Mendelssohn: Three Great Overtures
Meeresstille und glücklische Fahrt, Op.27 (1828)
Die Hebriden (“Fingal’s Cave”), Op.26 (1830)
Ouverture zum Märchen von der schönen Melusine, Op.32 (1834)
It could be claimed that the concept and popularity of the “Concert Overture” owes a great deal to Mendelssohn, having been highly promoted, if not specifically invented, by him. Although a substantial amount of incidental music was subsequently added to it, the celebrated Midsummer Night’s Dream overture (1826) originally stood alone, with no specified intention that it should serve as a mere prelude to anything else. Two more overtures quickly followed, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and The Hebrides, by which time it was evident that these pieces had embraced a descriptive – not to say programmatic – element. The young Mendelssohn would certainly have been familiar with their obvious forerunners – those works by Beethoven which invariably we now hear as “concert overtures” (for example Coriolan, Egmont, Consecration of the House), even though their prescribed function had been to introduce a play or an occasion, with or without ensuing incidental music. Nevertheless, the programmatic concert overture as we now know it was still a novelty at this time, and obviously held considerable attraction for the early German Romantic composers. Yet the natural successors to Mendelssohn’s pioneering works turned out to be by Berlioz, followed by those pinnacles of programmatic concert music, the “Fantasy-Overtures” of Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and others. The out-and-out storytelling tone poems of Liszt may well have added to the mix but The Hebrides and Romeo and Juliet must surely stand as the two supreme achievements in combining mastery of symphonic form with vividness and truthfulness of tone painting – whether specifically of “painting” or of “feeling” (to paraphrase Beethoven himself, on his own programmatic/symphonic Pastoral). By 1832 Mendelssohn was already promoting his three overtures as a group – and at the same time coining the new description: Drei Concert-Ouvertüren, as sent to his publisher two years later. With him the “painting” may have begun in the forest at night, but it quickly moved to the sea, where it eventually found still further expression (or “painting”) with Die Schöne Melusine.
Because Mendelssohn’s extraordinary teenage works have long ago found their natural place within the order of things we can all too easily take them for granted; thus it is occasionally necessary to be reminded of their provenance. In the first instance we should not be afraid to acknowledge how supremely privileged was this grandson of one of the greatest Jewish philosophers (Moses Mendelssohn) and son of a wealthy and influential banker (Abraham), who afforded him opportunities denied to most young students. In 1825 the family moved to No.3 Leipzigerstrasse, on the outskirts of Berlin, which boasted a “garden house” containing a concert space to seat up to 300 people! Felix’s (and also his hardly less gifted sister Fanny’s) side of the bargain was to study and learn with prodigious application and devotion, and so to fill this place with sounds as well as people – for example, the private Sunday matinée première of the present Meeresstille on 7 September 1828. But the third ingredient is rather less easily defined: no amount of privilege or hard work could of its own accord have given rise to the breathtaking imagination or sheer magic of these overtures – or of the Octet which preceded them in 1825. Four years earlier, Goethe had written that “Musical prodigies are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporising and playing at sight borders on the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age… what he already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time as the cultivated talk of a grown-up bears to the prattle of a child.”
It was a pair of separate poems by the same great German writer which were the inspiration behind this ambitious overture – although Schiller had already coupled them together as early as 1796, setting a precedent followed by Beethoven in 1815 for his cantata of the same name – a work which made such a profound impression on the young composer that certain influences can be traced in his own composition. Furthermore, it should also be made quite clear that the Prosperous Voyage was by no means the result of the Calm Sea; on the contrary, it is the very plight of a sailing ship being “becalmed” which is the subject of the first poem – and of Mendelssohn’s opening section – “……the sailor views with trouble…Silence fearful as the grave….”. With the rise of the zephyrs comes a truly Mendelssohnian (and Beethovenian…) outburst of joy: “…I see land beyond!” – this final line firing the composer’s imagination to create for himself a third “arrival” section, heralded – with deliberate pomposity – by a Jubelruf of trumpet fanfares and cannon fire. Note also his earlier flights of tone painting – “…the thick waves will be represented by the contrabassoon”. It is salutary for us that he writes from London in 1829 that the piece “might prove difficult for English taste…Am I to reform the English?”! So what did they (or we) make of the unexpected sudden soft plagal cadence at the very end?
That very year (1829), Mendelssohn had visited Scotland for the first time, and was totally captivated – “When God himself takes to panorama painting it turns out strangely beautiful. Few of my Switzerland reminiscences can compare to this; everything looks so stern and robust, half enveloped in haze or smoke or fog…”. Thus wrote the twenty-year-old composer to his family from Edinburgh on 30 July. There followed the much-documented visit to Sir Walter Scott and the famous seasick-ravaged trip to the Inner Hebrides – out of which grew the eponymous concert overture which the eminent Mendelssohn scholar Philip Radcliffe considered to be his masterpiece (as also did Wagner). Its earliest version was actually written down in Italy during December the following year, after he had returned home from Britain, and was revised two years later in 1832 (in fact, the late Christopher Hogwood has edited no fewer than four extant versions). It must have been extraordinary for him to observe at very close quarters the special atmosphere and character of the open sea – something he cannot have experienced all that often during his short life (except for frequent crossings of the English Channel). Certainly this piece was born at that moment, since he noted down its opening theme in a letter written from the islands – music so disarmingly simple in evoking the gentle swell of the “calm sea”, yet quickly threatening to blow into something fearsome, with at least one raging tempest later to erupt. And it is surely in The Hebrides itself that concise formal mastery was most miraculously put at the service of a sensitive and inspired pictorial imagination, in a way which has surely never been surpassed, and perhaps only equalled by the aforesaid Romeo and Juliet (likewise cast in B minor).
It so happens that there really is a story to be told in Die Schöne Melusine, yet Mendelssohn resists that temptation and stays faithful to his previously successful formula. Nevertheless, his biographer Walter Dahms claims that “whoever knows the tale of the beautiful mermaid and the knight, will understand this overture, and who does not, can piece the story together from the music. The simplicity of the music, which does not claim to be a running commentary on the action, but a symbol of the tale only, harmonises serenely with the tonal pattern”. The piece came about in 1834 as a (critical!) creative response to an overture by Conradin Kreutzer, composed for his opera on the same subject, this to a libretto by the Viennese playwright Franz Grillparzer (which Beethoven had previously resisted taking on – admittedly after serious discussions). It was first performed in London (under Moscheles), but subsequently revised for performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus two years later – in which form it has survived rather longer than Kreutzer’s ill-fated opera, thus recalling for us the fable which tells how the strange mermaid Melusina was compelled to return to the depths of the sea, having at least tasted the passions (and pains) of the human world she could not be part of. Mendelssohn’s evocative music is both soothingly mellifluous and ragingly tempestuous; yet the character/tone painting are so subtly intertwined that one cannot say for sure which applies to which.
© Alan George
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