Mendelssohn and Bruch

The works of Felix Mendelssohn for many years lay under-performed and over-criticised. Despite dying at the early age of thirty-eight, he became mistakenly seen as the musical voice of a discredited and out-dated tradition. He was not helped in this country by being championed by Victoria and Albert, becoming in the process almost Master of the Queen’s Music and the official voice of “respectable music”. A host of second-rate imitators also helped to devalue his style. His own disaffection with the music of Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner and other “modernists” and an adherence to Brahmsian methods and modalities mistakenly established his reputation as a reactionary instead of the prodigy he clearly was – the deeply dislikeable Wagner was particularly contemptuous. And there was also, it has to be said, from these quarters, a strong whiff of the anti-semitism which infected much of the cultural life in 19th and 20th century Europe even until recent times - his music, after all, was banned by the Nazis and statues of him broken up. Unbelievably, it was still impossible to buy a recording of Elijah until the 1970s! Now, thankfully, he is being reassessed although much of his output, especially choral works other than Elijah, is still under-performed.

That his family was aware of the acute difficulties Jewish families faced in making their way in Germany is shown by his banker father Abraham’s conversion to Christianity and the baptism of his children into the Lutheran Church. Felix seems not to have been much bothered by this for he was unconcerned about using his conversion name of Bartholdy and never made any attempt to compose the obligatory Mass, say, that was essential for the career of most composers up until then. Indeed, the greater bulk of his choral works rely on the sacred texts of the Old Testament such as the Psalms for their content. Perhaps this is why they have not received the attention they deserve, having been stigmatised as “ponderous” or “worthy” or “sanctimonious”, or damned as “religious kitsch.” Nothing is further from the truth.

Life for the Mendelssohn family was good, when Felix was born in Hamburg in1809, one of a family of four children amongst whom was his beloved sister Fanny, no mean musician herself, to whom he was absolutely devoted. Soon they departed for Berlin. Despite his father’s conversion, they seemed to have lived the life of a typical Jewish family of the time; warm, comfortably settled in a stimulating atmosphere of intense artistic, cultural and intellectual debate. The great and good of Berlin’s cultural elite passed through their doors. From this solid base, it would be possible for the young Felix to develop in any way which pleased him, and his family’s wealth was put at his disposal. Some critics have accused him of being too comfortable, on the entirely spurious ground that a great artist must have suffered, ignoring completely that the first work to display his prodigious talent was the Octet for Wind Instruments, composed when he was sixteen and which broke entirely new ground for the genre. It is true to say that his circumstances meant that he never had to rely on aristocratic patrons, or Church appointments or to hawk his work around in order to make a career, and it meant he could transcend any disadvantage placed upon him by his Jewish origins. That he was prodigiously gifted was very soon clear, and not only in music – he was an accomplished draughtsman and water-colourist and spoke four languages. After University in Berlin between 1826 and 1829, Mendelssohn travelled extensively, making several trips to Britain where he met Victoria and Albert and was lionised. In 1835 he moved to Leipzig on becoming the Music Director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and where he founded the Conservatoire. He married contentedly in 1837 and raised four children. Never in good health toward the end of his life, he was prostrated by the death of his beloved Fanny in May of 1847, and only six months later he was to follow her to the grave after a series of strokes. He was only thirty-eight years old.

The list of his works is too long to rehearse here, suffice to mention The Italian Symphony, the Violin Concerto, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Songs Without Words, the two great oratorios Elijah and St. Paul, the first of these being premiered at the Birmingham Music Festival in 1846. His legacy must also, importantly, include his devotion to and championing the cause of Schubert and Bach, giving, in 1829, the first performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, the first since his death in 1750. In tonight’s pieces we shall hear the unmistakeable influence of the great master in the fugues and Lutheran Chorales which form such a feature of Mendelssohn’s choral works.

Our first piece needs no introduction, the ever-popular Hebrides Overture, subtitled Fingal’s Cave, written in response to the composers visit to that mysterious cavern in 1829. Many composers have written pieces about the sea; only a handful convince you that they have actually been there! Mendelssohn is one of them!

The considered inclusion of Max Bruch into a programme about Mendelssohn is because of the great musical affinity between them. Such was Bruch’s devotion to his predecessor that he dedicated his first great popular success the opera Die Loreley to him. He was born Max Christian Friedrich Bruch on January 6th 1838 in Cologne and, like Mendelssohn, was already something of a prodigy by the age of fourteen when he won the Mozart Foundation Prize. There is no evidence of a Jewish heritage in Bruch’s life, but he was attached to many prominent Jewish families, especially the Lichtensteins, who directed him towards Kol Nidrei, that quintessential melody from which he composed his justly popular cello fantasia of the same name. After studying with Reinecke, he moved extensively – Kapellmeister in Koblenz from 1865, Sondershausen in 1867, Berlin in 1880 where he directed the Sternscher Songverein. After a three-year spell as conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic he returned to Berlin via Breslau and became teacher of composition for ten years until his retirement in 1911. He died in Berlin on the 2nd of October 1920 enormously feted as a composer of large-scale choral works almost all now completely forgotten! Among his legacy of over 200 works is the famously beautiful Violin Concerto No 1, voted the most popular piece of classical music of all time by listeners to Classic fm. Also popular are the Scottish Fantasy, the Concerto for Two Pianos as well as Kol Nidrei mentioned above.

