Beethoven & Mendelssohn: Super-Hero & Human

If there were a group of super-heroes made up entirely of great composers of classical music, who would they be?

The most daring composers, probably, the ones who took the biggest risks and the ones who challenged their listeners with music that demanded their attention. These would be composers whose personalities were strong, “larger than life.” Who would be the Super-Heroes of Classical Music?

Beethoven would certainly be one of them. Mendelssohn probably wouldn't.

BEETHOVEN

Beethoven was often shabbily dressed (he was once arrested for being a bum and the police couldn't believe he was the Great Beethoven) but many people thought he was a colossus, like a giant striding across the musical horizon of Europe. But that was the kind of age it was, full of strong emotions and powerful convictions during all those years of Napoleonic Wars.

There were political struggles with the aftermath of the French Revolution but also many huge changes in the way people lived. The Industrial Age was creating a new class of wealthy middle class people but it was an age when poor people might become poorer. Many of the aristocrats were losing their power and wealth. Ideas had been “large” and focused on great issues. People took risks. The way to realize a great adventurous life was to be in the military and fight the enemy.

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MENDELSSOHN

No one would have considered the neatly dressed, mild-mannered Mendelssohn a colossus. (Maybe more like Dr. Who, left.)

His music was not “colossal.” The time he lived in was not good for such colossal ideas. People wanted to maintain the status-quo. After years of warfare and financial instability, people became more conservative in their politics, their ideas, their issues. Rather than debate the humanitarian issues of the Napoleonic Era, they were more concerned about, say, fashion or how to make a good enough living to leave money and property to their sons, about having their daughters married to good men who could provide for them.

Rather than deeper, intensely personal issues like “the meaning of life,” people discussed what material things could give their life meaning. Rather than looking for adventure, men sought lives in business rather than the military. People didn't want that kind of excitement in their lives.

So, this may explain why Mendelssohn's music sounds “pleasant,” has “nice” tunes, doesn't challenge our ideas very much, is more likely to be happy than sad and why, when it IS sad, it doesn't sound really really sad or tragic (so it's called “sentimental”). His music never seems very “dark” though it can be cloudy or even stormy.

This doesn't mean his music isn't as good as Beethoven's. It's different. He felt that life and art were not two different, separate things. And for people who think Beethoven is too big, too “over-the-top,” too “overblown” for their emotional needs - perhaps too much art, not enough life - Mendelssohn may be just the right balance: something comfortable, more down-to-earth – a human rather than a giant.

He is most famous for bright sunny sounds – like the opening of his Italian Symphony (you can hear it here, in this video from an earlier post) or his “elfin music,” a quick wispy sound like elves and fairy-sprites scurrying just outside our awareness of such supernatural things. His most famous example of that is the scherzo from his Octet (you can hear it here in this music video from another post).

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In an earlier post – The Ages of Music: How Composers Make a Living – I mentioned that Mendelssohn earned his income from performing and from selling printed music.

He was from a very wealthy family – you can get an idea about his mother's family from this earlier post, but his father was already pretty wealthy, too, by the time Mendelssohn was born.

That just means Felix Mendelssohn didn't need to worry about “earning an income” to survive.

He's one of the few great composers who was born to wealth. Other composers may have become famous and at least financially secure if not actually “rich” in that sense, but many composers in the 19th Century dealt with poverty throughout their lives.

MOZART & REALITY 101

Mozart's father was employed as a violinist at the court of Salzburg's ruler, the Archbishop of Salzburg. If Mozart had found a similar job, he might have been better off, but when he couldn't find a count or prince who would hire him as a court musician, he went to Vienna “to seek his fortune.” He was 25 and not yet married. Vienna was the musical center of Europe – like New York City is the musical center of the United States – and so he figured if he couldn't get hired by the Emperor, the Emperor might hear his music, hear him perform and hire him after all. Meanwhile, he would give concerts, he would get performances, he would teach piano lessons and hopefully earn enough money, especially after he married and he and his wife had a family to raise.

The Mozarts were not very good with their finances. They both loved nice things and money that came in often quickly went out. So when the money wasn't coming in as much as it had, Mozart would write to his friends asking for loans. When he died at the age of 35, things were beginning to look a little better and of course he thought he had his whole life ahead of him.

SCHUBERT & POVERTY

Franz Schubert was born into a poor family. His father was a school teacher who ran a neighborhood school in his house. It was expected the sons would go into the profession, too. Schubert hated teaching and dreamed of becoming a famous musician.

He never really got the recognition he had hoped for. Today, he is one of the most popular composers of classical music. Even though he was often on the verge of bankruptcy, he enjoyed life with his friends and wrote an amazing amount of music, most of it never heard. His friends said he wrote music as naturally as an apple tree produces fruit. But beyond a circle of friends and some fans who heard his music along the way, most people in Vienna never really knew who he was.

Schubert's health was not good, either. He was only 31 when he died, but he had written some incredible music. A lot of this started to become better known after his death, sometimes 10, 20 or even 40 years later. Only then did people start to realize what a musical talent he had been. Only it was too late to help him.

Schubert was not the only one to suffer bad health and a precarious existence.

BEETHOVEN & MENDELSSOHN: THEIR FINANCIAL STABILITY

Beethoven's life lacked financial stability, too. He might get an income from some noblemen who supported him, but it wasn't really enough. He wasn't a spend-thrift like Mozart had been. But he started to go deaf when he was still a young man – in his early 30s, he wondered how it was possible to be a musician and be deaf. Even though he was emotionally distressed about his health, he wrote music that never showed his anxieties, that rose above his situation. He wrote music on a large emotional scale: it wasn't just dramatic, it was VERY dramatic. It wasn't just heroic, it was VERY heroic. Even when he was happy, his music sounds VERY happy – like his 7th Symphony. And when it was tragic, it was VERY tragic. His music is often marked by these kinds of extremes.

Mendelssohn lived a comfortable life. His music sounds comfortable. Even when he's writing sad music, it never rises to the level of tragic. Some people call it “sentimental” which is a negative term for “superficially emotional.” Nostalgia is a kind of “sentiment.” Pity is, too, and while it's nice when people can pity someone in a less good situation - “there but for the grace of God, go I” - it's usually not a constructive or helpful emotion: rather than helping the person in trouble, pity merely compares your better situation to theirs.

People assumed that because Mendelssohn had such an easy life, financially, and never suffered illness to the extent it seriously impacted his life or his career, he couldn't really FEEL these emotions as deeply as Schubert or Beethoven or Mozart had done.

But it's also as much a part of the age Mendelssohn lived in. The “Biedermeir” Age in Germany – very similar to the Victorian Age in England later in the century – was an era when people didn't express their emotions in public. It was a “comfortable” age when you wanted stability, not adventure. People didn't want to take risks because you might lose what you had. Rather than being emotional, they were sentimental. (You can read more about this in an earlier post, Being German in the 1800s.)

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn, the Person

People might assume, because their parents were wealthy, the Mendelssohn children had it easy.

THE FAMILY SCHEDULE: HOME SCHOOLING in the EARLY 1800s

They were awakened at 5am.

They were taught at home with private tutors but music was just a fraction of the curriculum. In addition to German (their own language) they also were taught Latin, Greek, mathematics, a lot of European history, geography, aesthetics (Felix's teacher was the great philosopher Hegel), political philosophy, German and foreign literature and also drawing and water-coloring. They also learned to speak fluent French and English. Later, Felix also learned Italian.

On Sundays, they could sleep in till 6.

