Repetition or Redundancy: Introductions by Mendelssohn and Mussorgsky

The beginning of Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang” symphony is completely inert, and therefore alarmingly dull, if I am permitted the oxymoron.  As I’ve been studying this score recently for classroom presentation, I started from the assumption that the piece’s dullness was due to my own limited perception, probably related to the generic problems connected with this “symphony-cantata” as well as the stupefyingly poor text that Medelssohn employed in the work.  Salvatore Cammarano’s book for Verdi’s Il Trovatore is a literary masterpiece compared to the shambles that Mendelssohn set in the cantata portion of his piece.

I adore Mendelssohn, and confess to being intimidated as well by the advocacy for this score by R. Larry Todd in his book on Mendelssohn that I’m using in the class. Todd is really careful to avoid personal enthusiasms and censures in his book, but the fact that he draws a structural diagram for “Lobgesang” and has several music examples constitutes advocacy.  I also hope that I’m man enough to admit my limitations. But I think I’ve discovered something that lends credence to my negative assessment of the piece.  

The first phrase of “Lobgesang” and the first phrase of Modest Mussorgsky’s (admittedly totally different and unrelated work conceptually and stylistically) Pictures at an Exhibition are similar.  It’s not an uncanny similarity, but similar they are, and not because they share the same key signature and roughly the same thematic shape, which they do, but which is certainly coincidental, but similar in their rhetoric.  Both are statement and response formulations, rather like a mass celebrant chanting something and being answered by a congregation.  This is common in classical music.  Brahms’ first piano sonata, Beethoven’s last symphony, Bach’s great mass, Rimsky’s Russian Easter Overture and most likely thousands of other works use this device.  It is common, to say the very least.  But Mendelssohn’s passage flops and Mussorgsky’s is immortal.  Why?

It is because in Mendelssohn the responsorial harmonization of the original single note phrase merely confirms the harmonies that are obviously implied in the former.  And then he adds new strophes to his passage, and each time the subsequent harmonization confirms the totally obvious. In Mussorsgsky, the harmonization, or at least the spacing is different each time, and even presents certain modal ambiguities; his opening promenade is definitely in B-flat, yes indeedy, but it is tinged by a lurking modal g minor, and sports as well the feeling of a premature move to the dominant, F major.  If this seems technical, well, it is-but remember, music is a craft with its own procedural protocols.  I can put it this way, non-technically: each time the listener hears the “celebrant” intone a phrase in Pictures, the listener is curious as to how the “responsorial” is formulated, and by the way, this interest does not diminish over repeated hearings.  The “Promenade” is a unique thing.  In Mendelssohn’s opening, you get exactly what is stongly implied each time.  It’s boring the first time, and it approaches unendurable on subsequent listenings.  

This should not sound immodest, because it is only basic musicianship, but I think I proved my contention in class yesterday.  I improvised Mendessohnian sounding harmonizations of the responsorials at the piano , but used different spacings each time and employed proxy chords which were rational but less obvious then the chords in the actual piece.  The passage was somewhat improved, but because I didn’t have an overarching conception of where I was going, it was still pretty bad.  In other words, I improved the passage tactically but not strategically.  If this seems like lese majestie,  let me suggest that the alternative is that we all shut up, stop thinking and experimenting, and eat everything that is put on our plate.  We shouldn’t eat everything that even a great master puts on our plate; we’ll get fat and complacent, and lose our powers of crititical discrimination.  The Italian and Scottish symphonies are masterpieces, “Lobgesang is an also-ran, that’s the way it is, whether I am personally impertinent or not.  I return to my profound rejection of the phrase, “You like it, I don’t, end of discussion” which an exceptionally intelligent friend of mine formulated during our conservatory days.  We need standards and discrimination.  

Finally, you may ask: “Isn’t repetition an often important unifying device, and therefore okey-dokey?”  Oh my, yes.  But repetition and redundancy are different things.  If you don’t believe me, consult a reliable dictionary.

Do All Styles Become Historical? Or Just Those of the Nineteenth Century?

Mendelssohn, Schumann

In Leon Plantinga’s survey of musical romanticism, “Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style In Nineteenth-Century Europe” he gives vastly greater weight to Schumann than to Mendelssohn.  In fact, he essentially promotes the time-worn and insupportable dismissal of Mendelssohn from the ranks of the truly great, for the time-worn and insupportable reasons of Mendelssohn’s supposedly “conservative” style, considered to have been fueled by the aesthetics of the past, his fortunate social and financial position, and the flawless perfection of his compositional technique, which is almost seen (implicitly, I grant you) as a liability.

