in this movement we hear all the mysteries of the universe explained and all the questions of mortal existence answered (if perhaps stopping short of such nagging but essentially local perplexities as where you left your house keys last night, or where you might find some edible corned beef or pastrami). The only catch is that those explanations and answers come in musical form, and so still need to be translated into more usable form for practical application. If nothing else, though, they make you feel that the pursuit is worth pursuing.

The Violin Concerto was first performed in 1845, and thus comes from near the end of the career of Mendelssohn (1809-1847), who alas didn't make it to his 39th birthday. It was a career that may have had the most remarkable launch in musical history. There have been numerous "prodigies" who produced first-rate music in their teens. Mendelssohn did something more. Make up a short list of the greatest music ever written, and no matter how much you try to shorten it, you're going to have a tough time excluding the Octet for Strings Mendelssohn wrote at 16 and the Overture for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream he wrote at 17. I just don't see how it's possible to write "better," more fully imagined music.

Let's start with the opening movement of the Octet. Oh, I don't think there's any doubt that it was written by a young person. There's an age beyond which it's just hard to sustain this degree of freshness, buoyancy, and sheer joy. But the structure is so taut and the musical materials so arresting that for me that 15 minutes pass in a trice, and a delighted trice at that. Note, by the way, the tempo marking: "moderately quick but with fire (emphasis added). I think there's plenty of fire in this 1959 recording by the veteran Smetana Quartet (though violist Milan Škampa was a relative newcomer, having been with the group a mere three years) and its younger colleagues, my much-loved Janáček Quartet.

Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20:
i. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco

Jiří Novák, Lubomír Kostecký, Jiří Trávníček, and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Milan Škampa and Jiří Kratochvíl, violas; Antonín Kohout and Karel Krafka, cellos
Westminster, recorded in Vienna, June 1959

Jeez, having come this far -- we're almost halfway through the Octet (15:01 out of 34:04 in this performance) -- how can we not hear the rest?

Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20:

ii. Andante, iii. Scherzo, Allegro leggierissimo, iv. Presto

Smetana and Janáček Quartets (Vienna, June 1959)

We might as well continue straight on with --

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Overture, Op. 21

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond.
Broadcast performance, May 23, 1969

Now I wouldn't suggest that young Felix's talents were fully developed at this point, just that they were as fully developed as he needed for the Octet and the MSND Overture. In fact, he continued expanding and heightening his resources all the way up to his intolerably early death, which genuinely seems to have been hastened by disregard for his health in the effort to create and promote such works as the great oratorio Elijah. (We're going to return for a closer look at Elijah in a separate post.) With Mendelssohn's early death in November 1847 (for what it's worth, less than six months after the death of his beloved sister Fanny, about whom more in a moment), he seems to me perhaps the composer whose fulfillment was left most tantalizingly unfulfilled.

I have no problem chalking the two supreme masterpieces of Mendelssohn's youth up as miracles. Still, we know a lot about the conditions in which the budding composer's talent was discovered and nurtured -- in a prosperous and deeply cultured household where artistic creativity and the life of the imagination were prized. Felix's skills and imagination expanded in tandem with those of his sister Fanny (a bit more than three years older than him; the relationship certainly recalls the symbiotic one between young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his "big" sister Nannerl), who was a bit more than three years older.

All four Mendelssohn children (there was another brother, Paul, and sister, Rebecca) seem to have been dazzlingly precocious, and Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn took their children's gifts seriously. Of course there was still a difference between the way boys' and girls' talents were treated. Although the parents clearly recognized Fanny's talent, there just wasn't any precedent or even procedure for developing a musically precocious girl's talent in the same way as a boy's. This leaves permanently open the question whether Fanny may not in fact have possessed a creative gift at least equal to Felix's.

Most of Felix's early music was written as part of communal creative explorations of Felix and his siblings, in particular Fanny. This is emphatically true of the Midsummer NIght's Dream Overture. If you're familiar with this altogether remarkable and ravishing piece, you may have noticed that I chose that decidedly unorthodox broadcast performance by Otto Klemperer and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

It's an odd business, choosing a performance by the BRSO for the special intensity of its orchestral playing. Despite the blessing of the BRSO's 30-year stewardship by those splendid musicians Eugen Jochum (who founded it in 1949 and remained at the helm until 1960) and Rafael Kubelik (1961-79), we tend to think of it as a "solidly reliable" ensemble, not one you would turn to for special qualities in phrasing or tone production. However, there are a number of broadcast performances, in Bavarian Radio's excellent early broadcast stereo, that suggest some chemistry between Klemperer and this orchestra. Klemperer had made a fine studio recording of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1961, but listen to the BRSO Overture, and for all that it may not be the last word in forward drive, or the ultimate in ensemble precision, enjoy the way it digs into the music and maximizes its magic.