They would go for long hikes and ice-skated or rowed on the near-by river. They were excellent swimmers. As a child, Felix loved to ride a horse. Even when he was 24 and living away from home, he wrote to his father asking for permission to buy a horse (permission granted).

The garden was often the scene of out-door parties, the trees hung with paper-lanterns the children had made. The children even published their own in-house newspaper.

In addition, there were many music lessons. The younger daughter Rebecka sang and the younger son Paul played the cello. For both Felix and his older sister Fanny, there were piano lessons and composition lessons. Felix also studied the violin and the viola.

Very frequently they were among the performers for the family's Sunday afternoon musicales. So they had to rehearse, as well.

Around this schedule, Felix somehow found time to compose a great deal of music.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FAMILY

The house became an intellectual center in Berlin: many of the greatest minds in the city or visiting artists and professors would come to their musicales which included more than just music-making. Lea Mendelssohn was a very fine hostess and the food was first-rate. The Mendelssohns loved English customs, so great amounts of tea were consumed. And of course, with all these eloquent guests and great minds the conversation was especially lively.

Like the Kennedy Family, the children of the Mendelssohn Family knew they represented a leading Berlin family and therefore German culture. They were taught to speak well and to listen well. The girls were supposed to combine charm with knowledge. The boys were supposed to be able to do more than 'hold' a conversation.

Mendelssohn read a lot – for instance, Homer (in German) and Plato (in Greek). He read most of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, then all the rage, and Shakespeare (who was not all the rage) in both English and German. He also owned a copy of The Decameron, a 14th-Century collection of often bawdy love-stories (it was a gift from his mother-in-law). He read the novels of Charles Dickens and his library included large collections of the works by his mentor Goethe and his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn.

Like many people in Berlin in the 1820s, the family was not outwardly religious – they did not attend temple before the children were converted to Christianity and they didn't really attend church on a regular basis afterward. That doesn't mean they didn't have a sense of faith. In fact, in one letter, Felix complained about people who were overly pious: he couldn't see himself that way.

TIME & MANNERS SHAPE THE PERSONALITY

He found England much to his liking. The British attitude of the “stiff upper lip” suited him as well as its manners and sense of reserve. Mendelssohn could be described as gentle, happy, charming, polite – above all, polite. One biographer described him as “a polite man who wrote polite music.”

Beethoven may have raged against the inhumanity of the Napoleonic Wars or the old-fashioned nobility or having his breakfast served late. Beethoven may have written music that “stormed the heavens” and opened new worlds to mortal men. None of this was Mendelssohn's style.

Many people think classical composers are a rather serious bunch, writing all this serious music. Mendelssohn had a sense of humor and loved lively conversation. He loved listening to and telling jokes, though compared to the off-beat and often dirty humor of Mozart or Beethoven, Mendelssohn's jokes would all be G-rated.

Unlike Franz Liszt and many other musicians of the era, Mendelssohn was not a ladies' man. He loved his wife and was very much at home in a domestic setting.

He was also a workaholic which no doubt contributed to his early death. He worked hard as a composer, a conductor, a pianist, even an organist as well as music director and music teacher who in his spare time organized music festivals and founded music schools.

He loved to travel. He made ten trips to England, mostly concert tours but they all included time to see the country, not just perform. He climbed Swiss mountains and took long hikes in the German countryside.

Luckily for him, he could fall asleep quickly and take a cat-nap on a couch in the middle of a party if he needed to.

Everything he did seemed effortless.

ALL THIS BUT STILL FULL OF DOUBT

But for some reason, he was often full of doubt about his own talent. He frequently revised his music. Sometimes it was written quickly, other times it took a long time to take shape. He worked hard and was suspicious of composers (or any creative artist) who “waited for the Divine Spark” of trance-like inspiration. He also was suspicious of a lot of technical talk about music: the important thing was not how it was composed but that it was composed well.

Not surprisingly, his manuscripts are very clean, usually free of corrections. But still, when he “finished” his Italian Symphony in 1833, he set it aside to revise it. That didn't keep him from playing it – it was a very popular work in his lifetime – but when he died 15 years later, he still hadn't published it.

He'd begun working on the “Scottish” Symphony when he was 22, not long after his trip to Scotland – he already had ideas for it written down while he was there – but he didn't actually “finish” it until he was 33.

The numbering of his works is very confusing. He never published the Reformation Symphony either, though it actually was the second of the mature symphonies he composed. It ended up becoming No. 5, making it look like it should be a late work. The second string quartet he composed was sent to the publisher before the first one.

Music publishers used a catalog system of “Opus Numbers” - opus is the Latin word for “work” - and we usually think of it as a chronological list: a composer finishes a piece, sends it to the publishers and then writes the next piece. That isn't always the case. A string quintet Mendelssohn published as his Op. 18 looks like it should've been written before the Octet, Op. 20 – but it was really written a year after the Octet.

Many people have different opinions about Mendelssohn's music. Just the other day, a friend on Facebook told me “If you can't recognize who wrote it, it must be Mendelssohn.” Meaning, I guess, that if it didn't sound like anybody else, it must be him!

Another friend told me recently that he didn't think much of his first two symphonies but figured that's because they were early works “and he hadn't found his voice yet.” I pointed out that that 2nd Symphony was written when he was 31 but two of his most famous pieces which my friend agreed definitely sounded like “mature Mendelssohn” were written when he was still in his mid-teens!

A LITTLE OF THIS, A LITTLE OF THAT

In a post about “classical vs. romantic,” I mentioned that Mendelssohn was a little of each, not one or the other. He preferred “classical” clarity and design but enjoyed “romantic” story-telling and pleasure (not so much the over-the-top emotionalism of someone like his friend Hector Berlioz whose “Symphonie fantastique” tells the story of a man having a bad experience on opium, imagining he's killed his girl-friend and then goes to Hell for her murder - oh, and he wrote this work to impress the woman he loved...).

Mendelssohn's music is primarily happy music – the finale of his Violin Concerto (written when he was 35) is just as exuberant as the opening of his Italian Symphony (begun when he was 22) or the whole Octet (composed when he was 16). (Check out the music videos, here.) When he wrote more emotional, sad or tender music, some people called it “sentimental” or “maudlin” - never tragic.

In another post - about Math, Science & Philosophy - I wrote about one of his teachers, the philosopher Hegel who is remembered today primarily for his “Hegelian Dialectic.” You take a statement or idea – call it a thesis – and then you take the opposite of that statement or idea – call it an antithesis (anti-thesis) – then take the best parts of both of them to create a kind of compromise – call it a synthesis.

Perhaps Mendelssohn himself was a living example of this: two parts classical (thesis) + one part romantic (antithesis) = Felix Mendelssohn (synthesis).

Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn's Family on his Mother's Side

This post is about the family of Felix Mendelssohn's mother, Lea Salomon Mendelssohn (see left).

In earlier posts, I wrote about Felix Mendelssohn's paternal grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, a famous philosopher in the 2nd half of the 18th Century. I've written about the banking company his sons built and how Abraham became a member of the upper-class society. I've mentioned the house they lived in with its large music salon where they could hold private concerts where the children Felix and his sister Fanny performed.

THE MENDELSSOHN HOUSE

The Mendelssohn House in Berlin has long since disappeared – at first, I couldn't find any images or descriptions of the house, beyond this:

Abraham Mendelssohn bought a mansion in 1825 in a quiet section of Berlin. The property “included not only the main house of many rooms, but several guest houses” and a spacious park complete with large gardens where Felix enjoyed taking walks and riding his horse. “The main house contained large salons in which Sunday musicales were given to invited audiences as well as amateur theatricals.”

