Musical Styles: Felix Mendelssohn

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Cecile Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Felix Mendelssohn (or Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy) is the composer I would associate with Christmas the most, simply based on all that I know about him musically.  He seemed to love everything; a truly sunny person.  (Remember, that’s based only on what I know; I bet there’s tons we don’t know.)  He died young, of something like tuberculosis, I believe, though I’m not sure (anyway, from a musical viewpoint it isn’t important), so that we can be forgiven that deep sorrow was not part of his life experience.  (However, one biography states that he fell into terrible fits of temper.  Some of this information is completely new to me; for instance, I had no idea that he had been married.  See a portrait of his wife at right.)

The tune of Hark, the Herald Angels Sing

However, I’m not familiar with any Christmas-related music by him at all, except for the harmonization of the tune of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” which was, in fact, an existing tune.  You can see the tune at right.  (The words are some patriotic verses.)

Well, I cheated; or rather, I attempted to cheat.  I made a desultory attempt to read up on any scholarly opinions there might have been on Mendelssohn’s musical influences, and found none.  You see, he took lessons from a certain well-known pianist and musician (Ignatz Moscheles, I believe), but he was mostly self-taught.  He was well-versed in the hymn-music of the Lutheran Church that was in his environment, and obviously heard all the music that was going around him, and absorbed it all into his own vision of how he wanted his music to sound.  All the composers of the post-Beethoven Era had intensely original visions of how they wanted to sound; ever since Mozart, being original was almost an obsession.  (There are stories of composers of that time who continually protested that they had created something entirely new; you hear a little of this in Amadeus.)

While Mozart was preoccupied with elegance, charm and grace, Mendelssohn was, too; but from all I have seen (and heard), Mendelssohn was influenced by literature, especially Shakespeare, we’re told, and also fairy tales.  Germans were crazy about fair tales, we know, from what we know of the Brothers Grimm, who were collectors of folktales.  For whatever reason, Mendelssohn wanted to develop a light, airy sound, to effectively depict fairy themes.  There are numerous instances of this fairy writing, from the Violin Concerto to the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  One technique he used to get this mood was to use rapid repetition of the same notes, or several notes in alternation, pianissimo, in several instruments —usually the upper strings— which of course results in a very lovely feathery sound.  This is the same principle as in the Clementi Bass, which you often hear in Mozart, but Mendelssohn turns it upside down, and puts it in the uppermost register, and creates fairy music.  This is not to say that he didn’t write music of darker moods, and more contemplative music.  He wrote at least a couple of Oratorios and similar works, where the writing was very homophonic and hymn-like, but with somewhat of a Mozartian elegance, but the melodic inspiration was somehow different from Mozart: more naive, more akin to folksong, perhaps.  Perhaps, again, he was influenced by Jewish melody, but I have no idea how much; this is pure speculation on my part.  (One must resist jumping to conclusions in ones haste to deconstruct anything; there’s entirely too much of that going around.)

To come back to the background theme, it would be lovely to hear any Christmas music Mendelssohn may have written; I’m just not familiar with any of it.  It would have been a natural for Mendelssohn to have written music for a sleigh ride, for instance; I will be rather embarrassed if such a piece existed, and I did not know it.

Wait: an easy search did turn up a set of six pieces that Mendelssohn wrote (we’re told) as Christmas presents for a family with which the Mendelssohns stayed in England!  As the notes accompanying the video observe, the music is not particularly Christmassy, that is, jolly and celebratory, and containing references to Christmas carols.  So, honestly, it isn’t really Christmas music.  What a pity.

Now, as to why Mendelssohn doesn’t enjoy as much fame and admiration, outside England, at any rate, as his fellow composers of the period.  I believe he was just as much individual in his style, even if it (his style) wasn’t as arresting or dramatic as the styles of Wagner, Brahms or Schumann and Schubert.  The reason, I believe, is that he was, as almost everyone agrees, very traditional in his musical idiom, very generally speaking, and as a result, the niche he carved out was very small.  This, in turn, meant that there were not a large number of followers in his “school”, so that the Mendelssohn school consisted of just himself.  In contrast, we could say that the Wagner school included Mahler, Bruckner, even Richard Strauss, and even Korngold and John Williams, and Frederick Loewe (the composer half of the team that brought us My Fair Lady).  Brahms was also influential, and I may be forgiven for including Dvorak among his fellow-composers who served to establish a style that made the music of Brahms easy to apprehend.  Mendelssohn’s music isn’t hard to reach; it is just one of a kind, and so easily dismissed.  In addition, numerous minor composers in the United Kingdom found that idiom familiar and comfortable, which instead of bolstering the importance of the style, seems to make it even easier to dismiss as trivial, uninteresting and shallow.  But then, why are Mendelssohn’s string quartets among the most frequently performed?  Is it because they are easy for amateurs to play?  The major quartets that do play them will probably beg to differ.  (Forgive me for sounding annoyed, but I suspect that Mendelssohn's music was fashionable for people to criticize as unoriginal and too fluffy, because there weren't too many people who would come to his defense.  Minor artists indulge in a lot of putting down, hoping that they will look good as a result.  I, myself, am seriously considering putting down a whole lot of other bloggers.)

Well, I apologize for only providing a single link, but trying to describe Mendelssohn’s compositional style in relation to Christmas appears to be an exercise in futility, and did not provide much opportunity to showcase Mendelssohn’s genius!

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