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Article Excerpt
The name of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) is familiar to every serious musician, and many of his works are familiar to everyone who has had any exposure to Western art music. He is mentioned at least briefly in every general music-history and music-appreciation textbook and is granted an article in all major encyclopedias of music. He has been the subject of numerous biographies, and most libraries' shelves include at least one of the many published collections of excerpts from his correspondence. His music was widely published during his lifetime, a collected works edition was issued already in the 1870s, and numerous further editions have been issued since then.
On the face of it, these observations might suggest that the educated musical public's knowledge of Mendelssohn's life and works is reasonably well-founded. But this impression is misleading, for Mendelssohn remains an elusive figure. Much of his music and the vast majority of his letters remain unpublished; despite an impressive array of reliable editions published in the last few decades, most of the works that have been printed continue to be known primarily through corrupt or otherwise unreliable texts; and substantial quantities of other significant primary source materials have never been studied by scholars or considered in the biographical and critical literature. In short, the evidence on which most modern images of Mendelssohn are based is too limited to be considered representative. Latter-day observers may be familiar with the composer's name, (1) with some aspects of his biography, and with a small portion of his output, but in Mendelssohn's case as with other major composers such one-dimensional knowledge is necessarily discomfiting.
Over the last few decades, a remarkable revival of scholarly and general interest in Mendelssohn and his music has been generated by a growing cognizance of the extraordinary quantity, breadth, and import of the primary documents of his life and works; this revival in turn has increased general awareness that conventional views of the composer and his historical significance have been shaped at least as much by specious music-historiographic polemics as by viable historical and aesthetic considerations. (2) But these developments have had little impact beyond the relatively limited circles of Mendelssohn specialists. Music history textbooks, music criticism, and the press in general offer little evidence of any broadened perspective on the composer's life, works, and historical significance.
The present remarks propose that the key to a historically and musically viable view of Mendelssohn as composer and nineteenth-century cultural figure is the substantial corpus of little-known primary sources that document his life and work. I begin by exploring some salient developments in Mendelssohn's convoluted reception history, then summarize the historical and modern dispositions of the epistolary, chronographic, and musical primary sources. I conclude with some brief case studies in the insights offered by these documents and a review of some important developments in Mendelssohn research that have been occasioned at least in part by scholars' engagement with little-known source material. For convenience, appendix 1 offers a bibliography of significant Mendelssohn research published since the 1997 commemorative year. The notes in this essay are keyed to those entry numbers whenever possible. (3)
PROBLEMS OF RECEPTION HISTORY
The widespread acclaim Mendelssohn enjoyed during his lifetime derived in no small part from the compositions he published: seventy-two numbered opera, plus an additional twenty-four minor publications released without opus numbers. Yet it would be misleading to attribute his prestige entirely or even primarily to his efforts as a composer, for his reputation from about 1835 onward also derived from his contributions in other areas of musical endeavor. He was by most accounts a peer of the other great piano virtuosos of the day, and was without doubt the mid-nineteenth-century's greatest organist. (4) Equally important were his lifelong activities as a conductor. From his earliest ad hoc and guest appearances on the podium, through his tenures as music director in Dusseldorf, Leipzig, and Berlin, to his numerous performances at the helm of the massed ensembles of Europe's major music festivals, he earned a reputation for having utter command of orchestral and choral ensembles and for performances of works by composers ranging from Lassus and Lotti through Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. (5) He was known as a fastidious and innovative programmer--not only one of the central figures in the formation of the western European musical canon, but also an influential promoter of the idea that the world of musical performance should consist of a cross-section of historical styles. And his pedagogical influence was likewise formidable, for he not only advised and promoted many aspiring young composers, but also was the de facto founder, organizer, and director of Germany's first conservatory of music (the Leipzig Conservatory, now the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy"). In these ways he also assumed the role of music educator in a culture intent on the role of music in the average citizen's musical Bildung.