All of this would imply it was a pretty large house on a pretty large property (and Felix had a horse). After his sister Fanny married Wilhelm Hensel, they moved into one of the guest houses which then became their family home (so clearly, this one, at least, was not like a cottage in the park).

Later, I found a few images posted on-line that appear to be the house Mendelssohn grew up in. You can see them and read more about the house in this post. Somewhere I'd read (but cannot verify, now) that the house was demolished by the Nazis in the 1930s but it may have been torn down earlier. The photograph I found was apparently taken in 1900.

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MENDELSSOHN'S MOTHER, LEA

I had not read much about Felix's mother's family before. I knew she was descended from a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin. But here's what I found today while researching information about Mendelssohn's love of Bach's music.

Abraham's wife, Lea Salomon, was the granddaughter of Daniel Itzig (see left) whom I had seen described somewhere as “an important merchant.” That left out two important details in his life. One was his being appointed to be the Director of the Prussian Mint by King Frederick the Great; under his successor, Itzig was appointed the court banker. Considering neither king was especially tolerant of the Jews – they were not consistently anti-Semitic, either - it was an unusual situation. Daniel Itzig died in 1799, one of the wealthiest men in Berlin.

He had 13 children, most of whom lived to adulthood (unusual in those days of high infant and childhood mortality rates).

His daughter Bella (a.k.a. Babette) Itzig married Levin Salomon. Their son Jakob Salomon (see right) converted to Christianity during the Napoleonic Wars. He had recently purchased a garden estate from a man named Bartholdy, so he adopted that as his Christian family name. He advised his brother-in-law, Abraham Mendelssohn, to convert and take the name Bartholdy, too.

During the last years of Napoleon's wars, Bartholdy became a Prussian consul-general in Rome. He was a great patron of the arts, especially interested in the old art of fresco painting which still survived in Italy. He commissioned several German painters to learn this skill which had long been forgotten in Northern Europe.

Bella and Levin Salomon's daughter Lea married Abraham Mendelssohn. It was Bella (Babette) who gave her grandson Felix a score of Bach's “St. Matthew Passion.”

Daniel Itzig's son, Isaac Daniel Itzig, founded the “Jewish Free School” in Berlin in 1778, the first of its kind.

Susanna Itzig Friedlander's husband helped Moses Mendelssohn's sons found the Mendelssohn & Friedlander Bank which later became Mendelssohn & Co. In 1812, it was “one of the 20 most important banks in Berlin;” by 1823, one of the top 3.

Another son was the father of an architect who built many important buildings in Berlin, including the Stock Exchange (see illustration, right), built in 1859 on the site of the Itzig Family's house (see end of post). The Stock Exchange was a target of the Allied bombing raids and destroyed in 1945.

Sarah Itzig (see left) married Solomon Levy. She studied piano with W.F. Bach, the oldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. She was a well-known musician in Berlin, performing at the Sing-Academy. She was Lea Salomon Mendelssohn's aunt and a strong musical presence in Felix Mendelssohn's early years.

Nowhere could I find any explanation why it was okay for Sarah Levy to perform in public (whether she was paid or not) but it wasn't for her great-niece, Fanny Mendelssohn. Perhaps it was a generational thing...

Two other daughters married Viennese bankers and were friends and patrons of Mozart's.

Here is a photograph of the Itzig House (right) taken in 1857 (making this also a fairly early photograph)/ Two years later, it was demolished and replaced by the Stock Exchange (see above), designed and built by Daniel Itzig's grandson.

How does it compare to the Mendelssohn Family House? You certainly do get the idea that it's a big house and this is a very wealthy family. No wonder Felix Mendelssohn never had to worry about personal finances...

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn's Sister and Her World

Felix Mendelssohn's older sister, Fanny, was also a pianist and compoer. She had begun piano lessons as a child and was taking composition lessons with Carl Friedrich Zelter before Felix did. She quickly exhibited admirable talent in both areas.

However, the prevailing prejudice toward women in the public eye at this time in history meant that while it was fine for Felix to pursue a career in music as a performer and a composer, it was not for his sister.

When she was 15, her father Abraham told her that music might be a career for Felix – he was only 11 years old at the time – “but for you, it will be only an ornament.” In other words, she could play and compose as much as she wanted to but she couldn't make a living at it. Her primary role in life was to be a wife and mother. The men earned the money.

In fact, it wasn't so much as “making a living at it” as that she would not be able to earn money by it. She could perform privately as often as she wished – as in their Sunday musicales – but not in public where people would pay to hear her and she would be paid or that critics would criticize her playing in public newspapers.

Two years after his father Abraham died and Felix was now 28 and recently married, his mother Lea asked Felix to help Fanny get her music published. He declined but explained that publishing meant a commitment to continuously be supplying new works to be published. Fanny was not in the habit of writing a great deal (though one wonders if she could have been, given the opportunity). He would assist her if she really felt it necessary (or to please her husband) but he wrote “I cannot encourage her to do what I do not deem right myself.”

People point out that Clara Wieck Schumann had long been one of the major pianists of the day. While she no longer wrote very much music as the wife of Robert Schumann and the mother of eight children, still, she was busy concertizing all across Europe, especially following the final illness and eventual death of her husband.

The difference is primarily one of class. While Berlin was more conservative (and conventional) than Leipzig, Clara was also not from a wealthy upper-middle-class family. Her father, Friedrich Wieck (pronounced VEEK) had planned a musical career for her when she was a child (in fact, he had plans to turn her into a concert pianist even before she was born, but that's a long story and doesn't concern us, here). He even took Schumann to court to keep them from getting married because he did not want him interfering with Clara's career (or the money he would've made from it). But Robert was the composer in the family and when he was busy writing, she couldn't even practice because it would disturb him. And of course there were the children...

In Fanny Mendelssohn's case, being from a wealthy family, it was just unseemly that a woman should earn money, especially upon the concert stage.

It's not the she chafed under this, though at times it irritated her.

There are a series of letters between her and Felix while he was in Paris, complaining about all the music he had to hear and all the composers he had to meet. She practically exploded, being cooped up in the house back in Berlin. What she wouldn't have given to be there with him!

She continued to compose as well as perform at the family musicales. When she married her husband, Wilhelm Hensel – technically, we should refer to her as Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, by the way – they lived in one of the former “guest-houses” on the Mendelssohn House's property in Berlin. Though given privacy, she was essentially her parents' neighbor and could easily take over managing the Sunday musicales. That was to be her outlet.

Even though she had known Hensel for at least five years - an artist, he had sketched portraits of everybody in the family but tone-deaf (they used to joke, in this musical family, that Hensel couldn't even hum a popular old Christmas carol) - she wasn't sure how her new married life would affect her musical life. Would her husband forbid her to compose music?

The story is told that the day after their wedding, Hensel asked her to sit down at the piano. He placed a blank piece of manuscript paper in front of her, implying she could write whatever she wanted.

In 1847, when she was 41, she was in the midst of rehearsing an up-coming performance of one her brother's choral works when she had a stroke and died later that day. Felix himself was so distraught at this early and sudden death, it affected his own health in such away that he never recovered, and he deteriorated until, six months later, he had a series of strokes and died as well.

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BROTHER & SISTER

They had been very close all their lives. They used to joke about being twins, they were so much alike. He was proud of her musicianship and specifically showed some of her songs to Goethe's wife who then sang them for the great poet during one of his visits.