So it seems only natural, as we continue with the Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music (from which we already heard the universally known Wedding March last night), to stick with the Klemperer-BRSO performance. We're going to hear, not just the three remaining excerpts (Scherzo, Notturno, and Wedding March) that form the standard MSND "suite," but also the Intermezzo and Mendelssohn's setting of the fairy scene "Ye spotted snakes, with soprano and mezzo solos and chorus, for no better reason than that I can't bear leaving them out.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 55:

Scherzo, "Ye spotted snakes," Intermezzo,

Notturno, Wedding March

Edith Mathis (s), Brigitte Fassbaender (ms) [in "Ye spotted snakes"]; Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. (Munich, May 23, 1969)

Ye spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy queen.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.
Weaving spiders, come not here;
Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence.
Philomel, with melody, & c.
Hence, away! now all is well:
One aloof stand sentinel.

I should probably have mentioned that, apart from the Overture, the MSND incidental music is not a product of Mendelssohn's youth. It was written in 1842. Did you notice any discontinuity? Your ears may be better than mine, but I'll be damned if I hear any evidence of the 16-year time gap between the Overture and the rest of this amazing music. Again, in the music of Mendelssohn's that works best, he had found a match between subject matter and his then-available technical and emotional resources.

All told there's about an hour of MSND music, though not all of it can be performed independently. At the same time, the music is rather overwhelming for practical use in performances of the play -- though RCA recording made a three-LP recording of the only-somewhat-abridged 1954 Old Vic production (directed by Michael Benthall, with a cast including Moira Shearer as Titania, Robert Helpmann as Oberon, and Stanley Holloway as Bottom), which incorporated most of Mendelssohn's music, performed by the BBC Symphony under Sir Malcolm Sargent.

Here, just for fun, is a more standard performance of the standard four-movement MSND "suite":

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Opp. 21/55:
Overture, Scherzo, Notturno, Wedding March

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), George Szell, cond.
Decca, recorded Dec. 2-4, 1957

Mendelssohn certainly made good use of the limited time allotted him. At 26 he became music director of Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra, and beyond his own compositional activity, it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of his role he played in advancing the cause of music, especially German music, old and new. (He was a central figure in the revival of public awareness of the works of his great Leipzig predecessor J. S. Bach. Bach's music was never lost to musicians and scholars, but the idea of performing it publicly seemed somewhere between quaint and preposterous until Mendelssohn took up the cause, most famously resurrecting the St. Matthew Passion, which he performed in his own edition.

I guess we should stop now. As I mentioned, we're going to come back to Elijah, the work that occupied so much of his attention in his final years, and a work that despite its unevenness is filled with unmatched dramatic power as it chronicles the prophet's rise in God's service and then his collapse, followed by what I like to think of as the story of the one person in biblical history who commanded an apology from God.

OOPS, SHOULDN'T WE HEAR THE WHOLE VIOLIN CONCERTO?

While I was trying to get the final links sorted out among this week's classical posts, it suddenly occurred to me that we never did get to hear the whole of Mendelssohn's great E minor Violin Concerto. So here is the whole performance that contains my preferred version of the Andante:

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64:

i. Allegro molto appassionato, ii. Andante,

iii. Allegretto non troppo -- Allegro molto vivace

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz, cond.
EMI, recorded Apr. 30, 1958


OKAY, THAT'S A WRAP

I can't think of a lovelier way to end than with Mendelssohn's best-known song, "On Wings of Song," sung for us first by soprano Margaret Price and then by baritone Wolfgang Holzmair. (If Ms. Margaret -- oops, Dame Margaret -- and Herr Wolfgang were fiddlers, I think they would both have "gotten" the Andante of the E minor Concerto.)

Note the composer's title: "Abendlied" ("Evening Song").

"Auf Flügeln des Gesanges" ("On Wings of Song"),

Op. 34, No. 2

Margaret Price, soprano

Graham Johnson, piano
Hyperion (CD of Mendelssohn songs)

recorded in Munich, March 1993

Wolfgang Holzmair, baritone

Anna Wagner, piano
Preiser (CD of Mendelssohn songs)

recorded in Vienna, October 1985

poem by Heinrich Heine

On wings of song,
My beloved, I'll bear you away,
Away to the pastures by the Ganges,
Where I know the loveliest spot.

There, in the quiet moonlight,
Is a garden, blossoming red;
The lotus blossoms are awaiting for
Their dear little sister.

The violets chuckle and fondly murmur
And look up at the stars;
Secretly the roses whisper
Fragrant tales to one another.

The innocent and knowing gazelles
Bound past, listening;
And in the distance murmur
The waves of the sacred steam.

There will we recline
Beneath the palm tree
And drink of love and peace
And dream a blissful dream.

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