Mendelssohn's reception between the mid-1820s and 1847 hardly foretokened the developments of the century after his death. Widely regarded by the end of his life as his generation's most promising heir to the compositional legacies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, he quickly became a whipping-boy in the revolutionary fervor of the post-1848 years--the personification of the fundamental values and attributes of the Vormarz culture that was the target of the midcentury revolutions. (6) Moreover, in this increasingly anti-Semitic Europe he was an artist who bore a name that was conspicuously Jewish, famous as such because of the contributions of his illustrious grandfather, the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn thus became emblematic of a culture that (in words attributed to Franz Liszt) had "cultivated art to the point of invading it" and had "taken possession of all the genres," but that had "never known how to create art." (7) As Wagner put it in his infamous tract on "Jewry in Music," (8) Mendelssohn represented a race whose capacity for self-expression was at best limited and at worst repugnant. He had "shown that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may have the finest and most varied education, the highest and most sensitive sense of honor--yet even with the aid of all these advantages be unable to call forth in us even once that deep effect that takes hold of our heart and soul, an effect which we await from music because we know her to be capable of it." (9)
These criticisms of the success and influence Mendelssohn had attained in prerevolutionary culture coincided with his followers' attempts to sustain his presence in musical life through a series of posthumous editions of his music--publications that were regrettably uncritical (as also in the case of the posthumous editions of Schumann's music). Soon after the composer's death, members of the musical press (especially in England, where the Mendelssohn cult had become a matter of near-idolatry) began proclaiming that the works he had left unpublished were the property of "the world," appealing for the immediate posthumous publication of the unknown compositions, and harshly criticizing the composer's heirs for the slow rate of release. (10) These appeals coincided with the dissemination in print of a number of compositions that Mendelssohn had either simply left unpublished or actively suppressed (see appendix 2 for an overview of the works published between 1848 and 1877, grouped by genre). These publications occurred in two series: the first, released between 1848 and 1852, extended through opus 100; the second, released between 1867 and 1873, included opera 101-21. All totaled, these publications added 106 individual compositions distributed over fifty posthumous opus numbers to the catalogs of Mendelssohn's works.
Despite laudable intentions, these posthumous publications of Mendelssohn's works also generated serious problems. To begin with, although the early releases in these series were duly supplied with disclaimers acknowledging their posthumous status ("opus X / no. Y of the posthumously published works"), the second phrase of the disclaimer was eventually dropped. Thus, works such as the "Italian" Symphony and the "opus 81 string quartet" (11)--works that Mendelssohn had rejected, and whose identity was materially altered through their posthumous publication--were eventually subsumed into the composer's oeuvre without even the benefit of the unwieldy but accurate designation of "opus posthumous." On the whole, these spurious editions distorted the public view of Mendelssohn's music and his growth as a composer: certainly he would have been confused at the designation of the A-major ("Italian") and D-minor ("Reformation") symphonies, composed between the Second and Third symphonies in 1833-34 and 1830-32 respectively, as his fourth and fifth essays in the genre.
The dissemination history of Mendelssohn's music in the 1850s also casts important light on the collected works edition issued by Breitkopf & Hartel under the general editorship of the composer's friend Julius Rietz between 1874 and 1877, for perhaps the single most important consequence of this series was that it crystallized, in seemingly authoritative form, the problematic representations of Mendelssohn's output that had been disseminated since his death. The series' title pages assert that the editions were "critically reviewed" (kritisch durchgesehen) by Rietz, "with permission of the original publishers," but these implications of scholarly authority are misleading. For one thing, the Rietz edition was anything but complete; indeed, it did not aspire to be a Gesamtausgabe, only a collected works edition. Moreover, the Rietz editions were hardly critical, even by standards of the day. Despite these problems, however, the Rietz collected works edition remains the central source by which Mendelssohn's music is known and performed, even today.