In order for some of her music to reach a wider public, he even published some of her songs and piano pieces as his own. This wasn't meant that he was trying to steal it or gain anything by not telling the truth about who wrote it: it was just “unseemly” or “unlady-like” for it to have been published under her own name. In fact, Fanny was quite flattered by it. Only a few people knew the true identity of these songs.

(This portrait, right, of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was made in 1842).

He wrote to her to tell her an amusing story. When he was in London in 1842, he met Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, for a social afternoon of talk and music-making. When the Prince mentioned that she loved to sing his songs, Mendelssohn asked her to choose her favorite and sing it for him. The song she chose was actually one that Fanny had written. He told his sister how it delighted him to know this but he was unable to confess the truth to the Queen of England!

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PUBLIC vs. PRIVATE

Fanny Mendelssohn performed once in public, playing her brother's 1st Piano Concerto (the work Stuart Malina will be performing with the Harrisburg Symphony in February 2010).

There is another story I had read in program notes for her one substantial orchestral work, a 10-minute overture called, simply, “Overture.” I've not seen it mentioned anywhere else so I'm not sure if it's true but it would be possible.

It was the only time she conducted any of her music in public, at a concert in a city in East Prussia where she was visiting friends. In her honor, the orchestra had programmed an Overture she had composed around 1830 (in fact, it is only known as “Overture”) and at the concert, the conductor asked her to lead the orchestra for it. Whether it was because she was far from Berlin and her social circle, a few years after her father had died and was no longer around to disapprove.

Despite all this, she composed about 250 songs, 125 piano pieces, an occasionally heard piano trio, a string quartet I've never heard, four cantatas and an oratorio called simply “Oratorio on Biblical Themes.” All these were written for and performed in the family's Sunday afternoon musicales.

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SOME OTHER COMPOSERS WHO HAPPEN ALSO TO BE WOMEN

If the Mendelssohns had lived in Paris or London, it's possible Fanny's life could have been different. But the class role of a woman in society might not have been very different in a different country.

In the United States, there was a young woman who had been a child prodigy, able to sing counter-melodies to the songs her mother sang to her when she was 2 and composing waltzes at the piano when she was 4. Amy Marcy Cheney only had one year of training in composition, but made her debut as a concert pianist when she was either 16 in Boston. One of the works she performed was a piano concerto by a friend of Felix Mendelssohn's, a German composer named Ignaz Moscheles (pronounced MOH-sheh-less).

Her plans for a career, however, came to a halt when she was married to a Boston physician named Dr. Henry Beach who was 24 years older than she was. She agreed to limit her concertizing to one performance a year, donating the money she'd earn to charity. But he didn't say she couldn't compose.

So that is how she realized her musical needs. She wrote lots of piano music and a large number of songs which could be played at home for her own musicales. But she also composed a large Mass for chorus and orchestra was had quite a public success in 1892 and four years later she composed the first symphony ever written by an American Woman (it's called the “Gaelic” Symphony because it uses Irish and Scottish tunes as the basis for its themes). She signed herself Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.

But soon after her husband died in 1910, she was back on the road, concertizing across the USA and Europe, continuing to perform and compose until she died in 1944.

It is only recently that composers who are women have begun being treated on more equal footings with those who are men. One of the busiest composer today is Jennifer Higdon. A string quartet of hers will be performed this season at the January 23rd concert of Harrisburg's Market Square Concerts. She has an orchestral work on the program with the Harrisburg Symphony the following weekend.

She has many new works being commissioned, including an opera to be written for the San Francisco Opera. Women of the previous generation were breaking through the “glass ceiling,” sometimes having their music performed or getting commissions for new ones because they were women. Composers of this generation are getting performances and commissions because they're composers: the fact they also happen to be women is less of an issue.

Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn & His Jewish Heritage

Felix Mendelssohn was born in the Jewish faith two hundred years ago. His grandfather was the famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. His great-grandfather had been born in a Jewish ghetto in the German city of Dessau.

As you've read in previous posts, the attitude in much of Europe was anti-Semitic. During the course of the 19th Century this may have lessened somewhat but it was never far from the surface.

Even when laws and social attitudes were more tolerant of Jews, still the Prussian government could declare than any Berlin Jew, when he married or bought a house, had to purchase a certain amount of porcelain from the Royal Porcelain Factory. They couldn't even choose what they might have preferred: they were just handed something and told to pay for it. That's how Moses Mendelssohn became the owner of a set of 20 porcelain monkeys. These monkeys became a symbol to future generations of the family until they disappeared in the years before World War II.

TOLERATION, ASSIMILATION & CONVERSION

During Mendelssohn's life, there was some toleration of the Jews but it did not mean there was an end to discrimination. He saw that if his children were to “get ahead” in the world, they would have to do it as a member of the state-supported religion which, in Berlin, was Protestant Lutheranism.

And so Felix's father, Abraham decided his children should be converted to the Lutheran faith. After all, Moses Mendelssohn had supported the idea of “assimilation,” which meant that Jews would leave the ghettos, blend into the society around them. It didn't mean they should necessarily convert but by placing less emphasis on certain aspects of their heritage and adopting those of the culture they lived in, they would become another faith living among many rather than something more easily scorned.

When Felix was 7 years old, he and his brother and sisters were baptized. It was actually several more years before Abraham and his wife converted.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY

An maternal uncle who had already converted suggested they adopt the name “Bartholdy,” after a property he had purchased from an important Protestant merchant of that name. And so, Felix became “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” (with or without a hyphen).

As an adult on the verge of international fame, Felix was advised by his father to drop the Mendelssohn altogether and just be Felix Bartholdy, but Felix refused, using both names officially (see his signature, left). I'm not sure when it happened that people began to drop the Bartholdy instead, but it was relatively recent and not a decision on Mendelssohn's part, himself.

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MENDELSSOHN as a MAN OF FAITH

They had never been exactly “religious Jews.” Mendelssohn never had firm roots in the faith he was born into. He grew up, basically, as a Lutheran but not a profoundly religious one. Today, the world is full of people who profess a faith but may not go to church. How many people today go to church twice a year, only at Christmas & Easter? In Germany in the 1800s, it was very similar.

MENDELSSOHN & ANTI-SEMITISM

But that didn't change the fact that Mendelssohn was born a Jew or “looked Jewish.” His parents were both Jewish and their families had long traditions in the faith, culture and ethnic heritage.

In 1830, Mendelssohn wrote a symphony (later called his “Reformation” Symphony) to celebrate the 300th Anniversary of Martin Luther's Augsburg Confession, an important event in the history of the Lutheran Church. It was not performed even though it included in its last movement one of Martin Luther's most famous hymns, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” It was rejected from the festival celebrating the event probably because the composer was considered a Jew but it may also have been because it was a little too over-the-top for what the people organizing the festival were looking for. Most likely, it was a little of both. (Anyway, Mendelssohn only performed the symphony once. No one else heard it until it was published and performed again in 1868, over 20 years after his death.)

There is a belief among musicians and scholars that Mendelssohn felt “unanchored” because he had converted to Christianity. Two of his oratorios were inspired by Biblical characters – his most famous was Elijah, one of the greatest of all Jewish prophets; the second was a New Testament figure, St. Paul, who had originally been a Jew persecuting the early Christians until he was converted in a blinding flash "on the Road to Damascus." At the time of his death, Mendelssohn was also working on a new oratorio called Christus.

Mendelssohn was brought up in the Protestant tradition and loved the music of Bach, one of the greatest Lutheran musicians of the 18th Century. He brought Bach's music back into public awareness with a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion when he was 20 years old. This was a dramatic work telling the story of Christ's crucifixion, using the Gospel of Matthew as the basis for its text.

