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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Nebraska Press
He is the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant musician, the one who sees most clearly through the contradictions of this period and for the first time reconciles them. And he will not be the last of such artists. After Mozart came Beethoven; this new Mozart will also be followed by a Beethoven - perhaps he is already born.--Robert Schumann, "Trios fur Pianoforte und Begleitung," Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, 1840
One artistic master has died; a greater one is blossoming in Brahms.--Brahms ' s teacher Eduard Marxsen, recounting his reaction to the news of Mendelssohn's death in a letter of 9 October 1873 to Hermann Levi
When Felix Mendelssohn died, on 4 November 1847, he stood at the forefront of German musical life. Yet his fortunes soon began to decline, and by the time of Johannes Brahms's death, on 3 April 1897, his music had acquired a widespread image of being superficial and overly sentimental. In 1875, writing at about the midway point between these two milestones, Friedrich Niecks (an apologist of sorts) confessed that "the serious beauty of Mendelssohn's music has to most of us not the same charm as the rugged energy, the subtle thoughtfulness and morbid world-weariness of other composers. As the Romans of old took delight in the struggle and writhing agony of the gladiator, so we of the present day enjoy watching the beats and throes of the human heart as exhibited by our tone and word poets, the gladiators of modern times."(1) might easily imagine Brahms as the very picture of Nieck's modern-day gladiator, at least to the conservatives of the day. "He is a modern of the moderns," wrote one unsympathetic early critic of Brahms's First Symphony (1876), "and this [work] is a remarkable expression of the inner life of this anxious, introverted, and over-earnest age, which cannot even be glad in a frank and self-forgetful spirit."(2)
Nowadays, of course, it is easier to appreciate the wide ground that Brahms and Mendelssohn shared, notwithstanding their contrasting temperaments and the very different outward circumstances of their lives and careers. Each, for instance, was an accomplished contrapuntist. Mendelssohn benefited as a youth from his studies with Carl Zelter in counterpoint, thoroughbass, and chorale harmonization; and though Brahms's early training was by comparison impoverished, he made up for lost time during the later 1850s, when he undertook a rigorous course of instruction in the same traditional subjects with his friend Joseph Joachim.(3) Thus both composers took an unusually deep interest in earlier music, not only collecting, editing, and conducting works from the Baroque and Renaissance periods, but also engaging it creatively in their own oeuvre -- in their sacred choral works and pieces for organ above all- literally making music out of the past. On more than one occasion the comparable interests of the two artists intersected in a very real way -- as in Brahms's introduction of Mendelssohn's Bachian eight-part motet "Mitten wir im Leben sind," op.23, no.3, to a concert of the Vienna Singakademie in 1864, and his use of Mendelssohn's organ part in his performance ten years later at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde of Handel's oratorio Salomon.(4)
On the other hand, both composers took "flight from opera" (in Heinrich Eduard Jacob's memorable phrase) while revealing their musico-dramatic instincts to best advantage instead in a secular cantata on a text by Goethe -- Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht and Brahms's Rinaldo.(5) These works, in turn, remind us of a similarity in working habits: like so many other pieces by the two masters, both experienced a protracted genesis and were subjected to extensive revision prior to publication. Mendelssohn completed Die erste Walpurgisnacht in February 1832 only to revise it extensively in 1842-43; the original version of Rinaldo dates from 1863, but in 1868 a new last chorus was substituted. Many similar examples could be cited. For example, Mendelssohn's setting of Psalm 42 contained only four movements in its original version of 1837 but in the following year was expanded to seven movements. Similarly, as first performed Brahms's German Requiem contained only six movements (nos. 1-4 and nos.6-7); two years after these had been completed a fifth movement, for soprano solo, was added. And just as the time between the conception and completion of Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony runs to some thirteen years (1829-42), so did Brahms require at least fourteen years to see his First Symphony through to its first performance in 1876 (and even after all that, he finally replaced the slow movement with another). By the same token, the standards of each composer were such that he withheld a large number of completed works from publication altogether (though by destroying the sources for most such works Brahms, at least, ensured that there could be no long series of posthumous publications such as followed Mendelssohn's early death and continues even up to the present day).(6)
We might observe still another parallel between the two artists, and one of a very different sort: both felt the ire of Wagner. To some degree, of course, particular circumstances obtain here- in Mendelssohn's case, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitism; in Brahms's case, Wagner's conviction of his own status as Beethoven's true heir. Yet Wagner must have found it equally intolerable that both of his nemeses gained wide prominence as cultural leaders of the German nation - Mendelssohn, in the Vormarz, through his revival of Bach and Handel and resuscitation of the oratorio; Brahms, during the Grunderzeit, not only in such works as the German Requiem and Triumphlied, but also on account of his impressive revitalization of the gro[Beta]e Sinfonie. Indeed, as judged by their values, no less than their activities, both Mendelssohn and Brahms might be fairly characterized as true guardians of the "sacred German art."(7)
Although each of these points of comparison would bear further exploration, none will be elaborated here. My focus instead will fall on the more narrowly conceived topic of Brahms's Mendelssohn reception. We shall begin with a sampling of the documentary evidence of Brahms's interest in his predecessor's life and music and then consider briefly a few representative cases in which this interest is reflected in his characteristic practice of allusion making.
Through his early introduction into the Schumann circle in Dusseldorf in 1853, Brahms gained entrance as well into a kind of posthumous Mendelssohn circle, including not only the Schumanns, of course, but also Joachim and, later, such figures as Ferdinand Hiller, with whom Brahms maintained a warm friendship throughout Hiller's declining years. Indeed, the ties were almost palpable: as Mendelssohn in 1841 had been godfather to the Schumanns' first-born child, Marie, so Brahms in 1855 stood as godfather to their last-born child, who was christened none other than Felix, in honor of the beloved deceased composer.
It is in this context of a dedicated band of Mendelssohn intimates that we can best approach one of the more tantalizing of Brahms's many early "lost" compositions. On 21 April 1854 Clara Schumann recorded in her diary that Brahms had recently shown her "three pieces, among which is his very ingenious [geistig] 'Erinnerung an Mendelssohn.'" There can be no question that Brahms was inspired here by the example of Robert Schumann, whose "Erinnerung (4. November 1847)," from the Album for the Young, memorializes the late composer by adapting the style of one of his Songs without Words.(8) We can only speculate about what Brahms's own commemoration must have been like, but we can at least form some idea from Joachim's comments about the piece in June 1854, when Brahms sent it to him, along with several others, for...
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