But at the very end of his inadequate and even somewhat condescending passage on Mendelssohn, which focusses mainly on the overture to “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the scherzo from the d minor Piano Trio, he makes a really provocative and interesting comment: “In the later twentieth century, when all the styles of the nineteenth seem historical, there are clear signs of a reawakening interest in the work of this extraordinarily gifted composer.”

Can you imagine a textbook (and that is what this book is, being part of the Norton “Introduction to Music” series) saying that Beethoven, or even Brahms, for heaven’s sake, was “extraordinarily gifted”? Of course not. That would be like saying that water is wet. But when that phrase is applied to Mendelssohn, it either means:

1. Actually, you know, Mendelssohn really wasn’t that bad. His music is sort of good afterall! or,

2. Mendelssohn wasn’t really a great composer.  He was just exceptionally talented.

In fact, Plantinga’s book is excellent on the whole; lucid, informed, and remarkably wide-ranging for an introductory text.  But the only interesting part of Plantinga’s Mendelssohn commentary is the suggestion that styles can “become historical”, which implies that we hear things differently over time, which does seem obvious, and platitudinous to boot, but really isn’t, because by specifying styles of the nineteeth century, he leaves open the notion that styles from other eras are capable of achieving a sort of timeless relevance denied to the romantic era. But it’s also possible that Plantinga is obliquely referring to a general reaction against Romanticism in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, at least among academics, among whom Plantinga is counted, obviously.  I remember being really annoyed in my conservatory days when more than one of my fellow students would make a silly pronouncement to the effect that they didn’t like anything between Beethoven (or even Bach!) and the moderns.  And they would say it with pride. This isn’t personal taste.  It is either ignorance or immaturity.  Or more probably, pretentiousness, which is in fact a sort of immaturity at all times, and at least some of the time it bespeaks ignorance as well.

Schumann’s greatest music is undeniably eccentric.  Mendelssohn’s music is not, because when we apply the standards of the nineteenth century to (for us) strange conceptions such as the yoking of religious sentiment and virtuosity, or pseudo-baroque oratoria, we make allowance for the zeitgeist of the times. Charles Rosen discusses this in his Mendelssohn chapter in The Romantic Generation. For most of the twentieth century, critics (almost unanimously) and many listeners made a cult of “personal style”, which almost by defininiton implies something like eccentricity, or at least, uniqueness.  So perhaps Plantinga is trying to say something along these lines:

“When Schumann’s music was composed, it appeared that its intrinsic eccentricity distinguished it in a way that would allow for the suspension of a historical context, because the music was so inextricably bound up with the unique personality of its creator, as opposed to Mendelssohn, whose aesthetics were, so to speak, more general. But with the passage of time we can see that this was not so, at least for the Romantics.  This means that Mendelssohn’s style is capable of posthumous “rehabilitation”, because the avant-garde quickly becomes the “derriere-garde”, and therefore composers who were formerly considered reactionaries are now in the same boat with the erstwhile ‘experimentalists’.” 

In our own time, it is impossible to tell what is reactionary and what is progressive.  One may scoff, and say “It’s just music. It’s either good or bad, and the application of such categories is meaningless.” I totally and vehemently disagree with that.  The history of style and the relationships between styles, and evaluation of these relationships is a vital part of understanding art.  Brahms, Puccini, and Rachmaninov are no longer old fashioned.  Vivaldi, Scriabin, Cage and Babbitt are newly old fashioned.  And a generation from now? Who knows.  Mendelssohn’s friend, Goethe, said: “The surest sign of sincerity is craftsmanship.” Pretty applicable to the “extraordinarily gifted” Mendelssohn, eh?

Mendelssohn and "The Anxiety of Influence"

David’s reply to a previous post on Mendelssohn’s relationship to Beethoven brings up an important point. How and to what extent did Beethoven’s (especially symphonic) successors respond to his overwhelming prestige, to his inescapable influence?

