Mendelssohn

Benedict Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351558518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume of essays brings together a selection of the most significant and representative writings on Mendelssohn from the last fifty years. Divided into four main subject areas, it makes available twenty-two essays which have transformed scholarly awareness of this crucial and ever-popular nineteenth-century composer and musician; it also includes a specially commissioned introductory chapter which offers a critical overview of the last half century of Mendelssohn scholarship and the direction of future research. The addition of new translations of two influential essays by Carl Dahlhaus, hitherto unavailable in English, adds to the value of this volume which brings back in to circulation important scholarly works and constitutes an indispensable reference work for Mendelssohn scholars.

Part I
Aesthetics

[1]
Two Essays from Das Problem Mendelssohn (1974)

Carl Dahlhaus

Translated by Benedict Taylor

Foreword

To speak of a Mendelssohn renaissance would be doubtless a crude exaggeration (besides being poor style, as was abhorred by Mendelssohn). But the coincidence that two recordings of the youthful String Symphonies have almost simultaneously appeared is more than chance. And equally the increase in academic interest in Mendelssohn is conspicuous, an interest which the present collection of essays may be understood to document. This volume stems from a symposium of November 1972 (a conference for whose organisation we must thank the President of the Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft, Dr Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel). And perhaps the academic enthusiasm that turned its attention to Mendelssohn is all the more ‘authentic’ given that the exterior date — the 125th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s death — offered no compelling reason for scholarly representation according to the usual practice applied for commemorative years.

In the discussion following the papers — a discussion that has not been printed, as it proved difficult to find a balance between the liveliness and involvement of an unedited version on the one hand, and the ossified and sometimes manipulated semblance of logical consistency in a pruned-down version on the other, which would justify publication — in the discussion, it was primarily the problem of musical classicism to which we ever returned.

As questionable as the term ‘classicism’ may be as a label in the humanities, as a formula by which a subject is not so much designated by name as dismissed without thought, it was equally clearly revealed that the term fulfils a useful heuristic function. First, it appears as if for Mendelssohn the regularity of phrasal and formal structure which has been perceived as ‘classicistic’ was not simply determined by tradition but — as one may read from his sketches — had often as not been laboriously achieved. Mendelssohn’s ‘classicism’ should therefore not be seen as an epigonism which takes for its preconditions what were simply outcomes in classical music, but would thus be itself an instance of the ‘classical’: an original, underivative stage of style. Furthermore, the classical movement of Haydn and Mozart is, following Thrasybulos Georgiades, characterised by discontinuity and irregularity (at least in those genres that raise themselves above the humble species of dance and diverting music), so that in music around 1840 continuity and regularity — which are no inheritance of the musically classical — might be taken as ‘classicistic’ in a general aesthetic sense, but not in any specific music-historical sense.

Secondly, the thesis that the taking over of classical form as a bare shell is characteristic of musical ‘classicism’ proves questionable. On one hand, the discrepancy between theme and formal outline is more conspicuous with Chopin (who no one counts among the classicists) than in the ‘classicist’ Mendelssohn. And on the other, the assertion that with Mendelssohn the song-like themes — the ‘Romantic’ melodic and harmonic structural-type of the ‘song without words’ — are merely used to ‘fill-out’ the formal schemata specified by tradition (and preserved with classical piety) grasps too little. Instead, the (ostensibly conventional) regularity of form constitutes the condition for the variative unfolding of song-like themes (supposedly alien to the sonata). The contradiction between theme and form, unmediated in Chopin, is mediated in Mendelssohn. What appears, seen from Beethoven onwards, as merely discrepancy — as a disintegration of structural details and formal claims, through which the form becomes (‘classicistically’) a bare casing — must be understood with Mendelssohn as an original presentation of a compositional problem, and recognised as such.

Third, so far as the leaning towards the poetic-programmatic counts as ‘Romantic’ or ‘Neo-Romantic’, one may name the opposite tendency, that of establishing an ‘absolute musical’ form through the association of an ever denser network of thematic-motivic relations, as ‘classicistic’. (Accordingly, besides Mendelssohn, Brahms would also number among the classicists, as seems to have been the case with Walter Niemann.) The word use takes for granted that the programmatic music of the New German School represented musical progress and Brahms’s technique of developing variation musical conservatism: the idea of loyalty to ‘old truths’ connects instinctively with the word ‘classicistic’. This assumption (which in the nineteenth century no one — whether opponent or follower of Brahms — doubted), is, however, if not untenable, at least made dubious through the consequences that were drawn in the twentieth century by Arnold Schoenberg from the work of Brahms, whom he apostrophised as ‘Brahms the progressive’.

The historical characterisation of Mendelssohn — the use or avoidance of the word ‘classicism’ — is based therefore upon aesthetic premises: on the validity or otherwise of the perception of effortless compositional technique, of epigonism, and of form as ‘casing’, all of which are included in the notion of classicism. The aesthetic judgement, however, depends in turn upon the critique of musical form, upon the interpretation of the relationship between song-like thematicism and sonata form. And a decisive outcome of the Mendelssohn Symposium (if a participant is permitted a verdict) could well be the insight that a formal-analytical establishment of aesthetic and historical theories about Mendelssohn is both possible and necessary. Possible, as the problem-free appearance, the impression that there is nothing to analyse in Mendelssohn’s phrasal and formal structures, has been proved deceptive (to pin down analytically the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality in a Song without Words may well be more difficult than to uncover or construct the motivic relationships in a Beethoven sonata). Necessary, because the history of Mendelssohn reception shows that the accumulation of the judgement of generations — for some historians the most reliable type of verdict — has led to nothing more than the hardening of a dubious stereotype, so that (without overprizing it) one may expect rather different results from an analysis of compositional techniques and aesthetics.

