4 November: Boreham on Felix Mendelssohn

The Soul of a Composer
Those whose musical instincts are even slightly developed will like to be reminded that it was on the fourth of November, 1847, that Felix Mendelssohn died, whilst still a youth in his thirties. The immortal composer had been one of that remarkable group of babies born in 1809. Men were following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting, with feverish impatience, for the latest news of the wars. Nobody took any notice of the babies that were being born. Yet, in one year, lying midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, there stole into the world a host of heroes. Gladstone was born at Liverpool; Tennyson was born at Somersby; and Oliver Wendell Holmes appeared at Massachusetts. On the very selfsame day of that fateful year Charles Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath in Old Kentucky. And, among the other celebrities of the year, Frederic Chopin was born at Warsaw and Felix Mendelssohn at Hamburg.

As though he knew that his days must be few, Mendelssohn got to work early. He made his first public appearance at the age of nine; composed a cantata the following year; wrote five symphonies 12 months later; and, at the age of 12, had created such an impression that Goethe invited him to be his guest at Weimar. Whilst still a boy he had the world at his feet. Yet, as Dr. W. S. Rockstro points out, he never lost his head. "The temptations to egoism by which he was surrounded would have rendered most clever students intolerable. But the natural amiability of his disposition, and the healthy influence of his happy home life, counteracted all tendencies towards inordinate self-assertion; and he is described by all who knew him as the most charming boy imaginable." During the years that followed he made triumphal tours of all the great European capitals; he 10 times visited London, being treated by Queen Victoria with a respect that almost amounted to personal affection; and then, overtaken by several domestic sorrows in swift succession, his sensitive spirit snapped and he died quite suddenly at the age of 38.

Harmony Articulation Of History
Music like Mendelssohn's has two distinct values; it has an inherent value and an associational value. Its intrinsic worth is obvious. The fact that a noble composition or a haunting melody can captivate the ear when it is heard for the first time proves that it possesses a virtue of its own, quite apart from any sacred or sentimental associations that may afterwards gather about it. We all know the story of the way in which, after a long agony of misfortune, Sparta applied to Athens for a leader. They expected a tall and stalwart soldier. To their disgust, they received a lame little schoolmaster, one Tyrtaeus. They soon discovered, however, that the odd little man could make music that set every soul on fire. And, inspired by his patriotic airs, the armies of Sparta were soon marching once more from victory to victory. Great music possesses this primary virtue.

But its secondary value is scarcely less vital. Carlyle has shown that, when the stirring chords of the "Marseillaise" fell upon the ears of the grim and silent revolutionists for the first time, the effect was instantaneous and electrical. But today those strains are invested with poignant historic significance; and to that supplementary fact they owe much of their extraordinary influence. The thoughts and memories that have become interwoven with the stirring music make such an appeal to the hearts of Frenchmen that they will, with that melody ringing in their ears, dare any death or make any sacrifice. The sound of the "Marseillaise," Carlyle affirms, will make the blood tingle in men's veins; whilst great assemblies, and armies on the march, infected by it and by all that it represents, will sing it with eyes streaming and hearts burning, hurling defiance at all the forces, material or spiritual, that may, dare to oppose them.

Mendelssohn As Part Of Sublime Pageant
There is something in the soul of man, whether he be a musical man in the technical sense or not, to which strains like those of Mendelssohn's choicest compositions irresistibly appeal. He may not be able to tell why they affect him, or how; he only knows that he feels differently after listening to them. Feeling differently, he acts differently; and thus music becomes woven into the web of actual life. It is, as Carlyle says in another essay, like Orpheus building the walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his lyre.

The Church recognised, very early in her history, the magic spell that music placed at her disposal. The world knew little of music until the angels sang over the fields of Bethlehem. In his "History of Music," Charles Burney declares that the ancients never indulged in simultaneous harmony. In their respective masterpieces, Mehaffy and Sir John Hawkins comment upon the crudity of the music of both Greece and Rome. But, as Dr. Storrs has demonstrated, when Christianity broke upon the world, the spirit of man had to find a richer voice for richer feeling. The laws of harmony appeared. Little by little, instruments were introduced until the organ, the triumph of the medieval monks, was perfected. And so, as Dr. Storrs says, music became ever richer and grander, in anthem, mass, and mighty oratorio. The rich, exultant, and lofty spiritual joy that poured itself into the world when Christ was born at Bethlehem, has awakened the sublimest minstrelsies of all the ages that have followed. And in that pageant of lyrical development, no name stands higher than the name of the inspired composer whose anniversary we gratefully mark.[1]


[1] This editorial appeared in the Hobart Mercury on November 1, 1947, to commemorate the century of Mendelssohn's death on November 4, 1847.

F W Boreham

Image: Felix Mendelssohn