Weber and Mendelssohn
Few nineteenth-century musicians were as well-connected as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. He came from a distinguished line of German Jewish intellectuals, and throughout life he retained many friends in academic circles. As a boy, he was taught by the distinguished Berlin musician, Carl Friedrich Zelter (himself a pupil of pupils of Johann Sebastian Bach), and he met such luminaries as the German poet laureate, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. As his career blossomed, his talents excited admiration and friendship from the elite of Europe, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. And his musical circle ranged widely, including performers such as Ferdinand David, Ignaz Moscheles and Julius Rietz.
Although Mendelssohn’s musical education was supervised by Zelter, an equally formative figure on the young musician was Carl Maria von Weber. By comparison to the conservative Zelter, Weber seemed a daring and modern figure, and he was mightily idolised by the adolescent Felix. Mendelssohn would recognise Weber in the street and run over to say hello. He offered childish acts of reverence, refusing to share a carriage with Weber and instead running ahead so that he could open the door for the great man. Mendelssohn also sat in on Weber’s rehearsals at the Berlin opera-house and later said that he had here learned many of his conducting techniques, although he chose not to imitate Weber’s ‘charming rudeness’ and his ‘exaggerated wavering in tempo’.
Two premieres of Weber’s work had a particular impact on the twelve-year-old Mendelssohn. On 25 June 1821 Weber premiered his Konzertstück Op.79 for piano solo and orchestra, a highly dramatic piece that would soon become a central item in Mendelssohn’s own repertory. Exactly a week earlier, Weber’s opera Der Freischütz had been premiered in the Schauspielhaus, Berlin. Mendelssohn and his family were among the audience and they shared its extremely enthusiastic response to the piece. Before the premiere the young Felix had repeatedly asked one of his friends to play extracts from the opera on the piano, and afterwards he would impatiently wait for a vocal score to be released so he could see for himself how Weber achieved such dramatic effects in music.
When Der Freischütz was premiered in Berlin on 18 June 1821, it was immediately recognised as a turning-point in the history of German opera. Unlike so many previous operas, the piece was not set in Italy or in Classical Antiquity. Nor was it peopled by mythological or noble characters. Rather, Der Freischütz was set at the end of the Thirty Years’ War — one of the darkest episodes in Germany’s history — and in a forest in Bohemia. And its dramatis personae consisted of peasants and hunters — characters who had formerly appeared in opera as mere comic side-kicks, if at all. Not only was the opera’s setting of the forest characteristically German; it also appealed to the Romantic idealisation of the lives of the forester and hunter, as opportunities for manly self-discovery.
The plot tells of a shooting-match that Max, a forester, must win if he is to ensure his marriage to Agathe. Another forester, Caspar, however, has made a Faustian pact with the diabolic Black Huntsman, Samiel, who grants him magic bullets that always hit their target, in return for the eventual surrender of Caspar’s or another victim’s life. Max becomes embroiled in Caspar’s schemes, accepting use of a magic bullet to ensure victory in the shooting-match. Yet Caspar plans to offer Max as a sacrifice to the Black Huntsman, and then instead agrees that Agathe should be the victim hit by the magic bullet. Thus the shooting-match and impending wedding are not innocent rural festivities, but filled with an impending sense of horror that is nothing short of Gothic.
If Weber’s opera Der Freischütz was a landmark in the creation of a specifically German operatic tradition, there was a wider tendency from the 1820s to explore national colour in music. Such a movement was partly a reaction against the classicism of the previous generation. But the interest in national styles was also a product of the Romantic love of remote and dramatic regions. As travel became easier, ladies and gentlemen were increasingly able to wonder at the scenic vistas, ancient cities or indigenous peasants of different areas. And few parts of Europe caught the Romantic imagination more than Scotland. Its scenery was an intoxicating mix of mountain, loch and rugged coastline; it had a valiant but ultimately tragic history, embodied above all in the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots or the failure of the Jacobite rebellions; and its evocative literature ranged from the pseudo-bardic musings of Ossian to the Borders sagas of Sir Walter Scott. All these factors made Scotland an essential stop on the itinerary of well-heeled nineteenth-century travellers.
Mendelssohn visited Scotland in the summer of 1829, on a walking tour made with his friend Karl Klingemann. Their travels included a fleeting visit to Sir Walter Scott, and also the cruise along the western coast and to the Inner Hebrides that would inspire the Hebrides Overture. The stimulus for the Scottish Symphony, however, occurred on the evening of 30 July, when Mendelssohn visited Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. The ruined abbey there made a great impression upon him.
Though the opening of the symphony was conceived in 1829, the piece was extremely slow in its gestation. During the 1830s Mendelssohn occasionally returned to it, but only in 1842 did he finally complete the piece; it was premiered on 3 March of that year by the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra. One reason for the delay may have been that his ideas often required a long time to mature, a similar phenomenon may be observed in his tendency to revise pieces such as the Italian Symphony to an obsessive extent. Mendelssohn may have also been prevented from completing the piece by his performing commitments, notably his work as musical director in Düsseldorf in the 1830s.
Such protracted gestation allowed Mendelssohn to make structural innovations. He sought ‘to eliminate the pauses between the movements as killing the temper’; and although he did not include transitions between movements (as in the Violin Concerto), he performed the work without interruption as a single whole. He also included many thematic links between movements: most notably, as already mentioned, the rocking theme of the first Allegro is transfigured in the hymn-like theme at the end of the finale. Indeed, arguably Mendelssohn’s greatest compositional achievement was in combining such structural innovations with the eighteenth-century forms he had learned from Zelter, and also with the dramatic colours so strikingly demonstrated by Weber.
This formed part of the programme note for AAM’s concert conducted by Christopher Hogwood on 9 April 2005.