Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847): Concerto for Two Pianos in E Major
Felix Mendelssohn may well have been one of the most naturally gifted musicians who ever lived. As a young man, he wasn’t far short of astonishing. Aside from the striking preciousness of his youthful compositions (he was even younger than Mozart when he wrote his first masterpieces), his talents appeared to spread out, far and wide, in almost every direction.
Aside from writing music, he was a virtuosic pianist and a fine conductor. He would prove himself a pioneer of lost masterworks (especially of JS Bach). He founded an important music school in Leipzig which still flourishes today. He wrote a famous wedding march and the music for an equally famous Christmas carol, Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
Had he not been a musician he might easily have been a classics scholar (he once published the German translation of a work by comic Roman playwright, Publius Terentius Afer). Like his literary-minded contemporaries, Schumann and Berlioz, he was a stylish writer of prose, and he was fluent in several languages. If all of this wasn’t enough, he was also close to professional standard as a painter – wherever he travelled, he excelled at creating water-colours of some of the beautiful, dramatic landscapes he passed through.
Super-talented he may have been, but Felix was also lucky in his early life. His family background was both wealthy and distinguished. His grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn*, his Uncle Jacob Salomon Bartholdy was a diplomat and art patron, while his Aunt Sara Itzig had had close links with two of JS Bach’s children: she had been a former pupil of WF Bach and a patron of CPE Bach.
*Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786) was a central figure in the late eighteenth century Haskalah movement, which sought to preserve the cultural identity of the Jewish race, while modernizing some of its values and seeking to integrate more into its surrounding society. As a proponent of rationalism, liberalism and freedom of thought, Haskalah is often regarded as the Jewish Age of Enlightenment.
Most of his generally happy childhood was spent in Berlin, the family having relocated from Hamburg when Felix was two years old. The Mendelssohn household was evidently a very stimulating place to be. Felix’s parents, Abraham and Lea were forever holding private concerts – often involving the very best, professional performers of the day, as well as staging Shakespeare plays in their large garden. The famous philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a frequent guest, and other regular visitors included musicians, poets, painters, scientists and mathematicians.
The Mendelssohns were however in the strange position of having both wealth and influence while at the same time living at the edge of an increasingly antisemitic society. In response to this, Abraham had already renounced his faith by the time he was starting his family. Felix and his three siblings were initially brought up in a secular environment before being baptized into the Lutheran church in 1816. Abraham also ordered the family to change their surname to the more Christian “Bartholdy”, much to the chagrin of their eldest son, who would get around the problem by diplomatically signing himself “Mendelssohn-Bartholdy”.
Although Felix appeared to have good relations with his siblings, he would form a particularly close bond with his older sister Fanny, with whom he would share an exceptional musical talent. They would enjoy many of the same educational opportunities, musical and non-musical, and for a time their father even considered Fanny the more able of the two. The only difference was that Fanny always understood she would not be pursuing music as a career on account of her sex.
An important influence on the siblings’ creative growth was the compositions lessons they received from Carl Friedrich Zelter, a local composer and director of the Berlin Singakademie, in their early teens. By this point, Felix in particular had started composing prolifically.
Zelter happened to be friends with the celebrated German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and one day invited the 12-year-old Felix to play for the great man. Goethe was bowled over and observed that Felix’s gift probably exceeded even Mozart’s at a similar age. Goethe told Zelter that although “musical prodigies … are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.”
Zelter asked him, “and yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?”
Goethe replied, “yes… but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”
Felix was ready to race ahead with his first staggering burst of youthful creativity. Among his outpourings across the next two years were a dozen string symphonies, a piano concerto, a violin concerto, a string quartet, two violin sonatas, a piano trio and several piano quartets.
By the time he was coming to write the first of his two concertos for two pianos in 1823, Felix Mendelssohn might have been excused for already feeling like an experienced old pro. The first of these concertos, in E Major, is striking for its technical virtuosity, especially in the two solo piano parts, which Felix wrote for himself and Fanny to play.
Taking the late classical concerto model as its starting point, he first movement is full of irresistible energy. Although the solo pianists enter hesitatingly after a substantial orchestral exposition, they quickly dominate proceedings, breathlessly working their way through one lively idea after another, with each taking an equal share in the workload.
Much slower and less virtuosic, the second movement is nonetheless just as impressive for its 14-year-old creator. Felix manages to create a large-scale structure (lasting thirteen minutes), with a variety of material across its duration – at times calm and serene, but also wistful and melancholy. The last movement is the most Mozartian sounding of the three. Based upon two very distinct ideas shared between the pianos – one fast and fleeting, the other a more solid chorale-like melody – the music has a distinctly playful feel throughout as it rounds off the piece in a suitably jovial manner.
There was no stopping Felix after this concerto (along with its near contemporary partner in A Flat Major from 1824). A year later came his First Symphony, the year after that his first undisputed masterwork, the String Octet in E Flat Major. Then aged 17 he wrote his wonderful Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Two string quartets, both evoking the late music of Beethoven and yet touched with greatness in their own right, followed before he was twenty years old.
Felix Mendelssohn would crown his spectacular musical apprenticeship by directing a stirring production of JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion, an important masterpiece which had lain forgotten since Bach’s death eighty years earlier. The performance would mark the beginning of a great Bach revival in the nineteenth century, while inevitably some of the glory would be reflected onto Felix himself – as if the young composer was already symbolically taking his place alongside the great Austro-German masters of the previous hundred yards.
He was just twenty years old and already had accomplished so much. The possibilities ahead must have felt almost boundless to the young Felix Mendelssohn.
But would they be in practice?