When he was 28, he fell in love with the daughter of a French Protestant minister. In fact, it was many months after the wedding until he took his wife home to meet the family.

Throughout his life, Mendelssohn was neither dogmatic nor pious about his religion, new or old. Just as they never attended temple when he was a child, he rarely attended church as a Christian. He might chose a church to attend more on the basis of what music was being performed, how well it was being performed or if they had a good pipe organ he wanted to hear or play, rather than how the faith was interpreted to the congregation by its preacher.

When a German critic complained about the “Hebraic elements” and music from the synagogue he heard in Mendelssohn's music, the French composer Hector Berlioz wrote in one of his newspaper articles if the critic would have made “such a foolish statement” is he hadn't known the composer of St. Paul and Elijah was a grandson of a man named Moses? “It is hard to see,” he continued, “how these [Jewish musical traditions] could have influenced the musical style of Felix Mendelssohn since he never professed the Jewish religion. Everyone knows he was a Lutheran and an earnest Lutheran at that.”

When he conducted at a German music festival in a city on the Rhine, there were demonstrators, students, who paraded in front of the concert hall with a placard reading “Christian Music for Christian Musicians.” They were dispersed by the police and probably Mendelssohn never even knew about it. Such public attitudes may not have been rare but they weren't the standard reaction to Mendelssohn or his music.

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WAGNER & MENDELSSOHN

Richard Wagner, who was openly anti-Semitic, was no great friend or supporter of Mendelssohn during his lifetime (by then Wagner had completed his opera, Lohengrin). A few years after Mendelssohn's death, Wagner published a newspaper article under a pseudonym entitled “Judenthum in Musik” which is best translated as “Jewishness in Music” though to be less offensive it's often called by the less pejorative word, “Judaism in Music.”

He attacked two composers in particular – Mendelssohn (who was already dead) as well as Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Jewish composer of German birth who preferred the Italian form of his first name, Jakob, and had added his maternal great-grandfather's name Meyer to his original last name, Beer (his father was also a banker; in fact, Meyerbeer also studied for a time with Zelter who had been Mendelssohn's principal teacher).

Wagner expanded and republished it as a book in 1869, about five years after Meyerbeer's death. The original article, published in a magazine with a circulation of about 1,200 readers, was mostly an embarrassment to Wagner's friends (like Franz Liszt who thought it was a passing phase) and an annoyance to Mendelssohn's fans. Wagner had hoped it would create a sensation and advance his career as a writer and make him lots of money. In this sense, it failed completely.

Wagner felt that Mendelssohn's conservative musical style was “in the way” of his own more advanced style which some were already calling “Music of the Future.” Meyerbeer was one of the most powerful men in the European musical world and had a great deal to do with the failure of Wagner's earlier operas to get produced, especially in Paris where he ruled the opera house. With many of his other essays and articles discriminating against Jewish musicians and their supporters, this book became an embarrassment to people who supported him or liked his music, several of whom were Jewish. Many people dismissed Wagner's prose writings (and with it, these political manifestos) with the expression, “He was a great composer but a terrible writer.” Most people dismissed it as “sour grapes” and musically political, trying to destroy the music of his detractors, than anything socially viable.

It also isn't likely these writings, not well known to later generations, were ever part of Hitler's readings or those of anyone formulating the politics of the growing Nazi party. Though it had been reprinted in the 1930s in Germany, there was little interest in it until after World War II.

But still, looking back on the history of the 19th Century, the attitude of Wagner remains. It was also a symptom of the society he lived in. Not to be too light about it, it is another form of discrimination and one that had tragic consequences difficult to analyze rationally.

Dr. Dick

Moses Mendelssohn, the Composer's Grandfather

Into our story, now, comes Moses Mendelssohn, born in 1729 to a poor Jewish peddler known locally as Mendel. German Jews had no right, at that time, to “formal names” and so when the boy was given the name Moses (perhaps the most common boys' name among the Jews of his town), neighbors called him “Moses, Mendel's son.”

Regardless of the family's poverty, the father was determined the boy would have as much education as possible. Eventually Moses studied law – which is what most students studied if they wanted to achieve the most well-rounded education available.

Trained in the art of speculation in the Talmud, Moses found the Enlightenment – where you examined a question “like an insect imbedded in amber, put under the microscope, turned this way and that, disassembled and reassembled before you could be sure of the answer” – a natural fit for him.

(In this drawing, Mendelssohn, seated on the left, discusses an idea with two fellow philosophers.)

While treating religion this way may affect a person's faith, philosophers found the Enlightenment gave them nothing to believe in instead, having taken away the comfort of even a mild faith where religion – if not its dogma – gave comfort and meaning to the “big questions” of our existence and our direction.

But in his Phaedo (written in 1767), “three dialogues [after Plato] on the Immortality of the Soul” – essentially a translation of Plato into German but with up-dates – Moses Mendelssohn argued that Reason in fact led to Religion, that God did exist (when others argued, because He could not be seen, He did not exist) but that “the religious instinct may not serve as a reason to enforce acceptance of any one specific religious doctrine.” He believed in Judaism because, to him, no other religion contained as many admonitions to lead believers toward “justice, piety, obedience to law and state, human warmth (humanity).” In reality, he wrote, it made no real difference what religion one chose:

“All religions are partly theoretical and partly practical. Their theoretical side has no influence on morality. Men often have constructed false moralities from true theories and true morality from false theories... Religion makes it easier to do good because it cites motives for doing so. Any religion does that if it holds out the promise to man that doing good will please God and the evil will displease Him. Yet the definition of what is 'good' is impeded by the prejudices of various religions. You ask me which religion is least impeded? I answer, the religion which permits the greatest freedom to Reason.”

Later, he also wrote that he believed the Jews had helped separate themselves from the society they lived in by holding their services in Hebrew. He felt they should adopt the language of the country they lived in rather than the language of their heritage. Keep in mind Catholicism still maintained its religious services in Latin – the use of the “vernacular” or language of the location was still controversial when it became a reality following the 2nd Vatican Council (Vatican II) which met in the 1960s.

Moses Mendelssohn also opposed the idea of a Homeland – the Zionist dream of returning to what is now Israel was already gaining popularity in the 18th Century – believing that “Home lies where your home is.” “The wall of the ghetto must be torn down by men working from inside as well as from outside.”

He began translating the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch) into German. But rabbis declared this translation an act of heresy (it should be read only in Hebrew), proposing a series of punishments for Jews caught reading it. The Danish king, Christian VII, for one, came out in favor of Mendelssohn's work and made it illegal to carry out the rabbis' plan.

(By the way, in 1820, Franz Schubert set Moses Mendelssohn's translation of the 23rd Psalm to music for women's voices and piano.)

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THE MONKEYS

Though these ideas were controversial, Moses Mendelssohn's works were popular with the general German public and he was highly regarded. That didn't mean people like Frederick the Great or members of his government couldn't still get away with anti-Semitic statements and acts.

For one, it had been decided early in 1761, that when Jews married or bought a house, they were required – by royal edict – to buy certain amounts of porcelain from the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin. The Jewish buyer could not even choose what they might want: it was just handed to them.

When Moses Mendelssohn married, he had to buy twenty porcelain monkeys which became a symbol in the Mendelssohn family, passed on from father to son as a reminder, until the 1930s and the rise of Hitler. After that, the monkeys disappeared.

(I don't know if these are similar to the Mendelssohn Monkeys or not - they were also made at a different porcelain factory - but they date from around the period. I saw a trumpet-playing monkey from this set listed on-line for sale at $1,862. I also doubt it was the Mendelssohn Monkeys that were the inspiration for Warren Zevon's 2000 song, 'Porcelain Monkeys' from his album "Life'll Kill Ya".)