These problems of textually corrupt dissemination are by no means limited to Mendelssohn's music, for a number of comparably problematical editions of his correspondence were published contemporaneously. A prolific and talented letter writer, Mendelssohn penned perhaps seven thousand letters between 1819 and his death in 1847. (12) In keeping with the nineteenth century's burgeoning enthusiasm for viewing the lives and works of celebrities through the lens of their correspondence, the composer's younger brother, Paul (1812-1874), in 1861 published a selection of Felix's correspondence from his "grand tour" in a collection titled Reisebriefe von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832. (13) This collection of letters--one of the first musical contributions to the great tradition of quasi-biographical epistolary and novelistic travelogs that included de Stael's Corinne; ou L'Italie (1807), Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), Goethe's Italienische Reise (1816-17), and Mary Shelley's History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), among others (14)--quickly went into a second German edition as well as English and French translations; all were reprinted and reissued numerous times. On the heels of these highly successful collections, in 1863, there appeared a sequel--a collection of letters from 1833-47, coedited by Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the composer's eldest son, Carl (1838-1897) (15)--and the two volumes were also combined into a single publication beginning in 1864. (16) These publications, too, quickly appeared in translation and were reissued in numerous subsequent editions. (17)
Many of Mendelssohn's friends, colleagues, and students also preserved their correspondence and published it in the latter years of the century, most often in the context of memoirs, some of them more self-serving for the authors than historically accurate. Earliest among these was the autobiography of Adolph Bernhard Marx, a close friend of Mendelssohn until the two had a falling-out in the later 1830s, after which Marx, a brilliant and influential writer, became an increasingly vocal detractor of Mendelssohn. (18) A second problematical, if also generally sympathetic, epistolary memoir was published in 1869 by Eduard Devrient, an actor and theater historian who was a longtime friend of Mendelssohn, but who since 1849 had also collaborated with Richard Wagner. (19) Understandably, Devrient, writing more than twenty years after Mendelssohn's death and after almost as many years of acquaintance with Wagner, tends to portray Mendelssohn through the lens of the intervening watershed years of musical history; Wagner's ideas on music and drama clearly inform his assessments and ideas. Other such memoirs--most of them featuring a healthy sampling of previously unpublished letters--appeared in the coming decades, (20) but by far the most important was Die Familie Mendelssohn 1729-1847: Nach Briefen und Tagebuchern, compiled and edited by Sebastian Hensel (son of Mendelssohn's older sister, Fanny Hensel). Originally intended for private dissemination only, this family memoir was first published in 1879 with the hope that it would be read "as the chronicle of a good middle-class family in Germany." (21) Like the previous collections of correspondence, it, too, quickly became a best seller, and was widely translated and reprinted. (The book was reissued as recently as 1995 by Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.)
Although these nineteenth-century editions of primary sources concerning Mendelssohn performed a valuable service by making available to the public firsthand evidence of Mendelssohn's life and works, and by preserving that evidence for later generations, they also often presented the primary sources in corrupt versions. Among other things, in many such collections letters were tacitly conflated and edited for content. The problems were obvious enough to be identified in contemporary reviews. (22) Yet those reviews quickly receded into historical distance, while the volumes that were their subjects were reprinted or edited anew without undertaking the sort of substantive revisions that would have been necessary to warrant description as critical editions. Here as in the case of the Rietz edition, then, scholars and the musical public were presented with seemingly comprehensive and authoritative evidence, but the impressions of completeness and critical authority were misleading.
Little headway was made in addressing these problems until the last decades of the twentieth century. Despite some outstanding contributions, (23) early-twentieth-century work on Mendelssohn drew almost exclusively on the Rietz editions of the music, the bowdlerized nineteenth-century editions of the correspondence between the composer and his family, and earlier secondary literature. The half-century from about 1910 to about 1950 represented a nadir. Monuments and important scholarly documents concerning the composer were destroyed, his music was banned in Germany, and his presence in the concert repertoire of other countries diminished to only a few pieces (the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, the "Italian" and "Scottish" Symphonies, the E-Minor Violin Concerto, and the Variations serieuses). (24) Historians--some of them willing scholarly colluders in the racist ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s (25)--did nothing to address the problem, and the musical public had little repertoire upon which to base any more substantive views. By the end of World War II Mendelssohn's reputation, and with it the general musical public's awareness of his contributions to nineteenth-century music, had sustained serious damage.
