Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847): Symphony no 4 in A Major (“Italian”)
If the gods had ever decreed that all composers should die at twenty, then Felix Mendelssohn would now be regarded as the greatest of them all.
No other teenage composer has ever equaled the undisputed masterworks that Felix created in his adolescent years, such as his Octet, Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream or his A Minor String Quartet.
But it’s also possible that such stunning, youthful accomplishments could have acted as something of a burden and hindrance in Felix’s later life. As a practicing Lutheran, he may well have been aware of Luke’s admonition, “beware when all speak well of you.” And almost everyone did speak well of the young Felix Mendelssohn.
He was positively adored by the older generation of Berlin intelligentsia, some of whom were friends with his well-connected family. All of them wanted to tell his parents what a credit he was to them, and from a young age, Felix felt a certain pressure to live up to such praise and to always be the perfect son.
His biggest role-model was his erudite, hard-working and professionally successful father – Felix once admitted that he would “never cease to endeavour to gain his approval.” But Mendelssohn senior also had faults that Felix would never think to challenge – and not least his essentially conservative and patriarchal values.
Felix was living in a time of exciting creative upheaval and yet he never allowed his music to stray past a certain point: his personality simply wasn’t suited to artistic trailblazing. In contrast to the wilder, more provocative talents of three of his closest contemporaries, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, Mendelssohn’s music would always retain a wholesome classical polish, a tonal language centered on Beethoven and Bach, and a general adherence to family-friendly subject matter.
But there were other factors at play. Felix was unusual in having “made it” as a composer at such a young age. He would never experience that early struggle, familiar to so many aspiring composers, for artistic recognition, nor feel any need to challenge the establishment in order to stand out. In addition, he never had to struggle for a livelihood, with his personal economy always protected by an allowance (and later generous inheritance) from his wealthy family.
Although the innovative late music of Beethoven had been a major inspiration on some of Felix’s earliest and most brilliant compositions (as indeed it had been for his composer sister Fanny), the musical idol of his maturity was JS Bach. “If my work has a resemblance to Sebastian Bach”, he once said, “I have written it just as it came to me: if I have fallen into the same mood and method as the good old master, I am so much the more glad, for you cannot suppose that I keep him in forms and not in substance. If I could, I could out of sheer emptiness bring no piece to an end.” Although Felix was referring to his sacred works here, the Bachian manner informs much of his later music, not least with its exquisite counterpoint, measured emotion and meticulous craftsmanship.
Felix would also look to emulate Bach in other, more practical ways. For the last decade of his life, he based himself in Leipzig, where Bach had spent several important years, devoting himself to the city’s musical community in much the way his worthy predecessor had a century before.
Felix’s transition from boy wonder to highly regarded pillar of the musical establishment, probably started in around 1829, at a time when he had embarked on a three year Grand Tour across Europe.
For much of the first year, he travelled extensively around Britain, including a happy period in London where he already had connections, and where he was feted wherever he went. But it was a subsequent tour of Scotland that made the most creative impression on him, with the country’s rugged mountains and windswept coastal scenery inspiring two of his most famous landscape works – the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish Symphony.
Heading south, Felix would find a subsequent ten-month stay in Italy equally inspiring, virtually from the moment he set foot in the country. “Italy at last!” he announced jubilantly in a letter home from October 1830. “And what I have all my life considered as the greatest possible felicity is now begun, and I am basking in it.”
When he got to Rome, he wrote that “I have not felt myself so well and happy for a long time; and I am filled with a perfect impatience to write… If God only grants me a continuance of this happiness, I foretell one of the richest and most delightful winters of my life.”
Lodging himself in comfortable rooms, every day in Rome was a positive joy. After breakfast he would “play and sing and compose”, and hardly want to stop. In the afternoons he would go out to find some new and wonderful thing to explore in the Italian capital – whether it was the Capitoline Hill, St Peter’s, the Vatican or one of the many art galleries – “all my occupations give me purest delight, and one paves the way for another.”
He was sociable and easily made new friends. He would go to visit the venerable and influential Danish sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, playing music on Thorvaldsen’s studio piano while the old man worked at his latest creation.
He also spent time with Hector Berlioz (then in the city as part of a two-year-residency awarded after winning the Prix de Rome). Temperamentally quite different, the two men constantly disagreed and sometimes squabbled. Berlioz laughed at Felix’s supposed religious piety and thought his music too prim; Felix found the Frenchman uncouth and his music bombastic and sometimes ugly. But they rubbed along well enough and remained friends – when once meeting up in later in life, they would symbolically swap their conducting batons, as a mark of respect for one another’s talents.
Alongside his many exuberant letters, a sense of Felix’s generally carefree mood can be gleaned from the important orchestral work he would begin to compose in Rome. It was, he announced, “the jolliest piece I have so far written… and the most mature thing I have ever done.”
Despite titling his new work Italian Symphony almost from the off, the work is mostly Germanic in manner, and until the last movement there is very little way in the way of actual Italian-sounding music. But there again, Felix shared in the general north European snobbery towards Italy’s musical life – it was one of the few things that disappointed him about him the country, having complained to his family that he had “not heard a single note worth remembering”, and that the Roman orchestras were “unbelievably bad.”
