CHAN 20256 – MENDELSSOHN, FANNY AND FELIX

Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn: Chamber Works

Introduction

Son of the renowned Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Mendelssohn (1776 – 1835) was a wealthy opera-loving banker; his wife, Lea, née Salomon (1777 – 1842), was an accomplished pianist and linguist; their salon soon became a centre for Berlin’s intellectual and musical life and their four children were nurtured with all the advantages that wise guidance could instil and money could buy. All four siblings proved musically gifted. Fanny (1805 – 1847) early emerged as an outstanding pianist and was soon composing songs and piano pieces of her own; Felix (1809 – 1847) not only matched her pianism and mastered the violin and viola, but was clearly a compositional prodigy from the start; their sister, Rebecka (1811 – 1853), was the accomplished singer in family concerts, and Paul (1812 – 1874), to judge from the works that Felix wrote for him, was a fine cellist, who eventually would become a director of the family bank. The one shadow on this idyllic existence seems to have been a congenital disposition to high blood pressure: both parents and three of the siblings were to die of strokes – Fanny, Felix, and Rebecka at lamentably young ages.

In due course, after her protective parents had made her wait for five years, Fanny was allowed to marry the Prussian court artist Wilhelm Hensel (who compensated for his tone-deafness by making many, if somewhat sentimentalised, portraits of the Mendelssohn circle). The marriage was a happy one, as was Felix’s union with Cécile Jeanrenaud, in 1837. Yet it would seem that their deepest bond remained to each other. Early on, Fanny evidently took a delight in mentoring the first musical steps of her four-years-younger brother. From 1819 she and Felix together took lessons in counterpoint and composition with the venerable pedagogue Carl Zelter – who, like Abraham Mendelssohn, was initially inclined to think Fanny the greater talent. And in his early teens, Felix composed a pair of substantial and ornate concertos for two pianos for his sister and himself to play in the family drawing room, which was large enough to accommodate a sizeable hired orchestra.

Once the professional career of Felix as composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, and administrator took off, in an increasingly demanding schedule all round Europe, personal contact became more intermittent as Fanny remained in Berlin, presiding over, composing for, and performing in the Mendelssohn Sunday musical gatherings. But they continued to encourage and comment closely upon each other’s music. Fanny was actually rehearsing Felix’s wild Goethe cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht, in May 1847, when she was overtaken by her fatal stroke. When Felix heard the news, he shrieked and fell in a faint. Already desperately overworked, he staggered on long enough to compose his frantically agitated String Quartet in F minor in her memory. But the shock of Fanny’s death undoubtedly hastened his own, from a series of strokes, less than six months later.

Nonetheless, there hovered behind their relationship a wider social issue of the time: whether it was proper for a well-born lady to enter the market as a professional composer. Whatever her talents and aspirations, there was no question that Fanny should do so as long as Abraham Mendelssohn lived. Early on he had told her that while Felix might become a professional, music must remain for her an ornament of her femininity; in other words, she could continue to delight private audiences with her compositions and performances, but she should not play in public nor publish her music. As a compromise Felix undertook to publish six of her songs under his own name, in his Op. 8 and 9 collections. This led to an embarrassment during an audience with Queen Victoria in 1842, when she singled out her favourite of his songs and he had to confess it was actually by Fanny. After Abraham’s death and with the encouragement of her mother and husband, Fanny does seem to have turned her thoughts to publication, but this time it was Felix who questioned whether she had the staying power to sustain a public career. Finally, in 1847, without consulting him, Fanny published two sets of songs and a set of choruses under her own name. When his blessing on the fait accompli duly arrived, she still doubted whether Felix meant it, but continued preparing further scores, including her new Piano Trio in D minor, for the press – though these only appeared after her death and soon fell into neglect. Not until the campaign of recent decades to restore unfairly overlooked or repressed women composers of the past to current performance, has any serious attempt been made to publish, perform, record, and reassess Fanny Mendelssohn’s substantial output.

Fanny Mendelssohn: Piano Quartet in A flat major

Whether or not she was touched with her brother’s genius, Fanny Mendelssohn was manifestly a born composer; the 460-odd pieces she left in her short life suggest that composing must have been an almost daily activity. Around 250 of these items are songs, although there are also three sacred cantatas, written in 1831. Most of the rest comprise piano pieces, though these include three sonatas and a fifty-minute cycle of seasonal character pieces, entitled Das Jahr (1841). Whether from diffidence or discouragement, she rarely attempted large scale ‘abstract’ forms, and although he helped her over the scoring of her only orchestral piece, the Overture in C major (c. 1830), Felix was sharply critical of her String Quartet in E flat major (1834) – not till the year of her death did she complete what was only her third chamber work, the Piano Trio in D minor.

Her first, the three-movement Piano Quartet in A flat major, was, in effect, a student work, which Fanny composed at seventeen under the watchful eye of Carl Zelter, and it suggests her inexperience in a certain squareness of phrasing and in occasional harmonic transitions that are more surprising than convincing. Yet the opening Allegro moderato movement is a substantial and vigorous attempt at sonata form. Formal opening chords, with piano flourishes and pattering strings, lead to a transitional theme of brilliant flying piano triplets and thence to a more cantabile second subject with almost John Field-like piano roulades. This theme also opens the development, before first subject material in the minor turns the music stormy, but is omitted from the substantially recomposed recapitulation – as though Fanny was already trying to achieve something different from the traditional formula. The Larghetto middle movement, in E flat, is a simple ternary form: the outer sections, comprising a swinging triple-time melody, enclose a faster, more agitated minor-key section.

