Sibling Love and the Daemonic

Sibling love in the relationship between Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn has become recognized in recent years as one of the most important formational aspects of their lives and music. Based on the wider publication of the letters and music of both composers, we have come to realize just how much each influenced the other. However, a few questions have remained unanswered regarding the nature of that relationship and the almost indescribably intense intellectual bond they shared. Using interdisciplinary methodologies provided by kinship studies and drawing extensively on Fanny’s correspondence, this chapter provides social context for understanding just how unusual the two siblings’ marriages were for the time and what that can tell us about their artistic relationship. The chapter introduces a new term, siberoticism, and tackles the meaning behind the strange letter in which Fanny tells Felix that he exerts a ‘daemonic’ influence over her.

Mendelssohn and the Idea of the North

This chapter re-evaluates Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ works by placing them in the context of the early-nineteenth-century North German view of Scotland, especially as channelled through Mendelssohn’s mentors Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Such interest in Scotland was undergirded by a belief in a shared German-Celtic past and a sense that Scottish culture was not exotic but rather essentially German. Figures in Mendelssohn’s circle participated in deliberate attempts to claim a general northern antiquity for German culture, using arguments concerning the relationship of climate, race, and character. A recontextualization of Scotland as representing a lost German past may signal additional reinterpretations of Mendelssohn’s anticipations of travel, his travel experiences, and his statements concerning folk song, as well as his Fantasy, Op. 28, originally titled Sonate écossaise.

‘Time Is, Time Was, Time Is Past’

The Reiselied forms a distinct subcategory in Felix Mendelssohn’s song output. Of his more than seventy published songs, at least eleven speak primarily of departure, travelling, awareness of distance from loved ones, and homesickness. This chapter examines Mendelssohn’s experiences of journeying to other countries as expressed in his lively letters and the songs born of his meditations on the subject. In particular, it examines ‘Ferne’, with its archetypal traveller’s anxiety about relationships with those back home; the famous Heinrich Heine ‘Reiselied’; and one of the most poignant of Mendelssohn’s requiems for his sister Fanny, the Nikolaus Lenau song ‘Auf der Wanderschaft’, a restrained but raw expression of grief.

Mendelssohn’s Difference in FaithRethinking Kunstreligion in the Context of His Compositional Aesthetics

This chapter departs from confessional interpretations of Felix Mendelssohn’s musical and religious outlook, encouraged by an empathetic reading of his own statements within the context of wider philosophies of art and religion, which combined into what became known as art-religion. In Mendelssohn’s writings, Kunstreligion was both a form of religion that was associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology and a means of finding his true self as a composer, as intended by his father, Abraham. His identification with nineteenth-century sacralized aesthetics of feelings never gave way to the unworldly nostalgia that critics and scholars have so often associated negatively with aesthetic religion. For Mendelssohn, Kunstreligion had practical implications and clear boundaries. His leaning towards religious theories of art inspired him to compose musical works for the spiritual enhancement of his audiences but found its limits whenever musico-religious rhetoric ran counter to his own moral consciousness, innermost beliefs, and sense of tolerance.

‘Inner Necessity’

This chapter argues that Felix Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang represents a profound rethinking of the rhetorical and musical processes of the symphony as a genre. Rather than a unilinear array of symphonic movements whose telos is the coda of its finale, the chapter argues, the Lobgesang is a study in symphonic bitemporality—one in which a central, previously enacted parable-like narrative (Nos. 2–8) is framed by a symphonic introduction (No. 1) and a vocal-symphonic conclusion (Nos. 9–10) whose music and theological import derive from the memory of that central narrative. This view of the Lobgesang as a parable enfolded within a sermon is supported by evidence from the work’s compositional history, texts, and tonal structure.

Brass Topics, Abbreviated Recapitulations, and the Bildungsreise

This chapter proceeds from a memorable passage near the end of the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony, where the woodwinds and brass unite in a forceful rendition of the opening gesture of the movement’s first subject. This fanfare in the coda represents the climactic stage in a process that has been at work since the start of this movement, a process that can be understood as an ingenious convergence of two of Mendelssohn’s well-established habits in orchestral sonata-form composition: deploying brass-related topics to generate a sense of closure and his tendency towards the drastic telescoping of recapitulations. The chapter further proposes that an autobiographical register might be at work in the movement’s distinctive deployment of rhetorical forces, asking whether we might discern here a meditation on Mendelssohn’s own journey towards personal maturity and independence.

Fanny Hensel’s Sechs Lieder, Op. 9

In October 1847, five months after Fanny Hensel died, her brother Felix Mendelssohn brought several of her manuscripts to his publisher. Three years later, these works appeared in print as Fanny’s Opp. 8, 9, 10, and 11, though who selected these pieces for publication remains unclear. The siblings’ music, however, provides another form of evidence that can shed light on Felix’s role in the dissemination of his sister’s music. This chapter examines Fanny’s Sechs Lieder, Op. 9, a collection that is intimately connected to one of Felix’s own song collections, Zwölf Lieder, Op. 9 (1830). Considering these intertextual resonances, it is difficult not to see Fanny’s Op. 9 as a sibling collaboration in its own right, a brother’s musical elegy to his departed sister.

Changes of Pace

Felix Mendelssohn’s lieder were subjected to severe criticism during the late nineteenth century, with his supposedly ‘sloppy declamation’ often criticized against an aesthetic ideal drawn from Hugo Wolf. Mendelssohn’s own song aesthetic was, however, quite different. This chapter investigates Mendelssohn’s text setting, examining the stress patterns of the poetry from which he constructs his vocal melodies. Covering both early and later songs, the chapter incorporates analyses of Mendelssohn’s song autographs, which reveal that declamation was the focus of a considerable amount of care by the composer. Distortions of the poetic rhythm (such as accelerations or decelerations) that occur in his mature songs can often be explained as deliberate expressive effects responding to the deeper meaning of the poem.

Mendelssohn’s Deutsche Liturgie in the Context of the Prussian Agende of 1829

Felix Mendelssohn’s 1846 setting of the Deutsche Liturgie is among the least understood of his sacred compositions. Far from being an isolated instance of music intended for the liturgy of the Prussian Union Church, Mendelssohn’s work participates in and responds to a tradition of such settings that can be traced back to the 1829 Prussian Agende, whose Musik-Anhang was compiled by Mendelssohn’s teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter. A comparison of Mendelssohn’s setting with those composed by Eduard Grell and Wilhelm Taubert offers a context for reappraising Mendelssohn’s sacred music in light of the historicist values of mid-nineteenth-century Berlin and for nuancing our understanding of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics, creative choices, and intellectual approach to sacred music.

Sacred Sound and Secular Space in Mendelssohn’s Instrumental Music

This chapter examines instances in Felix Mendelssohn’s oeuvre in which religious music arises in an otherwise secular context, specifically in the slow movement of the ‘Italian’ Symphony and the finale of the C minor Piano Trio. In Mary Douglas’s famous definition, dirt is matter out of place, but what is spirit out of place? Why, in these two movements by Mendelssohn, does it lose its place? The answer turns on the idea that each movement, in its own way, transfers the value of the sacred from its ‘own’ place to a foreign one—in one case, literally so, to an Italian landscape that even in its material form appears in nostalgic quotation marks, and in the other case, to the music (or a certain historically emergent music) itself. Both instances suggest an ecumenical change in the very category of the sacred, its absorption into a repertoire of expressive acts not limited to the articulation of creed.