This edict was repealed in 1787 and in 1808, “deserving Jews” in Berlin were awarded citizen's privileges, including the right to be elected to honorary posts. In 1812, shortly after Abraham Mendelssohn brought his family to Berlin, Prussia issued the “Emancipation Edict” declaring all Jews full-scale citizens.

Moses Mendelssohn, who had earned the king's favor as a “Protected Jew,” had died in 1786.

In 1813, his son, Abraham (see drawing, right), was honored as a public benefactor for helping to finance the army that defeated Napoleon in that year's war. He was then appointed to Berlin's Municipal Council. Imagine what his own grandfather, Mendel the Peddler, would have thought of that!

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MOSES MENDELSSOHN MEETS HIS WIFE

The story passed down in the Mendelssohn family about how Moses met his future wife may or may not be true, but it's a wonderful story.

In 1762, when Moses was 33 years old and already well-known, he visited Hamburg where he met a 24-year old blonde, blue-eyed Jewish girl named Fromet Gugenheim, the daughter of a merchant. She knew him by reputation and had read some of his books but was surprised when she first saw him. He was short, frail-looking and humpbacked. She burst into tears.

Mendelssohn asked her, “Is it my hump?” he asked. She nodded. Then he continued, “Let me tell you a story, then.”

“When a Jewish child is born,” he began, “proclamation is made in heaven of the name of the person that he or she is to marry. When I was born, my future wife was also named, but at the same time it was said that she herself would be humpbacked. ‘O God,’ I said, ‘a deformed girl will become embittered and unhappy. Dear Lord, let me have the hump, and make her fair and beautiful.’”

Fromet (see drawing, left) was touched by the story, and in June 1762, they were married. They had nine children, six of whom grew to adulthood (considering the mortality of children in the 18th Century, this was a luckier family than many).

Another story was told, that when Moses was out walking with two of his young sons, they were attacked by some men who called them names and threw stones at them. One of his sons asked his father, “Papa, is it such a disgrace to be a Jew?” He wrote to a friend that he lowered his eyes, sighed and thought to himself, “Men, men – where have you led yourselves?” On the other hand, he was able to rent a large private garden where he and his family could walk without being molested.

The eldest child, a daughter named Brendel (later changed to Dorothea), married a merchant chosen for her by her father (typical of the day but rather old-fashioned for a modern thinker like Moses Mendelssohn). After bearing four children to her husband, she met the young philosopher and writer Friedrich Schlegel, son of a Protestant clergyman. They fell in love and she ran away with him, living together until they got married four years later. They both converted to Catholicism a couple of years after that. Dorothea also became a writer and novelist.

The family's three sons founded a banking corporation in Hamburg, the main German port. This became one of the major banks in Germany. The second youngest son, Abraham, established himself with the firm in Paris in 1797 before moving back to Hamburg in 1804, then moving back to the family's home in Berlin in 1811 (see A Mendelssohn Chronology). It was in 1809, during their years in Hamburg, that Abraham's son Felix, the composer, was born. (The photograph at left shows the entrance to the Mendelssohn Bank, in a building opened in 1820.)

Once Felix had become one of the most internationally famous composers and a busy conductor, Abraham Mendelssohn (whose own success in the field of commerce was considerable) quipped “I am the son of my father and the father of my son.”

A biographer later wrote of the three generations of Mendelssohn men: “One wrote books, one wrote loans, the other wrote music.”

- Dr. Dick

A Little Bit about Religion in Germany

It is very difficult to tell just the facts of someone's life without giving the background of the times that person lived in. This project barely scratches the surface of what life was like in Germany two hundred years ago and even that has to be "led up to" with more background.

Mendelssohn was born in the Jewish faith.

This one observation and the impact it had on his life needs some background about the attitude toward Jews in Germany then and about the religious attitudes of the culture in general. What I'm writing about or quoting in these posts reflects the ideas and beliefs at the time and were not necessarily the ideas and beliefs of everybody. Any discussion of religious attitudes today could not possibly cover everything in a few pages - or not manage to offend someone.

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BEFORE 1800

The Protestant Reformation – “protesters” breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church – began in Germany in 1517 with Martin Luther. In the decades that followed, Catholic princes tried to destroy the Protestant princes, mostly through warfare. But it was the people who suffered, especially during the devastating 30-Years War (1618-1648).

(See the European map, left, showing the German States in 1648 at the end of the 30-years War. Notice all the different smaller principalities - some 300 of them - making up what we know of as Germany, today. Compare them to the larger nations like France; Poland at the time was one of the largest countries in Europe - by 1795, it had been partitioned between its neighbors, Austria, Prussia and Russia, and no longer existed.)

The German lands were now divided between the largely Protestant north and the Catholic south, dominated by Austria. During the 1700s, Prussia (once just part of Brandenburg) – initially ruled by a duke who then decided to call himself a king – quickly became a powerful military force and took on a leading role among the northern princes. A “soldier-king” created a military-like bureaucracy. His son, who loved to play the flute and enjoyed writing his own music, turned out to be an even greater military ruler, expanding the boundaries of Prussia in wars with Austria, Russia, Poland and France and earning in his lifetime the nickname “Frederick the Great” (see picture, right).

In addition to his passion for music, he was a close friend of the great French philosopher Voltaire who once quipped that “other states have an army: the Prussian Army has a state.” He called Frederick “the Philosopher King.” His capital, Berlin, had been a kind of sleepy back-water city that was suddenly thrust into the lime-light by its sudden rise to power in the late-1600s. To improve the culture there, he invited artists and philosophers to live there, including a well-known Jewish philosopher named Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

This was an age called “The Enlightenment” when rulers governed more by reason rather than religious faith, making reforms by moral principles based on a set of values than political or religious ideas. Many of its principles found expression in the French Revolution as well as in the founding of the United States of America.

His nephew Friedrich Wilhelm II, who succeeded him, was more interested in entertaining himself. He also enjoyed music, maintaining a fine orchestra and a string quartet, often playing the cello in it. Mozart wrote his last string quartets for the Prussian king, hoping to be given a job in Berlin as a court composer (he wasn't). Beethoven dedicated two cellos sonatas to the king (he gave him a nice ring as thanks).

Friedrich Wilhelm II also became a Rosicrucian, a member of a secret society that claimed to date back to the Medieval Ages built on “esoteric truths,” though in reality it probably developed around 1600 during the years of fighting between the Catholics and newly-formed Protestant churches.

The Masons were also a society founded on secret rituals with social intent that meshed well with the Enlightenment, but Rosicrucianism as observed by the Prussian king seemed less capable of working in a rational atmosphere and as a result, Prussia ended up becoming bankrupt by the time the king died and was much diminished in size and international prestige after losing war after war. When he died in 1797, his nickname could be translated “The Fat Fool.”

Even though many of the wars fought between the German states started in religious rivalries, both churches needed military protection, especially in the smaller states, and so essentially became subservient to the civil powers and secular states. The Catholic states became less attentive to the Pope's authority in Rome. The Protestant states became less centralized about their faith, preferring family prayers to eloquence from the pulpit.

This led to a variety of other Protestant sects – a movement called Pietism (after the word 'piety') which included the Moravian Brotherhood who had been banished from Catholic Bohemia but found a home in Protestant Germany (they also eventually found a home here in Pennsylvania).