However, the Tempo di Minuetto third movement is again unorthodox. A dainty, almost neoclassical minuet and trio form, it suddenly transitions at its conclusion into a brief but brilliant Presto on new material. Too long for a coda; too short for a finale? Or was Fanny trying to achieve a fantasia-like amalgam of both? As she composed, she was doubtless aware – they were especially close at this time – that her thirteen-year-old brother was writing his brilliant Mozart-inspired Piano Quartet in C minor; but her feelings must have been mixed when it was published, in 1823, as his Op. 1, while her own work languished, to be brought to light only in the late twentieth century.

Felix Mendelssohn: Piano Sextet in D major, Op. post. 110

By the age of fifteen, Felix Mendelssohn had not only been hailed as a new Mozart by no less than Goethe (who had actually heard the young Mozart), but seen his first two piano quartets into print, as his Opp. 1 and 2. It speaks volumes for his confidence and facility that he composed the entire half-hour score of his Piano Sextet in just fourteen days, in April and May 1824. But then, the fact that he never got around to publishing it may indicate that he never took it that seriously – the score only appearing posthumously, in 1868, as his Op. 110. The unusual line-up of piano, violin, two violas, cello, and double-bass might suggest that it was written for the players available on a particular occasion, while its florid piano part, particularly in its finale, reflects the passing influence of a work with which both he and Fanny were infatuated, and which he would often perform in later years: Weber’s romantic Konzertstück for piano and orchestra. Indeed, the unfolding of Felix’s score sounds at times less like an integrated sextet than a chamber concerto for piano and ensemble. But what is really striking by this date is the purity which Mendelssohn achieves in his instrumental part-writing. Not a note sounds unnecessary or out of place, not a texture in this, potentially problematic, medium sounds unbalanced or unclear. His was indeed a Mozartian ear.

The extensive Allegro vivace first movement glides into action with a gently insinuating melody for strings, taken up in answering figuration by the piano, this in turn progressing to an ebullient unison tutti. Rippling violas in parallel thirds lead to a piano second subject introduced by repeated minims, and the remainder of the exposition is increasingly dominated by brilliant piano triplets. After an exposition repeat, the triplets persist more or less throughout the development which is almost entirely given over to discussing the first subject. The recapitulation is relatively unaltered, by the standards of Mendelssohn, and there is a brief, bright coda. Following this substantial span, the short Adagio, in F sharp major, simply unfolds an extended serenely nostalgic triple-time melody twice, in varied dialogue between the piano and the strings.

The equally brief D minor Menuetto, marked Agitato, introduces a touch of disquiet into this hitherto cheerful work, though its F major trio is more effervescent. The Allegro vivace finale, in sonata form, bursts in with a rattling, faintly circus-like, Weber-esque tune of the kind that Mendelssohn would develop in his future piano concertos, while the second subject evolves from a prettily pattering motive – though the rest of the exposition descends to rather empty display. The development, through which the piano keeps up an incessant chatter, is more wide-ranging and relatively short, but towards the end of the recapitulation, the music seems to be working up to something. Suddenly the Menuetto returns – now marked fortissimo – the Weber-esque coda persisting in D minor until the major key reasserts itself in the very last bars.

Fanny Mendelssohn: Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 11

Composed for the birthday of her sister, Rebecka, the Piano Trio in D minor by Fanny Mendelssohn was first performed in one of her last Berlin musicales, on 11 April 1847, though it was only issued posthumously, by Felix’s publisher, Breitkopf, in 1850. In addition to her newly discovered impetus to turn professional, it is possible that Fanny found encouragement in the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 (1846), by Clara Schumann, with whom she was in frequent contact in early 1847. But where Clara’s fluently wrought textures bespeak a well-schooled composer, Fanny seems prepared to take greater risks to find herself anew.

As in several chamber works by her brother, the structural weight of the D minor Trio falls on the first and last movements, the two middle movements comprising lighter intermezzi. The work opens in hushed turbulence with a broad theme unfolded by the strings in octaves over surging waves of piano left-hand semiquavers. An eventful transition brings us to an aspiring F major second subject, initially on the cello, over tremolando piano chords. There is no exposition repeat but the development of these ideas is wide-ranging and dramatic, with only a brief moment of calm for a citation of the second subject. The opening idea returns fortissimo with the texture reversed – massive piano chords against surging strings – while the recapitulation of the aspiring second subject veers uncertainly between D major and minor, before settling in the minor. Thence the movement seems to die away, only to flare up again at the last, completing a fully ten-minute structure that refutes the doubts which Fanny had expressed – or the doubts that had been instilled in her – as to whether she could sustain a large-scale developmental form.

In complete contrast, the second movement proves a wistful Andante espressivo in A major, composed against a ternary-form background, but elaborated in quite wayward detail. The initial idea, in a gentle sarabande rhythm, proves a quasi-ternary structure in itself, and when it returns, it is cross-cut with phrases from the plaintive F sharp minor central section in an almost developmental manner before coming to rest. The brief D major third movement, which follows attacca, is entitled ‘Lied’, comprising what, in its amiable unfolding, was perhaps Fanny’s final tribute to the ‘songs-without-words’ genre. Yet the finale, back in D minor, is strikingly adventurous: a fantasia-like structure that begins with a wandering, cadenza-like piano line alternating with a peremptory sequential melody over rising arpeggios. Once the strings join in, the tempo quickens, by way of an upwardly mobile sequence, to a march-like idea in ‘ratatat’ rhythm, and these materials are driven forward in a tonally unstable flux which, even in moments of respite, never ceases to generate a sense of expectation. This is at last fulfilled in a climactic reprise of the second subject from the opening movement, after which the music races to its jubilant close. One certainly wonders what a liberated, professional Fanny might have gone on to achieve had she been granted a few more years.