Felix Mendelssohn: Overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op.21 (1826)
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 Midsummer Night’s Dream overture 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). With Mendelssohn 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”) in 1834 with Die Schöne Melusine.
Because the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture has long ago found its natural place within the order of things, it is all too easy to take it for granted, and so it is occasionally necessary to be reminded of its 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 Nr.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 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. 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 this overture – or of the Octet which preceded it the previous year. In 1821 Goethe wrote 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.” Mendelssohn an even greater natural genius than Mozart himself?! Let the music speak…
© Alan George
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