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Dan Coren
A musical might-have-been:
Mendelssohn's real tragedy
DAN COREN
As I recently mentioned in the July Letters section, on June 24th I attended the season finale of the Delaware Chamber Music Society. I was there to hear Schubert’s C major String Quintet, one of the last of the mind-boggling flurry of works he wrote in the year before his death in 1828.
While the Schubert did indeed satisfy my soul, a Mendelssohn work on the same program disturbed it. Listening to cellist Clancy Newman and pianist Julie Nishimura perform Mendelssohn’s D Major Cello Sonata of 1843 made me ask myself, as I have many times before: Why does Mendelssohn’s music make me so annoyed and melancholy? Why can’t I just sit back and enjoy his impeccably suave and perfectly crafted music? If I could, I guess I wouldn’t be writing columns like this one.
Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was, to my mind, the most musically gifted of all his famous contemporaries– Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner. He was the only composer of that generation who truly understood the Classical style; in fact, I claim that he was the only composer in music history smart enough to assimilate Mozart’s music successfully.
Listen to this excerpt from his first string quartet to hear what I mean. It’s a perfectly executed example of the one simple musical gesture at the heart of the Classical style (technically termed a modulation to the dominant key).
Why Haydn and Mozart are immortal
Wait, wait— don’t stop reading! Although it’s tough to explain in prose what a modulation (that is, a change of key) involves if you don’t already know, please trust me when I tell you the phrase epitomizes the deceptively difficult trick of beginning in one key (in this case E-flat) and ending in another with one less flat (or one more sharp) in its key signature. If you’re a fan of Mozart and Haydn, you’ve heard that modulation hundreds of times. Believe me, you’d notice its absence— in the same way you notice when your steak needs more salt— in the music of composers who don’t bring the move off convincingly or don’t even attempt it.
And the late-18th-Century composers who couldn’t master that move include just about everyone but Haydn and Mozart. Those two, however, never tired of exploring it. Almost every first movement of every instrumental work by Haydn and Mozart– more than 95% of them, by my conservative guess– consists of reworking the same abstract dramatic narrative, the plot of which revolves around that modulation to the dominant key— what later, around 1840, came to be called sonata-form.
(Sonata-form is one of mankind’s greatest intellectual achievements, the musical equivalent of the invention of the calculus. I never tire of contemplating its complexities and delights. It’s really a shame that its 19th-Century descriptive codification has been used to write so many stultifyingly dull and intimidating program notes and record jackets. I could write a book.)
What Mendelssohn knew at 14
Haydn didn’t really hit his stride until his early 40s, and even after that it took him the rest of his career to perfect sonata-form; Mendelssohn, as his first quartet shows, understood it completely at the incredible age of 14, well before he wrote the works that are so famous for their precocity and mastery of sonata-form: the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture and the Octet for strings.
Oh, yes, then there’s Beethoven, who died in 1827. Beethoven was the ultimate classicist; he had less interest in Romantic sensibilities than just about everyone around him. He, too, devoted his musical life not to breaking down sonata-form, but to digging deeper into it, taking chances with it, in the ways that made him… well, that made him Beethoven. In the few years before his death, Beethoven left the legacy of his last string quartets, in which the classical sonata ideas are still at work, but transformed in ways that we’re still puzzling over to this day.
It seems almost certain that Schubert was unfamiliar with these works, and I’m not sure he would have known what to make of them. But it seems equally certain that Mendelssohn, while still a teenager, had not only looked over the Beethoven last quartets but also had even used them almost directly in his own string quartets. Forty years ago, nobody seems to have even considered Mendelssohn’s acquaintance with late Beethoven as a possibility; now, as a little Internet browsing will show you, it’s a generally accepted truth. If you need convincing, listen to this passage, which precedes the last movement of Mendelssohn’s A minor Quartet of 1827, and then listen to the recitative passage preceding the last movement of Beethoven’s 15th Quartet, Op. 132, also in A minor, composed in 1825. There’s no way this can be a coincidence.
