Mendelssohn at two hundred
From Alex Ross, “The Youngest Master: Mendelssohn at Two Hundred,” New Yorker, 23 February 2009, pgs. 77-78:
Felix Mendelssohn, whose two-hundredth birthday fell on February 3, was the most amazing child prodigy in musical history. “What about Mozart?” you may ask. Go talk to Goethe, who heard the child Mozart in 1763 and the child Mendelssohn almost sixty years later, and who gave the palm to young Felix. According to Goethe, Mendelssohn bore “the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child.” Even if Goethe got a bit carried away, his enthusiasm is understandable. Mendelssohn began composing at the age of ten, and within a year of two he was producing pieces that were technically secure and, at times, strikingly imaginative. Two of his adolescent works – the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – have won permanent places in the repertory. Mozart reached a comparable level only in his early twenties.
...By his mid-teens, Mendelssohn had found his own fiercely elegant voice. The Octet burns with a kind of happy fury; Larry Todd, Mendelssohn’s most authoritative biographer, has argued that its lunging themes and crackling counterpoint were inspired by scenes from Goethe’s “Faust.” Even more staggering is the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Overture, which offers one magical tableau after another: the opening harmonies of woods and horns, their notes gleaming like stars emerging from mist; an elfin scurrying of strings; opulent themes for the royals and a rugged dance for Bottom and the players; and the coda for Puck, which moves beyond comedy into some sphere of transcendent sadness. Rich in feeling, free of excess, it almost sounds like the statement of a wise old man – a musical Goethe, dreaming of youth. That it came from a boy of seventeen essentially defies expectation.
The question for Mendelssohn, as for all prodigies, was “What next?” He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes, at the age of thirty-eight. Works such as the “Hebrides” Overture, the “Scottish” and “Italian” symphonies, and the Violin Concerto showed no obvious falling-off of inspiration. He was lionized in Central Europe and also in England, where he became something like a guest national composer. But there were mutterings of discontent. Hector Berlioz complained that Mendelssohn was “rather too fond of the dead.” Heinrich Heine mocked his “very serious seriousness,” saying that the music lacked the raw feeling, the “naïveté,” essential to the highest art. By 1900, critics were dismissing Mendelssohn as a relic of the Biedermeier and Victorian eras, of the bourgeois cult of comfort. George Bernard Shaw lambasted the composer’s “kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering.” Mendelssohn remained popular, but he seemed to slip from the ranks of the truly great.
Sunday, April 5, 2009