The music of the Italian Symphony is rather more an outsider’s journey of discovery through a new and beguiling land, a land characterized by cheerful sunshine, monumental architecture, solemn religious ceremonies and beautiful rural scenes.
Although the four movements have no explicit programme, they are full of vivid pictorial detail. Suffused with dance-like energy, the first movement – in the bright key of A Major (Felix would later jokingly refer to the symphony as “Blue Sky in A Major”) – suggests a lively urban scene. But nor is there anything lightweight about the music, and there are constant reminders throughout this first movement that we are listening to an organically-developing symphony, with plenty of dramatic variety.
The second movement, by way of contrast, is much more solemn and stately in manner. Set in the key of D minor, with a courtly theme played on oboes, bassoons and violas against a steady bass pulse, the music seems to recount one of the many religious ceremonies Felix would have seen in the Italian capital. But still there is little authentically Italian about the music itself, with even the main theme taken from an old Bohemian folksong.
For the third movement in A Major, Felix reaches back to the late eighteenth century, and creates the most graceful of minuets, full of elegant flowing quavers. The ceremonial feel returns briefly in the middle trio section, where a brass chorale (introduced by little fanfares) seems to evoke an old civic parade.
The terrific energy of the first movement is then resumed in the fourth, as it combines two lively Italian folk-dances – the saltarello and tarantella – in electrifying fashion. The opening of the movement is particularly memorable, with an ostinato pedal-note heard in the upper strings while the whirling melodies are played on flutes and oboes, a delicate, fleet-footed piece of scoring that recalls Felix’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture from seven years earlier.
Felix would eventually complete the symphony back in Berlin in March 1833, before conducting its London premiere two months later. But even after the work had been well received, Felix was oddly dissatisfied with it. He would revise it several times over the coming years – a process he described as “some of the bitterest moments” of his composing life – and even after that he still never quite got it the way he wanted. He refused to publish the work in his lifetime or to even have it performed in Germany.
Was this a case of the older Felix distrusting something about his carefree younger self? Clearly the revisions (and the Italian Symphony would not be the only work of Felix’s subjected to this treatment) suggest a search for technical perfection. But in doing so, he may also have started to suppress the more instinctive sides to his art.
It is also notable that the extensive revisions do not improve the work, with the English music critic Edward Greenfield once observing that Felix “undermined the original’s freshness” and that he much preferred the “white-hot inspiration” of the original. Most musicologists and audiences agree with Greenfield’s assessment, and it is usually the first version of the work that is performed today.
Perhaps the torturous revisions also suggested a general sea-change in Felix’s outlook. It is quite possible that his life never felt quite as serene and untroubled again after his Italian adventures – even if much of that was down to his own lifestyle choices.
After his permanent return to Germany, he might easily have carved out a cushy career for himself as a concert pianist or music critic (at one point he was offered the editorship of an influential music magazine). His allowance could even have allowed him to live off his compositions alone had he so desired.
But Felix Mendelssohn was also a man with a strong sense of civic duty. Instead of wallowing in his family wealth and youthful fame, he sought out full-time employment in a traditional kapellmeister role, taking on musical directorships firstly in Dusseldorf and then in Leipzig. In the latter he would involve himself in almost every facet of the city’s musical life, including its main orchestra, opera house and several prominent choirs, often working very long hours as a result.
Though Hector Berlioz was sometimes nonplussed by Felix’s devotion to such roles (“It really pains me to see a great master like Mendelssohn worried with the paltry task of chorus-master”), yet he could only marvel at “his patience and politeness. His every remark is calm and pleasant, and his attitude is the more appreciated by those who, like myself, know how rare such patience is.”
Felix deliberately programmed concerts of lesser-known music – unearthing forgotten gems from the eighteenth century as well as promoting several up and coming composers. Later he would found the Leipzig Conservatory, which still flourishes to this day*, enrolling several of his distinguished musician friends as teachers.
*Now known as the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”.
Despite often being portrayed as the ideal family man and a generally steady type, Felix could be complicated in his own way. And some of that was certainly down to the strain of overwork in his later life.
Far from being universally cheerful, as certain early biographers have suggested, he was often distant and remote to those who knew him well (he was once dubbed the “discontented Polish count”, a nickname which even he liked). He could also be highly strung to a surprising degree. If one of his beloved family members ever fell ill, he would be inconsolable for days afterwards. On another occasion, he became so tired from overwork that he started babbling away manically in English at a family dinner and had to be quietly led away to bed for a restorative twelve hours of sleep.
It was almost certainly his heavy work burden that left him less time to develop his compositional gift in later years – although he could still spark impressively at times and show all the creative energy of his youth – his E Minor Violin Concerto (1844) and his late String Quartet in F Minor (1847) being fine examples.
Throughout these later years, there was also the shadow of his talented sister Fanny, with whom he had closely shared his childhood along with a wonderfully varied education. No less a musician, she was still one of his biggest cheerleaders, even as she was often shut away at home and unable to join him with his various activities. Taking his beloved father’s lead, Felix would always strongly disapprove of Fanny creating a professional career for herself as a composer or performer.
It was a position he would eventually waver from, but only after it was almost too late.