An inconvenient truth
Why aren’t Mendelssohn’s string quartets as famous as they deserve to be? Perhaps it’s because the idea of Mendelssohn delving into late Beethoven is such an inconvenient truth, a truth that belies the long-established tradition of despising Mendelssohn for being glib, superficial and hopelessly conservative. But here’s the rub: Knowing the full truth about Mendelssohn’s early achievements ultimately strengthens, at least for me, that harsh judgment.
Unable to abide Berlioz’s crazy experiments, seemingly tepid to Schumann’s never-ending enthusiasms, Mendelssohn was apparently unable to participate in the musical ferment surrounding him. Nothing seemed to prod him to move on from the perfect classical style that he had mastered at such a young age. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman was written in 1843, the same year as the Mendelssohn cello sonata I heard at that chamber music concert. It might as well have been written on a different planet.
Perhaps it’s not such a good thing to be writing perfect simulacra of the masterpieces of your elders at 14. Mendelssohn makes me think of one of E. M. Forster’s most melancholic characters, Tibby Schlegel, the younger brother of the heroine, Helen, of Howard’s End. Forster says of him,
“The years between 18 and 22, so magical for most, were leading him gently from boyhood to middle age. He had never known young-manliness, that quality which warms the heart till death…”
Schubert at 14 wrote the music you’d expect of a teenage genius– original, disorganized and self-indulgent. But by his 20s he had basically re-invented classicism. He still took sonata-form as an axiomatic point of departure. But in terms of scope and harmonic language, he had created a new musical universe where nobody had ventured before.
Saving the world from Wagner
What would the world have been like if the Fates had been just a little kinder and allowed Schubert and Mendelssohn to know each other’s music as contemporaries? Perhaps a mature Schubert would have saved the world from Wagner and kept Mendelssohn from writing years and years of works like this cello sonata— which, measured against what he seemed to promise us in the late 1820s, is as infuriating as it is pleasant. And it, like almost all of Mendelssohn’s mature music, is nothing if not pleasant.
In the end, Mendelssohn’s music makes me wish I could time-travel back to the 1830s just for the chance to scream at him “Enough! Get a life! Tell a joke! Make a mess for a change! If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up writing a piece like that apotheosis of smug pomposity, Elijah.”
To read a response, click here.
Mendelssohn's real tragedy
DAN COREN
As I recently mentioned in the July Letters section, on June 24th I attended the season finale of the Delaware Chamber Music Society. I was there to hear Schubert’s C major String Quintet, one of the last of the mind-boggling flurry of works he wrote in the year before his death in 1828.
While the Schubert did indeed satisfy my soul, a Mendelssohn work on the same program disturbed it. Listening to cellist Clancy Newman and pianist Julie Nishimura perform Mendelssohn’s D Major Cello Sonata of 1843 made me ask myself, as I have many times before: Why does Mendelssohn’s music make me so annoyed and melancholy? Why can’t I just sit back and enjoy his impeccably suave and perfectly crafted music? If I could, I guess I wouldn’t be writing columns like this one.
Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was, to my mind, the most musically gifted of all his famous contemporaries– Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner. He was the only composer of that generation who truly understood the Classical style; in fact, I claim that he was the only composer in music history smart enough to assimilate Mozart’s music successfully.
Listen to this excerpt from his first string quartet to hear what I mean. It’s a perfectly executed example of the one simple musical gesture at the heart of the Classical style (technically termed a modulation to the dominant key).
Why Haydn and Mozart are immortal
Wait, wait— don’t stop reading! Although it’s tough to explain in prose what a modulation (that is, a change of key) involves if you don’t already know, please trust me when I tell you the phrase epitomizes the deceptively difficult trick of beginning in one key (in this case E-flat) and ending in another with one less flat (or one more sharp) in its key signature. If you’re a fan of Mozart and Haydn, you’ve heard that modulation hundreds of times. Believe me, you’d notice its absence— in the same way you notice when your steak needs more salt— in the music of composers who don’t bring the move off convincingly or don’t even attempt it.
And the late-18th-Century composers who couldn’t master that move include just about everyone but Haydn and Mozart. Those two, however, never tired of exploring it. Almost every first movement of every instrumental work by Haydn and Mozart– more than 95% of them, by my conservative guess– consists of reworking the same abstract dramatic narrative, the plot of which revolves around that modulation to the dominant key— what later, around 1840, came to be called sonata-form.