This sense of religious mysticism was contradictory with the standard philosophies of the Enlightenment. The late-1700s was becoming an Age of Doubt. As Will & Ariel Durant explains in the 11th volume of their “History of Civilization”:

“The Prussian Protestant clergy had by that time... come to think of Jesus as a lovable mystic who proclaimed the approaching end of the world. In 1800, a hurried observer reported that religion was dead in Germany and that 'it is no longer the fashion to be a Christian.' ... Such reports were emotionally exaggerated... it hardly touched the German masses. ...Faith always recovers and doubt remains.”

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THE QUEST for "JEWISH EMANCIPATION"

As faith weakened, toleration grew.

Like much of Europe, Germany had long been an anti-Semitic country, but (continuing to quote Durant) “it became impossible for an educated Christian to hate a modern Jew because of a political crucifixion eighteen centuries ago,” perhaps recalling those same Jews had met Jesus with palm leaves when he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Before the Enlightenment, Jews were forced (either politically or socially, sometimes by law, other times for their own protection) to live in ghettos.

In the 1770s, freed by Emperor Joseph II in Austria and later in the Rhineland and in Prussia, they emerged from the ghettos and “assimilated” to became part of many cities' society.

This was, at least, the attitude of most of the educated classes: among the uneducated poor, this was not the case.

In some areas, resentment lingered, mostly because of economic competition in trade and banking. In 1810, Napoleon, who then controlled most of the Confederation of the Rhine, applied his own laws granting freedoms to the Jews of France to the Jews of Germany. In many countries, this was referred to as "Jewish Emancipation."

But as Jewish doctors and scholars and scientists mingled with Christians, intellectual Jewish women held salons where philosophy was discussed with some of the finest minds in the country.

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While this post reflects events mostly in the 18th and early-19th Centuries, it does not reflect the attitudes and events of the second half of the 19th Century or the 20th Century and the 2nd World War, times when Jews were once again forced (socially or politically) back into the ghettos.

The story continues in the next post about Mendelssohn's grandfather, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

- Dr. Dick

Being German in the Early 1800s

SOME INFORMATION about the SURFACE of MENDELSSOHN'S LIFE

The country you're born in, the heritage you inherit, the events that surround you as you grow up all affect you in some way. They may affect someone else differently since there are many variables to consider – your own personality and how you deal with these influences.

Deep down, as people might say, we're all the same and have the same opportunities. How well we realize them may depend on any number of factors and how we handle them.

The things all people have in common – call it potential or “raw material” – are what define us as “human beings.” What and who we become may be what most people see on the surface – which, I suspect, is why some people have problems getting past the color of our skin, our physical features, the way we talk or dress or behave, even our gender.

So let's see a few facts about the “surface” of Felix Mendelssohn and then explore what the attitudes where that defined the culture he grew up in.

Mendelssohn (commemorated here - right - on a German stamp) was born into a middle-class family. His father was a successful banker. By comparison to most composers' lives, Felix Mendelssohn had it easy. He didn't have to struggle to survive much less study to become a musician, as a child. His father “gave” him an orchestra when he turned 12, agreeing to hire the handful of players that would form this small orchestra so if Felix started composing something for them, they could perform it at one of the family's Sunday musicales. He ended up writing a dozen small symphonies for this orchestra as well as concertos written for his violin teacher, his sister and himself to be the soloists.

Now, granted, it wasn't a 100-piece orchestra: we're talking maybe a dozen or so string players. But that's still a pretty nice gift for a 12-year-old would-be composer! Most composers at that age, the families were usually struggling to put food on the table with the parents having to scrimp so their son can even take music lessons.

He hardly had to worry about anything financial during his life. Lucky him!

The common image of a creative artist is one of struggle, poverty, suffering – Franz Schubert (pronounced SHOO-b'rt) was 12 years older than Mendelssohn and he may be typical of this image: always living in poverty, never recognized in his lifetime, dying at the age of 31 after creating all this incredible music (almost 1,000 pieces of music in his catalogue).

This is a stereotype like any other stereotype: there are those who fit it and those who don't. In fact, it's really a product of the mid-1800s.

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GERMAN FAMILY VALUES around the 1800s

In Germany (and by that I mean “German-speaking lands” which would also include what is now Austria), the family was the center of society, no matter what economic level it lived at. With the growing middle class – merchants, mostly – the family reflected their faith. At the center of each church was a parish minister or priest whose led a congregation or flock: in the family, the father is the center and leads the wife and children. Youth was supposed to be obedient to the elders and the father's word was law. The mother educated the children, teaching the daughters the “domestic arts” (which included music) and she was to be dedicated to her husband.

The German man might be good-humored in public (at least in the tavern) but stern at home and serious among his competitors and employees. In business, the hierarchy was very similar to the family's. He was expected to work hard and expected the same in return from those under him.

It was basically a conservative world. Faith and old customs helped him maintain his authority – as if he were a king with his court (“a man's home is his castle”). Religion was a sacred heritage and useful in training the younger generation what was right and wrong, thereby not only continuing the family line but the principles on which it was based. He rejected the hot-headedness of youth with its “revolutionary” ideas (just those opposed to his own). He looked to keep his wife and children “in subordination” but would not stand for any “insubordination.”

The wife, accepting this without resistance, was the family's guiding authority (she would interpret or enforce what her husband said). Her role was to be the contented mother of her children.

All this was meant to perpetuate the family line from father to son, mother to daughter and, in the larger sense of things, provide a stable grounding for society and, working upwards through the church and state, the continuity of the country or its culture as a whole.

At least, that was the ideal. It didn't always work out that way.

As early as 1774, a German philosopher named Theodore von Hippel published an essay “On Marriage” which was essentially a call for “women's liberation.” He objected to the bride's vow of obedience, felt that marriage was an equal partnership, demanding the full emancipation of women with not only the right to vote but also to be eligible for any office (there had been several great queens in an age dominated historically by kings - like the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, left, who ruled from 1740-1780).

If the word “Man” referred to “mankind” presumably including both men and women, he argued the “Rights of Man” should more honestly be called the “Rights of Men.”

If our own Declaration of Independence talks of unalienable rights (Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness), the general assumption of the era was the the role of women was “to darn Man's socks and cook Man's dinner,” tasks Man thought “women were Endowed by their Creator with the unalienable obligation to perform.” [*]

Needless to say, Hippel was ignored. (Except by a few women.)

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THEN & NOW?

Still, after the French Revolution's ideas began to spread through the rest of Europe, ideas like this became more popular if not generally accepted. Intellectual women could hold forth at salons – where people gathered to discuss the latest news and ideas – and women sometimes took the prerogative in divorce which before would have been scandalous if not impossible.

Then, too, morals in general became a little looser at the same time. Once the old King of Prussia died and with him his very conservative ideas, his son was like a pendulum clock swinging back to the opposite side: he kept mistresses and was fairly open about it and so other noblemen followed his example. People married for love rather than economic and social stability. People now decided it was time to party, to dress with a taste for fashion, to visit the “in-”places. All of this was already setting 1800 in motion.

This is not very different from what happened in England at the end of the 19th Century when Queen Victoria became the symbol of stodgy morality. The next generation took the pendulum back. The 1950s in America, the “Eisenhower Years,” where years of conservative family values (if you were white and middle-class - it was a different world if you were poor and black) but then along came the rebellion of the '60s and the Sexual Revolution through the '70s, swinging back again to the Reagan Years and now opening up again to another cycle of looser, more encompassing possibilities.

That doesn't mean “everybody changes.” As in politics, one party's in and the other party's out: eventually, their turn will come to be back in and then the in-party is out.