On the other hand, musical analyses — whose methods are never presuppositionless but always developed from models with a particular historical location — must be historically supported so as not to fall into unfounded constructs. (Analytical, aesthetic and historical criteria should be conceived of as being interdependent, connected through their mutual interplay, and not as being related through a one-sided foundation in a single category.)

Mendelssohn’s compositional procedures are characterised by a precise feeling for musical genres, for their distinctions and traditions, and for the stylistic peaks pertinent to them; and the fact that later generations (whose consciousness of such stylistic highpoints scarcely extended further than the crude dichotomy between serious and popular music) did not recognise such discreet gradations as generic features (be this in the partsong for male-voice choir that was determined by the particular situation of the music festival and not designed for general dissemination through printing, or the monodic strophic song that remained within the compass of the Goethean song aesthetic) but perceived these as deficiencies in compositional technique and censored them accordingly, is the cause of many errors of judgement about Mendelssohn’s works or groups of works.

In order to be adequately historically based, a judgement concerning the ‘discontinuity’ of the organ sonatas presupposes no less than deciding on the justification of, firstly, the aesthetic claims of the pieces and their stylistic exemplars (and moreover whether we are dealing with a ‘notated improvisation’ or a ‘work’ in the emphatic sense of the Classical-Romantic conception), and, secondly, on the generic character of the intended genre’s tradition (the notion of the sonata may be meant in the sense of either the pre-classical or classical, and thus a row of heterogeneous movements akin to the suite may appear as either an aesthetic shortcoming or as a legitimate trait of the genre).

Although Mendelssohn literature has hardly been sparse, for a discussion of Mendelssohn as a composer that has a scholarly, scientific character, and thus in which analytically supported argument predominates instead of aesthetic platitudes, there has been until now nothing but scattered attempts. And the point of the Berlin Symposium was therefore not to conclude this discussion and gather the results, but to bring them into conjunction in the first place and to show that this discussion is meaningfully possible. One can fight for the composer Mendelssohn — and indeed fight through scholarship.

Mendelssohn and the traditions of musical genre

1

The habit of labelling Mendelssohn a ‘classicist’ or ‘classical Romantic’ relies upon the presumption that classicism is a style, whose formal canon originates from a ‘classic’ that is valid as a paradigm. Mendelssohn belonged to a post-classical age, whose representatives, as Immermann expressed it, perceived themselves as born belatedly, as epigones.

The chance or misfortune to stand on the shoulders or in the shadows of a classic is something musical classicism shares with Romanticism, however, and the dependence on the classical (or at least on the picture one makes of it) is scarcely less in certain sonatas, quartets and symphonies by Schubert, Weber, Chopin or Schumann as in those of Mendelssohn. So much so, that Friedrich Blume felt compelled as a consequence to bracket together classical and Romantic music into a single epoch, and to deny a profound historical caesura analogous to those boundaries of 1430, 1600 and 1740.¹ Indeed, Blume’s thesis that the musical canon of forms did not change with the transition from the classical to the Restoration period — the time of Romanticism, of classicism and the Biedermeier — appears an exaggeration, in view of the Romantic Lied, the lyrical piano piece and the symphonic poem. Nevertheless, one must concede to Blume the fact that musical Romanticism, just as with classicism, represents no antithesis to the classical but rather a successor. A polemical relationship to the immediate past, as was characteristic for those epochal breaks of 1430, 1600 and 1740, manifests itself nowhere.

The type of dependence on the classical is different, however, for Mendelssohn from that in other composers, whose Romantic nature no one doubts. The contradiction occurring in Chopin between sonata form, which he summoned from outside rather than making his own from the inside out, and the themes that fill out this schema, is a discrepancy perceptible almost nowhere in Mendelssohn: the musical development of ideas and the formal outline harmonise seamlessly. It would be precarious, however, to designate the disparity between theme and form in Chopin as ‘Romantic’ and the successful mediation of Mendelssohn as ‘classicistic’, since the erosion of traditional form into an empty shell, the hardening of what has been handed down by tradition, suggests the that expression ‘classicism’ is evident not in Mendelssohn but rather in Chopin, in whose sonatas form, as if something indifferent, has become mechanical.

The rigorous conclusion — that the distinction between Romanticism and classicism becomes indefinably blurred and is therefore of little use as a description of historical reality — would, however, be hasty. (Eric Werner’s suggestion of avoiding characterising Mendelssohn as a ‘classicist’ and counting him instead as a ‘mannerist’ might initially provoke astonishment; this idea, however, is so weakly grounded that it casts upon itself the suspicion that it was motivated by the quite unnecessary attempt to keep some distance from Mendelssohn a vocabulary perceived as pejorativel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• PART I AESTHETICS
• PART II MUSIC AND SOURCE-STUDIES
• PART III CONTEXT AND CULTURE
• PART IV BIOGRAPHY AND RECEPTION
• Name Index