Since the 1950s, however, general awareness of the limitations of those resources, and the general readiness of scholars to go beyond them, has increased steadily. Already in 1949 Peter Sutermeister issued a new, more reliable edition of the Reisebriefe that had been so badly served in previous editions; this volume still contained errors and omissions, but many of these were corrected in Sutermeister's subsequent editions of the letters, beginning in 1958. (26) In the meantime, Eric Werner--already distinguished as a scholar of Judaic music and its intersections with western European musical style--issued the first postwar life-and-works study to draw extensively on unpublished letters and other archival documents, in his Mendelssohn article for the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart in 1959. (27) This text, important as one of the first to deal frankly with the importance of the composer's Jewish heritage for his life and works, became the foundation of Werner's full-length Mendelssohn biography, which appeared first in English translation in 1963 and then in a substantially revised version of its original German in 1980. (28) Unfortunately, these three contributions are afflicted by problems serious enough to threaten Werner's scholarly credibility (see p. 70-71, below), for many of the documents Werner adduces cannot now be traced, while others are demonstrably misquoted or otherwise misrepresented; (29) in addition, many events and circumstances he presents as fact are simply incorrect. Nevertheless, Werner's contributions to Mendelssohn scholarship are undeniably important, for not since George Grove's original Mendelssohn article (and Ernst Wolff's biography based largely on it) (30) had any life-and-works studies undertaken so seriously to surmount their dependence on the unreliable sources then available in print.
The 1950s and 1960s also witnessed the relocation of a number of vital collections of Mendelssohn primary sources into public archives and libraries, a development that facilitated a surge in scholarship drawing on the previously unpublished documents of Mendelssohn's life. The principal contributors to this newly emergent discourse were scholars charged with preserving and curating the manuscript sources in their public domains. Working with Hugo von Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1894-1975, great-grandson of the composer), Max F. Schneider formed the Internationale Felix-Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft (Basel) in 1958; this society sponsored a research institute and an archive containing unpublished manuscripts of the composer, and the holdings of this archive were transferred to the Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz in 1964, becoming the Mendelssohn-Archiv. This collection came under the curatorship of Rudolf Elvers, who in the coming decades issued a series of exemplary transcriptions and interpretations of important Mendelssohniana that had remained in manuscript. (31) These scholars' efforts to disseminate previously obscure Mendelssohn sources were followed by comparable studies by Hans-Gunter Klein, Margaret Crum, and Peter Ward Jones, (32) as well as inventories of several other important collections.
The turn to the 1960s also witnessed an increased scholarly reconsideration of the primary sources for Mendelssohn's music. On the one hand, the new decade witnessed the birth of a new critical edition of Mendelssohn's works--the Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys (33)--the most explicit recognition up to that point of the philological and editorial inadequacies of the Rietz editions. Although the new Leipzig series evidently was launched with an eye to impact--publishing first of all the Concerto in E Major for two pianos and orchestra (1960), then its counterpart in A-flat major (1961), and then the series of youthful string sinfonie Mendelssohn composed between 1821 and 1824 (1965-72) as well as the youthful opera Die beiden Padagogen (1966) and the first five string quartets (1976-77)--it was unable to sustain its momentum. Having added twenty-one substantial and previously unknown works to the published repertoire by a major composer, the series had certainly made its point: if nothing else, these editions demonstrated that scholarship concerning Mendelssohn had much ground left to cover. On the other hand, because these newly published compositions represented only a small percentage of the unpublished works, general awareness of the quantity and quality of those other works remained low.
