Mendelssohn wrote to his friend Carl Klingemann, in
August 1839, an account of the summer months he had
recently passed in Frankfort. “In the morning I worked,
then bathed or sketched; in the afternoon I played the
organ or the piano, and afterwards rambled in the forest,
then went into society, or home, where I always found
the most charming of all society: this was the mode in
which my life was gaily spent, and you must add to all
this the glorious summer days which followed each other
in uninterrupted succession.” Without intending it, the
thirty-year-old Felix (whose very name is the Latin for
“happy”) was epitomizing the even tenor of his entire
life. Poverty, hostility, misfortune—the lares and penates
of Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert—passed over
without so much as brushing their wings against his
portal. Tragedy struck him only once, in the sudden death
of his sister Fanny. And that blow killed him, unpre-
pared as he was to meet it.
This life, lived in perpetual sunshine, brought forth and
nurtured an art drenched in sunshine—whether the warm
sun of Italy or the colder, more brilliant sun of the Heb-
rides. It is an art of surfaces, impeccable in workmanship,
exquisite in design, played upon by an unfailing discrimi-
nation. Mendelssohn is incapable of vulgarity, unlike
Liszt or Berlioz; he is incapable of the occasional naive
miscalculations of Schubert or the imperfect workman-
ship of Schumann. But he rarely achieves the dramatic
power of the first two or the ecstasy of the last two. And
the states of spiritual experience that inform Beethoven’s
music were unknown to him. Still, efforts to demote him
from the rank of major composer have proved and prob-
ably will go on proving unavailing. The beauty of per-
fected form is too rare a commodity lightly to be discarded,
particularly when it is united with so rich a melodic
content.
The thrice-familiar Violin Concerto is probably Men-
delssohn’s best orchestral work. Like the “Scotch” Sym-
phony, it had a long period of gestation. In 1838
Mendelssohn wrote to Ferdinand David, the concertmas-
ter of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, that he would “like to
write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E
minor runs in my head, the beginning of which gives me
no peace.” The concerto was not finished, however,
until 1844, and proved to be Mendelssohn’s last large-
scale orchestral composition. The opening theme, which
haunted Mendelssohn in 1838, haunts us as powerfully
today; it is the very avatar of E Minor; one might hum it
at any time and be sure one was humming it in the right
key (a very practical way of acquiring relative pitch!) :
The quiet second subject is played by the woodwinds over
a long-sustained bottom G in the solo violin. The fine
cadenza (which owes much to the expert advice of David)
is placed at the end of the movement, an innovation at
the time. Also original and striking is the manner in
which Mendelssohn joins this first movement to the suc-
ceeding Andante, a magical moment which, as Donald
Tovey pointed out, is often lost in the concert hall by
precipitous applause. The Andante itself is a song with-
out words, a love song tender rather than impassioned,
although a touch of passion does make itself felt in the
minor harmonies of the middle section. The movement
concludes with a coda of surpassing eloquence, leading
to a transitional Allegretto of fourteen bars, which in
turn ushers in the finale, Allegro molto vivace, without
a break in the concerto’s continuity. This final movement
has its being in the fairy world that Mendelssohn of all
composers knew best, the world of Puck and Oberon,
... Where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
And there the snake throws her enamelled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
“When Max Bruch died at the age of 83,” wrote Donald
Tovey, “the news came to many as a revelation that he
had lived so long.” Bruch was born only five years after
Brahms, in 1838, and died in 1920, two years after De-
bussy. Although he held a number of important posts
and attained a fame that transcended the boundaries of
his native Germany during the 70’s and 80’s of the nine-
teenth century, he was already a figure of the past before
he died. Today his music is almost never performed, with
the exception of the still-very-popular G Minor Violin
Concerto. Occasional airings of other concerted pieces—
the Scottish Fantasy for violin and harp, the Kol Nidrei
for cello—suggest that Bruch was capable of producing
more than one well-wrought composition, and that con-
ductors might well look into his three symphonies and
the long list of choral-orchestral works he produced. Al-
though it is rumored that the mercilessly sarcastic Jo-
hannes Brahms said to Bruch, after the latter had played
him the whole of his Odysseus, “Tell me, where do you
get your beautiful manuscript paper?’”—it is a fact that
Brahms himself conducted the work in 1875.
Tovey has analyzed the neglect of Bruch’s music, and
that of other conservative composers of his era, with
insight: “Spohr and Mendelssohn were so completely
idolized by a masterful majority of musicians in their own
day [that is, in the generation before Bruch] that grave
injustice was done to all music in which new and refrac-
tory elements were struggling for expression. The result
was that kind of so-called classical period which should
accurately be called pseudo-classical. The injustice of a
pseudo-classical period produces with the swing of the
pendulum another kind of injustice in the next generation.
No art is then allowed to have any merit that does not
consist almost exclusively of new and refractory elements
nobly struggling for expression. This does not repair the
older injustice, it merely transfers it.... Lovers of music
ought, at this time of day, to show more gratitude to those
who devote themselves to making beautiful things. It is
not easy to write as beautifully as Max Bruch.” But, Tovey
remarks, Bruch not only wrote beautifully, but set his
standard of beauty instinctively, and rarely suffered a
lapse from that standard.
The concerto was finished in 1866, but Bruch was dis-
satisfied with it, fearing that it was too free in form to
merit the title “concerto.” However, after some revisions
he sent the manuscript to Joachim, who assured him that
the title was justified, for “the different sections are
brought together in beautiful relationship, and yet—this
is the principal thing — there is sufficient contrast.”
Bruch’s major break with tradition was to avoid sonata
form in the first movement; instead he writes an elaborate
prelude or introduction, connected without pause to the
beautiful and fully developed slow movement, and con-
taining distinct themes and a passionate, G minor char-
acter of its own. The Adagio is one of the loveliest
moments in all of violin literature; curiously, Bruch with-
holds its real first subject until he has prefaced it with a
kind of “false” first subject; but once heard, the heavenly
theme dominates the movement:
The finale, Allegro energico, is in the grand virtuoso tra-
dition, with a surging opening theme entirely in double
stops. A contrasting lyrical second subject is only slightly
less beautiful than the one just quoted from the slow
movement. The concerto contains no extended unaccom-
panied cadenzas for the soloist (another innovation, and
an excellent one) but the finale closes in a fiery burst of
speed. DAVID JOHNSON
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