Mendelssohn’s three great Beethoven glosses (Piano Sonata in E Major, op. 6, String Quartets Opp. 12 and 13) are early works.  Mendelssohn appears to be more concerned with Bach, Handel and Mozart in most of his latter works, maybe because Beethoven seemed like too big an elephant in the room to the mature Mendelssohn, but then, of course, you have the “Lobegesang”, as a (problematical) exception.   A kid’ll try anything, and if you’re a kid like Mendelssohn, you just might succeed.  But the only kid like Mendelssohn in musical history had a father named Leopold.  Mendelssohn’s latter works are not nearly as experimental or progressively minded as the earlier works.  Beethoven, of course, is the most experimental and progressive composer in history. 

Is it coincidence that Mendelssohn’s two indisputably great symphonies are placed outside of the Germanic (Beethovenian) orbit, in Scotland and Italy? Is the “Lobegesang” weakened because Mendelssohn is Handelian grandiose, perhaps, but not Beethovenian grandiose?  

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

R. Larry Todd

A work that takes up the Beethovenian gauntlet and works well is the Brahms First.  The 5th and 9th symphonies meet and reconcile in an incredibly classisizing synthesis.  Brahms was progressive by reinventing the past.  Bruckner’s Beethoven glosses in the Third, Ninth, and parts of the Eighth work well because, unlike Mendelssohn, Bruckner was attuned to the Beethovenian grandiose.  David mentitions a book by Bond that tosses Schumann 4th into the ring.  If Schumann’s 4th wasn’t in d minor, and didn’t accentuate submediant relationships, and wasn’t cyclical, would we associate it with Beethoven’s Ninth, and Fifth? And do all cyclical works owe their existence to Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous motto? Maybe, but we can’t say for sure. The question is, is Beethoven so fundamental in himself, or was he accepted as fundamental because the zeitgeist of the 19th century was in accord with his nature? Some of both, but if I had to choose, I’d take the first alternative, when we’re talking symphony.

Tchaikovsky appropriated the model of the Fifth in his own Fifth, but I think he might have thought he was getting it from Liszt, a composer much closer to his heart than Beethoven.  And How about Liszt? Is the “Faust” symphony another Beethoven gloss? As for Berlioz, in “Fantastique” and “Harold in Italy”, how about that?  Berlioz was too much his own man to be sure about.  His big musical gods included Cherubini and Gluck.   And he was weird.

Caught Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Mendelssohn's Reputation

Felix Mendelssohn is the most underrated master in classical music history.  Not as transcendant as Mozart, not as powerful as Beethoven, not as intimate as Schumann, not as poignant as Schubert, not as idiosyncratic as Chopin, not as quirky as Berlioz, Mendelssohn seems to fall between two stools…at least for many listeners.  His technique alone qualifies him for the pantheon.  And technique matters, and not just to musicians.  It’s pretty facile to say, “oh, well, you know, I don’t care about all that fancy technical stuff, I want music that moves me.”  Counterpoint, instrumentation, formal subtlety are rewarding in themselves.  Plus, Mendelssohn is transcendant, powerful, intimate, poignant, idiosyncratic, etc.  He was just too intelligent, too urbane, too refined to allow his music to be dominated by any single characteristic. He doesn’t “wear his heart on his sleeve”.  Mendelssohn requires a listener who doesn’t need to be blown away all the time, a listener who cares about the craft of musical composition.

It is well known that Mendelssohn’s reputation has been deeply harmed by anti-semitism, most famously in Richard Wagner’s screed, “Judaism in Music”.  And everbody knows that his statue in Leipzig was pulled down by the Nazis and his music banned.   But I don’t really think that antisemitism is the principal reason for the relative undervaluing of his work.  I think many listeners impose the wrong (Beethoven or Wagner) context on him.  The right context (Bach and Mozart) may lead listeners to a greater appreciation of his gifts.

Now, one might say, “What are you talking about, Mendelssohn is a staple of the repertory, in concert and on recording.”  My riposte? Mendelssohn is underrated until such time as he achieves the status of Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms, and perhaps he is deserving of the status accorded to Schubert and Chopin as well.  These rankings are a parlor game, I know.  Individual tastes differ, naturally, but it probably should be acknowleged that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner are the untouchable four, comprising the benchmarks against which other greats may be measured.  And why have I neglected to mention Haydn? For shame.