Obviously, the emergence of previously unknown works would have been impossible without scholars' cognizance and exploration of manuscript materials. But the systematic and source-critical study of compositional process, long since accepted as a central area of scholarship for other major composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had remained largely absent from research concerning Mendelssohn's music. This situation, too, changed dramatically in the 1960s, largely on the momentum generated by Donald Mintz's dissertation on Mendelssohn's compositional process. (34) Pointing out a number of obvious paradoxes, ironies, and conceptual lacunae in conventional critiques of Mendelssohn, Mintz undertook a more methodologically objective assessment of the composer and his musical aesthetics, working principally on the basis of surviving evidence regarding his compositional priorities as reflected in the revisions recorded in manuscripts for the D-Minor Piano Trio, Elijah, and the A-Major ("Italian") Symphony. Mintz's arguments were strong enough to launch an entire new branch of Mendelssohn scholarship--one that has yielded significant findings regarding not only Mendelssohn's work habits in general, (35) but also repertoires including his earliest compositional efforts, (36) the chamber music, (37) the songs, (38) the sacred works, (39) the stage music, (40) and the works for piano, organ, (41) and orchestra. (42) Equally importantly, Mintz's line of inquiry presented scholars and musicians who were concerned about the intractable web of specious arguments concerning Mendelssohn with a promising methodology for reinvestigating the subject: no longer could it be quite so comfortable simply to use conceptually slippery but ideologically potent labels such as "romantic classicist" and "classical romantic" as justification for an assessment of Mendelssohn that had been born largely of political rather than artistic considerations, and that was based on evidence that was neither pure, systematically chosen, nor critically presented.
Clearly, the work done since World War II has yielded fertile soil for the ongoing general reassessment of Mendelssohn. Ironically, however, a single body of evidence lies at the heart of both the latter-day Mendelssohn renaissance and his problematical reception history: the autograph documents that transmit the events and activities of his life and the music he produced.
THE SOURCES
The widespread increase in source-critical scholarship in the later twentieth century was particularly propitious for Mendelssohn research, for this development coincided with the relocation of many previously dispersed source materials into far fewer collections that were relatively centralized and (in large part) publicly accessible. For purposes of these remarks, the sources at the core of these collections may be divided into two broad classes: the letters, diaries, and other nonmusical manuscripts; and the musical manuscripts themselves. (43)
Letters, Chronographic Archivalia, and Library Items
As mentioned above, Mendelssohn penned some seven thousand letters, of which about six thousand are traceable today (either as originals, contemporary copies, or later photographic reproductions); to date, perhaps one-third of the surviving letters have appeared in print. In addition, the composer was an active diarist, regularly recording many of his passing impressions and making notes to himself in pocket-sized book-lets and Schreibkalender between 1829 and 1847. Two of the twenty-four surviving diaries have been edited, annotated, and published, but most remain in manuscript. (44) Finally, Mendelssohn was an avid collector of precious manuscripts as well as printed music and books and visual artworks, and a remarkable amount of his library and his collection survives. (45) These materials transmit valuable information not only about his interests, tastes, and proclivities, but also (as in his copied and annotated scores of music by other composers) about his specific responses to those items.
The sheer quantity of these documents is daunting enough, but the challenges they pose have multiplied over the course of their complex transmission histories. (46) Prospects for recovering the composer's correspondence were generally good in the years immediately following his death, for many of Mendelssohn's correspondents, appreciative of his engaging prose style and aware that the documents were valuable, retained the letters in safekeeping and passed them on to their heirs. Indeed, in several instances this familial mode of transmission led to remarkably well-preserved collections that were published while still intact (e.g., the collections of correspondence with Hiller, Moscheles, Klingemann, and Lindblad (47)). More than a decade elapsed between the composer's death and his heirs' first systematic efforts to regain access for preservation and possible publication, however, and no sooner had these endeavors been launched than they were threatened by familial problems. (48)
Already in the hands of a diverse and geographically far-flung group of recipients, the vast majority of Mendelssohn's outgoing letters were further dispersed during the great social and economic upheavals of the early twentieth century: with German hyperinflation in the 1920s, the heirs of many of Mendelssohn's original correspondents were compelled to sell off part of their family estates; consequently, numerous letters were auctioned and disappeared into private possession. Because many of these letters were auctioned one at a time, previously coherent collections were permanently dispersed. Similarly, as is well known, the 1930s and 1940s witnessed an enormous wave of emigres from the continent (especially Germany), and some of these were able to bring some of their family valuables along with them, in the process relocating many letters to the United States and Great Britain. The problems attendant to these events account for most of the Mendelssohn letters we now have to consider lost or missing.
As mentioned above, however, thousands of letters still survive,...
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