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210
The Music at Tippet Rise
Mendelssohn studied with a pupil of Clementi’s, and his sister Fanny, an equally talented pianist, studied with the patron of the great C.P.E. Bach. Both siblings based their music on Bach’s, as a writer who grew up in the era of Nabokov would find it hard to escape that particular orbit of genius.
When Mendelssohn was 12 he met Goethe, who said that, compared to Mendelssohn, Mozart’s music at the same age was “the prattle of a child.” At 15 Mendelssohn met the great piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, who admitted that he had nothing to teach him.
When he was 34, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory, where he hired Robert Schumann, Moscheles, and the violinist Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s great friend. Leipzig was the town where Schumann, still sane, had founded a magazine where he changed musical taste throughout Europe. Schumann gave Mendelssohn the manuscript of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, and Mendelssohn afterward single-handedly revived interest
in Schubert in Germany. Leipzig was also where Bach had been the organist at the Thomaskirche, and thus it was a Bach chorale which Mendelssohn put into the third movement of this cello sonata, quoting as well from Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue.
Mendelssohn was a perfect and fun composer, whose Songs Without Words and concertos remain among the great works in the repertoire. His enormous felicity, his ability to take on the guise of Mozart, Schubert, or Clementi, is apparent in this chameleonic work, which he wrote when he was
33. Without Mendelssohn, there would be no Saint-Saëns. Listen for the brilliant arpeggios and scales throughout and, of course, the infectious melodies.
Unlike Beethoven, Mendelssohn was too conservative
to rebel. Leipzig was a very conservative town, and the patrons and critics wanted exactly what they got: a perfect Romantic, without the excesses of Liszt or the unpleasant innovations of Wagner.
Mendelssohn was at home with a Scherzo (witness the famous one from the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and the second movement is a perfect example of a classically perfect version. Whenever I hear Mendelssohn, I always think of those half-oval radios with the wicker speaker covers which sat on everyone’s table in the German, Italian, and Jewish houses in our neighborhood. As Protestants (although my mother was an Irish Catholic),
we were too righteous for radios. I avenged myself on the congregation of our Catholic church, where I played Liszt on the organ. The fourth movement of this Sonata has a lot in common with Mendelssohn’s piano concertos: fun, singable themes, ribboned with virtuoso technique which weaves around the cello, which itself always anchors the flamboyant piano with a good-natured insistence on tone and melody, giving the pianist a hard time fitting in all the notes around the cello’s jaunty insistence on well-tempered fun.
There was much interest at the time in reviving Germany’s greatness from the Middle Ages, which
kept the aristocracy busy practicing medieval social rules. Klemens von Metternich kept the 40 city-states powerful, to prevent nationalism from destroying the Hapsburg empire, which happened anyway in a series of revolutions leading up to World War I. Mendelssohn spent many of his adult years as a conductor, traveling Europe and popularizing his peers. He died at 38.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Song Without Words for Cello and Piano, Op. 109
The Songs Without Words for piano are small, lyrical, Romantic vignettes, melodies from a forgotten era, easy to play, impossible to forget, still one of the great monuments of the repertoire, despite their modesty. There are some 55 songs in eight volumes, written on and off between 1829 and 1845. Mendelssohn wrote an arrangement of them for four