(Sonata-form is one of mankind’s greatest intellectual achievements, the musical equivalent of the invention of the calculus. I never tire of contemplating its complexities and delights. It’s really a shame that its 19th-Century descriptive codification has been used to write so many stultifyingly dull and intimidating program notes and record jackets. I could write a book.)
What Mendelssohn knew at 14
Haydn didn’t really hit his stride until his early 40s, and even after that it took him the rest of his career to perfect sonata-form; Mendelssohn, as his first quartet shows, understood it completely at the incredible age of 14, well before he wrote the works that are so famous for their precocity and mastery of sonata-form: the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture and the Octet for strings.
Oh, yes, then there’s Beethoven, who died in 1827. Beethoven was the ultimate classicist; he had less interest in Romantic sensibilities than just about everyone around him. He, too, devoted his musical life not to breaking down sonata-form, but to digging deeper into it, taking chances with it, in the ways that made him… well, that made him Beethoven. In the few years before his death, Beethoven left the legacy of his last string quartets, in which the classical sonata ideas are still at work, but transformed in ways that we’re still puzzling over to this day.
It seems almost certain that Schubert was unfamiliar with these works, and I’m not sure he would have known what to make of them. But it seems equally certain that Mendelssohn, while still a teenager, had not only looked over the Beethoven last quartets but also had even used them almost directly in his own string quartets. Forty years ago, nobody seems to have even considered Mendelssohn’s acquaintance with late Beethoven as a possibility; now, as a little Internet browsing will show you, it’s a generally accepted truth. If you need convincing, listen to this passage, which precedes the last movement of Mendelssohn’s A minor Quartet of 1827, and then listen to the recitative passage preceding the last movement of Beethoven’s 15th Quartet, Op. 132, also in A minor, composed in 1825. There’s no way this can be a coincidence.
An inconvenient truth
Why aren’t Mendelssohn’s string quartets as famous as they deserve to be? Perhaps it’s because the idea of Mendelssohn delving into late Beethoven is such an inconvenient truth, a truth that belies the long-established tradition of despising Mendelssohn for being glib, superficial and hopelessly conservative. But here’s the rub: Knowing the full truth about Mendelssohn’s early achievements ultimately strengthens, at least for me, that harsh judgment.
Unable to abide Berlioz’s crazy experiments, seemingly tepid to Schumann’s never-ending enthusiasms, Mendelssohn was apparently unable to participate in the musical ferment surrounding him. Nothing seemed to prod him to move on from the perfect classical style that he had mastered at such a young age. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman was written in 1843, the same year as the Mendelssohn cello sonata I heard at that chamber music concert. It might as well have been written on a different planet.
Perhaps it’s not such a good thing to be writing perfect simulacra of the masterpieces of your elders at 14. Mendelssohn makes me think of one of E. M. Forster’s most melancholic characters, Tibby Schlegel, the younger brother of the heroine, Helen, of Howard’s End. Forster says of him,
“The years between 18 and 22, so magical for most, were leading him gently from boyhood to middle age. He had never known young-manliness, that quality which warms the heart till death…”
Schubert at 14 wrote the music you’d expect of a teenage genius– original, disorganized and self-indulgent. But by his 20s he had basically re-invented classicism. He still took sonata-form as an axiomatic point of departure. But in terms of scope and harmonic language, he had created a new musical universe where nobody had ventured before.
Saving the world from Wagner
What would the world have been like if the Fates had been just a little kinder and allowed Schubert and Mendelssohn to know each other’s music as contemporaries? Perhaps a mature Schubert would have saved the world from Wagner and kept Mendelssohn from writing years and years of works like this cello sonata— which, measured against what he seemed to promise us in the late 1820s, is as infuriating as it is pleasant. And it, like almost all of Mendelssohn’s mature music, is nothing if not pleasant.
In the end, Mendelssohn’s music makes me wish I could time-travel back to the 1830s just for the chance to scream at him “Enough! Get a life! Tell a joke! Make a mess for a change! If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up writing a piece like that apotheosis of smug pomposity, Elijah.”
To read a response, click here.
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