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THE BIEDERMEIER AGE

What happened next – this next swing of the pendulum – affected Mendelssohn's life directly.

The flexibility of the 1800s was the beginning of the “Romantic Era.” By that, I don't mean the “I love you” sense of Romance but a more emotional way of living and expressing yourself, paying less attention to rules and regulations. It's the opposite of “Classical Era” or an attitude which was more structured and traditional, more rule-bound, more intellectual in its concepts. This is a division that applies to music, to literature and architecture and painting – as well as lifestyles in general.

In Central Europe, this period is usually referred to as “The Biedermeier Age” (pronounced BEE-d'r-my'r). Unlike the “Victorian Age” at the end of the century, focusing around the guiding life of Queen Victoria in England, Biedermeier was not a person. In fact, the name wasn't given to it until 50 years after the pendulum had swung back again. It was taken from humorous characters in poems that were popular at the time (named Biedermann and Bummelmaier) – it's sort of like having someone today calling the 1950's “The Bumstead Age” after the comic strip character Dagwood Bumstead whose family life reflected the values popular in that generation (even though the comic strip originated in 1933 and still runs today with only slight modifications).

Basically, the decades following the upheavals of the Napoleonic Era and the advent of the Romantic Era around 1848 (when there were more political and social upheavals across Europe), the Biedermeier Age was an era of comfort rather than the emotional ups-and-downs people had been experiencing. The political instability of all those years of warfare gave way to a desire for things – everything – to be calmer, more comfortable and, above all, stable.

Biedermeier middle-class families attempted to imitate, on their own scale, the lives of the nobility. The furniture was detailed and decorative but inexpensively made even though the idea was to LOOK expensive. Rooms were full of small “art objects.” Everything pointed to comfort and success. (see photo, left, a comfortable room in the Biedermeier style, 1840s)

These Biedermeier details were visible in the architecture of the day: for instance, houses were built back from the street rather than right up to the sidewalk or curb, hinting at something a little more private from the world outside.

In Vienna, the Austrian Prime Minister Prince Klemens von Metternich (see right), a powerful man and no friend of democratic ideas, was also the President of Vienna's Academy of Fine Art. Only works that gave a positive impression of Viennese life and culture were permitted. As a result, paintings were mostly portraits and beautiful landscapes or still-lifes with domestic items arranged on a table. Paintings like this may also be found in earlier periods but periods that also had a similar life-view. Gone are the Greek gods, paintings with warfare and violent themes and certainly no one sitting around naked.

In order to keep his view in power, Metternich knew the politics needed to be more “controlled.” This was an era when the secret police went from tracking down spies and gathering military secrets to keeping society in line. If the family unit was secure and well-behaved, then all should be well.

In 1819, political unrest in Austria (wanting to speed up the humanistic changes idealized by the French Revolution) led to Metternich's oppressive governmental decrees which resulted in very strong censorship of the newspapers and of students in universities. People were afraid to talk about government policies they disagreed with because you never knew who was listening – the guy sitting behind you in the tavern, the neighbor under whose window you were walking by, a servant working in the kitchen - they could all overhear something, report it to the police and be paid for the information.

ANOTHER COMPOSER'S BRUSH with the TIMES

In the 1820s, composer Franz Schubert (see left) had a circle of friends that included poets, novelists and painters. They would gather at a friend's house to discuss the latest books they'd read, the poems they were writing – Schubert might play a song he had just written – and then the discussion would eventually break down into some drinking. But at one point, even though they never thought they were discussing politically sensitive issues, one by one, they found themselves being taken in for questioning, some of them arrested without explanation only to be released without explanation. Some other friends were not released: it turned out they were writing pamphlets that advocated dissenting opinions from the government. And so Schubert and his friends, apparently guilty by association, decided to abandon their “reading club.”

This may not be very different from issues today when, following the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, the government took a more watchful eye on society's communications, not just tracking down people plotting further attacks but through other surveillance aspects covered by the Patriot Act.

We are, of course, at war – even though the war may be a little more vague than the traditional sense of warfare, like it had been in Napoleon's day or even in this century when armies of one government fight an army of another government.

In Schubert's day, the surveillance by the Austrian Government may have been more like the “McCarthy Era” during the Cold War – another kind of vague 'war' – when Washington was looking for anyone who might have been a Communist sympathizer.

It might be something to ask your parents and grandparents what they might remember of both these topics from the 1950s.

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A SOCIAL ISSUE in the 1800s: SUICIDE AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE

During the uncertainties of the Napoleonic Wars, one disturbing symptom was an increase in suicides among young people. In Germany, this was a serious problem. Many poets wrote about lost love and broken hearts, how young people died of love. But eventually, many of the poems begin to reflect how young people with broken hearts would go out and drown themselves or shoot themselves. Schubert set many of these poems to music.

One of the most popular novels of the day was by the great German poet, Goethe (pronounced GER-teh). “The Sorrows of Young Werther” told the story of a young man who falls in love with a married woman. When she refuses to leave her husband to run off with him on Christmas Eve, he asks her husband to borrow his pistols – and then commits suicide with them.

One of the great works of this age, the songs by Franz Schubert called “The Beautiful Miller's Daughter” (Die schöne Müllerin – dee SHER-neh MYÜ-leh-rinn), tells the story of a young apprentice miller who's walking along a wooded stream and comes to another miller's mill. He sees the beautiful daughter of the family and falls in love with her (Romantic!). He envisions only peace and tranquility in this domestic happiness (Biedermeier!). But he finds out she's in love with (or at least he's courting her) a hunter and a hunter represents something less stable than a miller would – always moving about, his income dependent on how good (or bad) the hunting is and of course, the violence of hunting. He thinks if she marries the hunter, she's letting herself in to be unhappy. In the end, this would-be love-story ends without the young miller ever knowing whether she even knows he exists – it's all in his mind – and he confides his thoughts to the stream burbling past him. In the end, unhappily moving on, we realize it is the stream singing a lullaby and that the young man has drowned himself.

Schubert was writing for amateurs to perform these songs and listen to them in their homes, around the parlor piano in front of a fireplace after dinner (also very Biedermeier). But like a lot of TV today, whether it's actions stories or romances we watch on TV or in the movies, it was a kind of escapist experience: this is not how WE live, but we experience how an imaginary characters lives and relate to it. Women may have sighed at the poor man's plight, men may have felt “I know what unrequited love is all about” -- but would the men go to the extreme of committing suicide over a romantic break-up? Probably not. But some did.

There was concern that perhaps “glorifying” this kind of violence was leading to an increase in suicides or merely reflecting its existence in society – “life imitating art” or “art imitating life.”

This is an argument very much at the heart of a lot of pop music today.

While Schubert's music is specifically German for the 1820s, the basic emotions of its story are more universal than that: this story could be told in almost any era with several different possible “surfaces.” Isn't it the stuff of blues? Couldn't a rapper write a series of songs about the girl who, for whatever reason, got away? Substitute city streets for a wooded stream, reverse the roles of miller and hunter – (she loves an accountant?) - or even have the guy thinking “it'd be great to give up this street life and settle down and have kids.” Believe it or not, that's a kind of “Biedermeier” thinking.

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Mendelssohn grew up in a close family - so close to his sister that her unexpected death destroyed his own health - and family life was always important to him. Though he traveled a lot as a performing musician and conductor, he was never happier than in domestic surroundings. His was definitely a “Biedermeier” world.

- Dr. Dick

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[*] I love this quote: it was used in Liane Ellison Norman's novel Stitches in Air, a novel about Mozart's mother.