A note on Mendelssohn's Symphonic Chronology

This is a headache because of revisions, publishing dates, numbering, and opus numbers which are tangled.  Larry Todd (the most eminent Mendelssohn scholar) assigns these dates as being most chronologically relevant:

Symphony Nr. 1, 1824
Symphony Nr. 2, “Lobegesang”, 1840
Symphony Nr. 3, “Scottish”, 1842
Symphony Nr. 4, “Italian” 1833
Symphony Nr. 5, “Reformation”, 1830

You Don't Have to Start at the Beginning: Mendelssohn and Beethoven

Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13, written at the age of 18, and his String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 12, written at the age of 20, are at once the most knowlegeable glosses on Beethoven in existence and yet at the same time deeply original works.  Beethoven’s late style was not exactly terra incognita for the early romantics, but middle period  works, especially the Fifth Symphony, exerted much more influence, generally.  Mendelssohn is the exception.  As he comments himself, “You don’t have to start at the beginning…”.  Early Mendelssohn bends back only a year or two to embrace late Beethoven.  These quartets are from 1827 and 1829, and therefore can properly be regarded as a sort of continuation of late Beethoven rather than works with a retrospective orientation.  Consider a wildly different repertory that looks back to late Beethoven, the Rochberg quartets, especially the “Beethoven”  movement in the Third, and you will understand the difference between the creator and the curator.  

Mendelssohn was amused, and possibly flattered, when an auditeur of his a-minor quartet mistook the piece as having been written by Beethoven.  Mendelssohn took all sorts of Beethoven works as models for these quartets:  The “Harp” Quartet, the Quartet Serioso, the a-minor quartet, Op. 132, the “Tempest” piano sonata, the “Les Adieu” piano sonata, the F-Major quartet, op. 135, especially the “Muss es sein” idea, which Mendelssohn balances with his own “Ist es wahr” quotation from his own song, “Frage” which is actually printed in its entirety in my score.  But Mendelssohn doesn’t quote! He absorbs and sublimates.  Those who know and love the late Beethoven quartets can only marvel at the profundity and originality of Mendelssohn’s ability in extending this most personal of styles. 

Mendelssohn’s counterpoint is breath-taking.  Effortlessly elegant, flexible, natural and eloquent, contrapuntal textures have rarely been such a joy, as opposed to a sort of chore to listen to. 

Mendelssohn doesn’t need to take his scherzi from Beethoven, because Mendelssohn was himself a very great scherzo writer.  Both Scherzo movements in these quartets are actually archaic sounding intermezzi with scherzo music taking the middle panel of A-B-A structures.   These intermezzi are the most obvious delights in these great works.  I think they deeply influenced Brahms, as well, who has several archaic sounding movements with scherzando central panels. 

And Mendelssohn is tonally progressive.  How innovative the E-flat quartet is! movements in E-flat, g minor, B-flat, and c-minor, with a coda derived from the E-flat end of the first movement.  This is not “progressive” tonality in the sense we associate with Carl Nielsen, because the different tonalities do not directly engage each other, but it sort of points in the same direction.

Mendelssohn is always a master of the string quartet texture.  These vibrant works jump off the page.  And melodies? Take a look at the Mozartian elegance of both slow movements.  Sometimes one hears the absurd defamation that Mendelssohn is superficial.  If a composer has the right to be judged by his best work (definitely not the “Songs Without Words”!) Mendelssohn is deep.  He’s just so very, very, competent that his works never betray anything like the struggle of genesis.  M had it all, from a very young age.  A prodigy to rival Mozart, but who wrote true repertory works at an age younger than Mozart.  These quartets are winners.

Definitely not a winner, however, is Mendelssohn’s symphony, “Lobegesang”; It’s actually a 23 minute symphony yoked with a 40 minute cantata, and is a pathetic and futile attempt to be a work in the manner of Beethoven’s Ninth.  I followed the score with amazement as I heard the excellent recording by Kurt Masur with the splendid Leipzig Gewandhaus.  Amazement, because, as a thoroughly trained musician, someone who is really comfortable with reading scores accurately, and hopefully insightfully, I could find nothing wrong, and yet the work was excruciating, interminable! All the competency was there; the great, light on its feet orchestration,  the effortless counterpoint, the relative pithiness of individual sections, the mastery of choral writing, yet the work was almost unlistenable.  Maybe it’s my fault, that I wasn’t in the mood.  Maybe it’s the flat out awfulness of the text, with lines such as “Now all praise the Lord, ye who have breath…” I don’t know. 

The first symphony, in c minor, written when M was 15, is a delight.  It combines a sort of “sturm und drang” as practiced by Mozart in his g minor symphonies with a cheerful appropriation of Beethoven’s Fifth.  No where near the quality of the quartets, this is nevertheless a very charming and listenable work.

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music
by R. Larry Todd