Our second item is a piece of his completely unknown juvenilia, his Opus 3, the Jubilate, Amen written when he was 18 and first performed on May 1st 1857 in Cologne. Weber thought well enough of it to give it its first outing. Bruch’s love for folk tune turned him towards the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852) for his text. This author’s enormous output, ranging from satirical squibs to vast exotic epics, had proved a fruitful seam for composers from Brahms to Britten to mine. Just to mention Oft in the Stilly Night, The Minstrel Boy, Hark, Hark the Lark and The Last Rose of Summer is only to scratch the surface! Bruch turned to a sequence of poems called “An Anthology of National Airs” in which Moore tried to distil the essence of what he called “indigenous melodies” into words, which could be suitably set. There is a German Air, an Irish Air, an Egyptian Air even a Kashmiri Air! Handel, Boyce, Haydn, and Beethoven are among the mentioned melodists. Bruch chose the Russian Air although his setting owes more to the Jewish tradition than the Russian. He turned to Ferdinand Freiligrath for the sympathetic translation. Unfortunately, Bruch’s sumptuously melodic response to the German does not easily allow a simple reinstatement of Moore’s original, in which the poet hears the distant sound of the Vesper Hymn coming to him over the moonlit waters of some profound lake – a truly Romantic conceit. However, Breitkopf and Härtel, Bruch’s publishers, have kindly allowed me to provide a new English version in which I have tried to stay faithful to the spirit of Moore’s atmospheric verses. If I have also added a slightly more philosophical note to what is otherwise simple word painting, it is in attempt to honour a small fragment of a marvellous composer’s work which really should be better known beyond the borders of our own cultural insularity!

The Mendelssohn choral works that follow come from the much-denigrated later years of his life written in the six years before his death in 1847. There is almost nothing new to say about the first, Hear My Prayer, since the central Soprano solo of O For the Wings of a Dove has been the staple diet of every boy soprano and on the menu of every Cathedral Choir well before Ernest Lough’s famous 78 recording found its way onto the gramophones in practically every front parlour in the land! But this is not the twee party-piece it so often turns into! It is a short but dramatic cantata with words by W. Bartholomew based on a gloss of Psalm 55 Exaudi, Deus which includes the verse “And I said: O that I had wings like a dove; for then would I flee away and be at rest.” It expresses a central theme of the texts of the People of Israel, a plea to God for their liberation from the oppression of their enemies. We shall be using the little-known orchestral version in our concert, and not stinting on the drama! There’s nothing twee about it!

We end the first half with another neglected piece, his opus 96, the Hymn Lass O Herr mich Hülfe finden. Written in 1840, its four movements re-echo the themes set out above. The first part, a beautiful plea for pity and release from oppression for contralto and chorus; the second, a Chorale for the same forces, straight from Bach’s Lutheran handbook! This is followed by a lilting Andante con moto where the soloist expresses trust and hope in God’s mercy and the work ends with a mighty fugue of praise, with trumpets and drums and all, where we can experience first-hand both Mendelssohn’s technical mastery and his love for the music of Bach. Why anybody should have thought this wonderfully robust score to be not worth doing is anybody’s guess, but it has proved impossible to source an available full-score. Accordingly, I have recreated the orchestration utilising the resources at our disposal, together with a new English version of the text, trusting that this will bring the work back to life again, albeit briefly. I offer it in all humility.

After the interval, all of our forces will combine for a rare performance of the cantata Lauda Sion, the only extended work Mendelssohn wrote to a Latin text, first performed in the same year as Elijah and a year before his death. This is the more remarkable, for the words are the most explicitly Christian and Catholic he ever set. There is an English “translation” in the vocal score, which does not really reflect this, but whether we use it or not depends how we get on with unfamiliar Latin!

Again, having sung this as a boy, I am astonished at its neglect. Despite the disavowals made, for whatever reason, for the Mendelssohn heritage, and the Christian context here, I am absolutely of the opinion that “klezmer” runs through this music like Blackpool through a stick of rock! The sumptuous textures, the yearning melodies, the suffering and the warmth, the generosity and the righteous anger are all there. But sanctimonious, my eye!.

The work opens with a murmuring string figure, with distant brass and woodwinds leading to a fortissimo choral statement of the central motto; Lauda Sion – O Zion praise Him, with a robust development section marked Allegro maestoso e vivace. A triple-time Andante follows in C minor – Laudis thema specialis, and this leads to a hymn-like antiphonal movement between soprano solo and chorus – Sit laus plena. A ravishing solo quartet In hoc mensa novi Regis is followed by a forthright Lutheran Chorale Docti sacris, which is expanded into the dramatic Dogma datur Christianis. As beautiful a soprano solo as Mendelssohn ever wrote Caro cibus ushers in a powerful choral plea for deliverance Sumit unus. The work finally returns to its home key of C major, the murmuring string figure reappears and the full resources recapitulate the opening movement. A deeply consoling prayer for peace and freedom Bone pastor, panis vere, with the chorus and soloists combining Alla breve over flowing strings, ends the piece with swelling Amens.