Mendelssohn

Susan wrote me an email—did I know of any recording of the complete 12 fugues for string quartet by Mendelssohn?

Actually, I had never heard of the work, so I did what anyone—including Susan, I’m sure—would do. And yes, the clip below from YouTube is what I found.

Also yes, four of the fugues were recorded by the Vogler Quartet. But the other eight? Yet to be recorded, it seems.

It’s both surprising and unsurprising that Mendelssohn wrote these fugues when he was 12 years old. Surprising because they are very complex and very mature—far from what you would imagine even the most talented 12 year old could do. Unsurprising because Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who went on to champion the work of another composer, also of fugues as well as much else—Johann Sebastian Bach.

Susan knew of these works because of the remarkable work of Stephen Somary and his Mendelssohn Project, which has located some 270 pieces of music hitherto unpublished and unknown.

And it’s total justice that Mendelssohn has this champion, since he got a completely bad rap for years. Yes, his music was played—we’ve all heard the violin concerto, the Italian Symphony, Fingal’s Cave. But the critical judgment was that Mendelssohn was conservative, a little light—not the heavyweight that Brahms, Schumann, Schubert were. George Bernard Shaw, in fact, came out and said it: Mendelssohn "was not in the foremost rank of great composers," he wrote in 1898.

There are a number of reasons for this. Paradoxically, Mendelssohn was wildly popular in his time, and that has always cast a bit a suspicion—can a composer be that popular and still be any good? Was he catering to the crowd?

The second strike against him—he was Queen Victoria’s favorite composer, and the two in fact met and made music together (she was a passable singer). More support for the theory that there’s something a bit sentimental about the music.

But the most important factor might simply be racist. Mendelssohn was Jewish, though in fact he was baptized and raised as a Christian. But he pointedly refused to hide his Jewish origins, despite his father’s wish that he use the name Bartholdy, instead of Mendelssohn.

And three years after Mendelssohn’s death at 38, Richard Wagner published a savage attack on the Jews in general and Mendelssohn in particular. The essay, entitled Jewishness in Music, used Mendelssohn as the best example of why “there is no place for the Jew in music.” Yes, he was skilled, he was facile, but he “has shown us that a Jew can possess the richest measure of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture ... without even once through all these advantages being able to bring forth in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect we expect from music".

We’ve rejected the racism—but have we kept, wittingly or not, the critical judgment of Mendelssohn? Isn’t it time to rethink, and to rehear?

I’ve always thought so, and have been happy that others do as well. What I didn’t know was the tremendous amount of music that was unpublished. Why? Because Mendelssohn was well off, under no pressure to publish. He also died quite young; he may have been too busy composing to worry much about publishing.

So he was prolific, and left scores of manuscripts unpublished. What happened to them?

Here, racism strikes again. In 1936, the Nazis forbade Mendelssohn to be played publicly, and most of the manuscripts, located in the state library in Berlin, were taken secretly to Warsaw or Krakow. When these cities fell, says Somary, the compositions were dispersed in any way possible, and ended up throughout the world.

Right—so is it any good?

Well, Somary says yes. Frequently, an unpublished piece has a reason to be unpublished, but not in the case of Mendelssohn. In fact, the version of the Italian Symphony that we all know is the wrong version, not the revised version that Mendelssohn wanted published.

It might be time as well to start hearing some of the chamber music besides the famous octet. I listened recently to five minutes of the 6^th String Quartet, and it was enough to send me straight to Amazon—I needed that music.

For years Bach was unplayed, almost unknown, until Mendelssohn came along. How fitting that Mendelssohn, unfairly treated, should have found a champion himself.