It was the destiny of every post-Mozart Wunderkind to be compared to the genius from Salzburg, whose enormous talent was quite ruthlessly exploited by his (otherwise loving and devoted) father, Leopold, who took little Wolfgang on long, tiring and dangerous travels around the whole of Europe, presenting him to patricians, aristocrats and crowned heads of state. When the enlightened family of the eminent financier Abraham Mendelssohn and his wife Lea noted the remarkable musical abilities of their son Felix, born in 1808, they not only took care to ensure his meticulous musical training, but also – with the onerous fortunes of the young Mozart in mind – sensibly and tactfully took pains to maintain a balance in his musical and general education and not to abuse the talents of little Felix (and his sisters Fanny, a future pianist and composer who also displayed great ability, and Rebecca, who was dreaming of a career as a singer) in order to ‘show them off’ in public concerts. Yet in the Mendelssohns’ drawing-room in Berlin, family concerts, held quite regularly on Sundays, became a tradition and attracted the city’s cultural elite; young Felix initially showed himself to be a brilliant pianist (he also played excellently on the violin and viola). A key moment in his development proved to be his contact with the greatest authority in the field of musical education in Berlin, namely, Carl Friedrich Zelter, who from the beginning of the century had been running the prestigious Berlin choral society, the Sing-Akademie. Around 1819, Zelter began giving regular lessons to Felix and Fanny, which almost immediately triggered a creative explosion: the 11-year-old Felix kept a special exercise book filled with a succession of ambitious works. The first is considered to have been the song ‘Ihr Töne schwingt euch’, for his father’s birthday, towards the end of 1819. The following year, compositions gushed forth, with songs, piano miniatures, sonatas, variations, fugues, minor chamber works (such as the interesting Recitative-Largo and Allegro in D minor) and even dramatic pieces beginning with single ‘scenes’, from which two accomplished singspiels, distinctly Mozartian in style, were produced: Die Soldatenliebschaft (Felix’s wealthy father could afford a full stage production with excellent Berlin musicians to celebrate his son’s twelfth birthday) and Die beiden Pädagogen; the striking overtures to these works represent Mendelssohn’s first serious orchestral works. Crucially, Zelter, a near-contemporary of Mozart (and himself a composer of middling ability), belonged to the generation that revered exclusively Baroque-Classical models – his ideals were Haydn, Mozart, Hummel and the masters of the first half of the eighteenth century. He did not even esteem Beethoven and displayed reserve or even antipathy towards the growing generation of Romantics. He instilled in his pupil a love of the old art of counterpoint and the music of Bach, evidence of which includes erudite childhood fugues, more than merely accomplished (and their echoes in later output, such as the Fugue in E flat major for string quartet from c.1827, discovered posthumously in the composer’s archive and published as part of Op. 81, which may have been part of an unfinished quartet and a tribute to the contrapuntal experiments of late Beethoven opuses).
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While listening to Sing-Akademie rehearsals and concerts, the young genius also familiarised himself with oratorios, including Handel, to which he creatively referred in his masterworks St Paul and Elijah. Already as a child, he tried composing for vocal-instrumental forces, writing a Gloria, Psalm LXVI and Magnificat in 1822. His next sacred work was a setting of the Marian antiphon Salve Regina, from 1824, for soprano and strings – an exquisite piece that affords us some insight into an important moment in Mendelssohn’s creative development: it is patronised from beginning to end by the spirit of Haydn and Mozart, but the original, subtle harmonic writing, the refined melodic line and the candour of the lyrical expression announce the fully-fledged composer who would soon be regaling the world with his wonderful Octet and the epoch-making overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream – works of an independent, mature talent.
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The most important achievements of Mendelssohn’s maturing period include the cycle of twelve string symphonies, the first six of which were written within a short space of time in 1821, with two more following in 1822 and the last four in 1823. These are typical ‘study’ pieces, and we can follow how master Zelter gradually introduced his pupil to the secrets of the genre, seemingly recapitulating its eighteenth-century history from three-movement forms referring to Italian models of an operatic provenance, with their typical opening gesture in a unison slancio (as in String Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5), singing middle episode generally in Andante and lively, often contrapuntal finale. The tender, highly expressive second movement of String Symphony No. 2 essentially adheres to that convention, but the lyricism of its melody and the rich inventiveness reveal the true scale of the teenage composer’s talent.
In the string symphonies from the ‘second batch of six’, the teacher clearly sought to show the evolution of the genre, which the Mannheim composers expanded with a third movement minuet. Here Zelter also gradually introduces his pupil to thematic dualism as a principle shaping the opening allegro. These elements are visible in the Seventh String Symphony in D minor, the first with a minuet; in this work, one particularly admires the subtle use of chromaticism in the second movement, while the beginning of the finale is ‘typical’ Mendelssohn, wishing to liberate himself from the Classical models – yet a moment later the master bids him continue in the now clearly unwanted spirit of a Baroque fugue… .
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The next stage in Mendelssohn’s development as a composer came in the concerto. In his early essays (for violin, for piano and for both those instruments, as well as two concertos for two pianos), it is the solo parts which remain paramount, with the orchestral accompaniment rather discreet. The Concerto in D minor for violin and strings, from 1823, was long familiar solely from the Mendelssohn literature, which listed it among the juvenilia. It was only Yehudi Menuhin’s edition of the forgotten score (he bought the autograph) in 1952 and his introduction of this work into the concert repertoire that drew public attention to this charming work, in which commentators enthusiastically discerned a foretaste of the brilliant Concerto in E minor. NB it is worth mentioning that the string symphonies were also being discovered in a Berlin library at this time – for more than a century, nearly all of Felix’s youthful works remained entirely forgotten, unpublished and unplayed since their first performances in the 1820s.
This Concerto was dedicated to the violinist Eduard Rietz, a good friend of the composer’s, with whom he also worked closely later in his career. Adhering to a Classical-leaning style, this work abounds in moments of great beauty, and it also contains many interesting, mature solutions in the areas of texture and harmony. The first two movements appear to be lacking the lightness and humour typical of Mendelssohn’s later works – that feature only appears in the concise, energetic, Gypsy-style finale.
Piotr Maculewicz
transl. John Comber
