But the exertion was beyond his strength. He witnessed Jenny Lind’s first appearance at Her Majesty’s Theatre, on the 4th of May, and left England on the 9th, little anticipating the trial that awaited him in the tidings of the sudden death of his sister Fanny, which reached him only a few days after his arrival in Frankfort. The loss of his mother in 1842 had shaken him much, but the suddenness with which this last intelligence was communicated broke him down. He fell to the ground insensible, and never fully recovered. In June he was so far himself again that he was able to travel, with his family, by short stages, to Interlaken, where he stayed for some time, illustrating the journey by a series of water-colour drawings, but making no attempt at composition for many weeks. He returned to Leipzig in September, bringing with him fragments of Christus, Loreley, and some other unfinished works, taking no part in the concerts, and living in privacy. On the 9th of October he called on Madame Frege, and asked her to sing his latest set of songs. She left the room for lights, and on her return found him in violent pain and almost insensible. He lingered for four weeks, and on the 4th of November he passed away, in the presence of his wife, his brother, and his three friends, Moscheles, Schleinitz, and Ferdinand David. A cross marks the site of his grave, in the Alte Dreifaltigkeits Kirchhof, at Berlin.
Mendelssohn’s title to a place among the great composers of the century is incontestable. His style, though differing little in technical arrangement from that of his classical predecessors, is characterized by a vein of melody peculiarly his own, and easily distinguishable by those who have studied his works, not only from the genuine effusions of contemporary writers, but from the most successful of the servile imitations with which, even during his lifetime, the music-shops were deluged. In less judicious hands the rigid symmetry of his phrasing might, perhaps, have palled upon the ear; but under his skilful management it serves only to impart an additional charm to thoughts which derive their chief beauty from the evident spontaneity of their conception. In this, as in all other matters of a purely technical character, he regarded the accepted laws of art as the medium by which he might most certainly attain the ends dictated by the inspiration of his genius. Though caring nothing for rules, except as means for producing a good effect, he scarcely ever violated them, and was never weary of impressing their value upon the minds of his pupils. His method of counterpoint was modelled in close accordance with that practised by Sebastian Bach. This he used in combination with an elastic development of the sonata-form, similar to that engrafted by Beethoven upon the lines laid down by Haydn. The principles involved in this arrangement were strictly conservative; yet they enabled him, at the very outset of his career, to invent a new style no less original than that of Schubert or Weber, and no less remarkable as the embodiment of canons already consecrated by classical authority than as a special manifestation of individual genius. It is thus that Mendelssohn stands before us as at the same time a champion of conservatism and an apostle of progress; and it is chiefly by virtue of these two apparently incongruous though really compatible phases of his artistic character that his influence and example availed, for so many years, to hold in check the violence of reactionary opinion which injudicious partisanship afterwards fanned into revolutionary fury.
Concerning Mendelssohn’s private character there have never been two opinions. As a man of the world he was more than ordinarily accomplished—brilliant in conversation, and in his lighter moments overflowing with sparkling humour and ready pleasantry, loyal and unselfish in the more serious business of life, and never weary of working for the general good. As a friend he was unvaryingly kind, sympathetic and true. His earnestness as a Christian needs no stronger testimony than that afforded by his own delineation of the character of St Paul; but it is not too much to say that his heart and life were pure as those of a little child. (W. S. R.)
This article has the unique value of being the record of an eminent musical scholar who was an actual pupil of Mendelssohn. No change of reputation can alter the value of such a record of a man whom even his contemporaries knew to be greater than his works. Mendelssohn’s aristocratic horror of self-advertisement unfitted him for triumph in a period of revolution; he died, most inopportunely, when his own powers, like Handel’s at the same age, were being wasted on pseudo-classical forms; the new art was not yet ripe; and in the early Wagner-Liszt reign of terror his was the first reputation to be assassinated. That of the too modest and gentle “Romantic” Pioneer Schumann soon followed; but, as being more difficult to explain away, and more embarrassing to irreverence and conceit, it remains a subject of controversy. Meanwhile Mendelssohn’s reputation, except as the composer of a few inexplicably beautiful and original orchestral pieces, has vanished and been replaced by a pure fiction known as the “Mendelssohn tradition” of orchestral conducting. This fiction is traceable to some characteristic remarks made by Wagner on his experiences of English orchestral playing, remarks which, though not very good-natured, do not bear the full construction popularly imputed to them. If Beethoven had come and conducted in England, Mendelssohn’s expostulations with careless players would have been met by references to the “Beethoven tradition”; and, if Wagner had shared Mendelssohn’s reluctance to putting on record remarks likely to wound individual, professional and national sensibilities, it might not have been impossible that reproaches against slipshod and mechanical playing might nowadays be met by references to the “Wagner tradition,” for Wagner also found himself compelled to concentrate his care on the main items in the overloaded English orchestral programmes, to the detriment of the rest.
Mendelssohn’s influence on the early career of Joachim is, next to his work in the rediscovery of Bach, his greatest bequest to later musical history. Those many profound and sincere admirers to Joachim to whom the name of Mendelssohn calls up only the Widow in Elijah and the weaker Songs without Words, may find the idea strange; but there is no doubt that Joachim regarded the continuation of a true Mendelssohn tradition as identical with his own efforts to “uphold the dignity of art.” (D. F. T.)
MENDÈS, CATULLE (1841–1909), French poet and man of
letters, of Jewish extraction, was born at Bordeaux on the 22nd
of May 1841. He early established himself in Paris, attaining
speedy notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste
(1861) of his “Roman d’une nuit,” for which he was condemned
to a month’s imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. He was
allied with the Parnassians from the beginning of the movement,
and displayed extraordinary metrical skill in his first volume
of poems, Philoméla (1863). In later volumes—Poésies, I ère
série (1876), which includes much of his earlier verse, “Soirs
moroses,” Contes épiques, Philoméla, &c; Poésies (7 vols., 1885),
a new edition largely augmented; Les Poésies de Catulle Mendès
(3 vols., 1892); La Grive des vignes (1895), &c.—his critics have
noted that the elegant verse is distinguished rather by dexterous
imitation of different writers than by any marked originality.
The versatility and fecundity of Mendes’s talent is shown in a
series of his critical and dramatic writings, and of novels and
short stories, in the latter of which he continues the French
tradition of the licentious conte. For the theatre he wrote:
La Part du roi (1872), a one-act verse comedy; Les Frères d’armes
(1873), drama; Justice (1877), in three acts, characterized by
a hostile critic as a hymn in praise of suicide; the libretto of
a light opera, Le Capitaine Fracasse (1878), founded on Théophile
Gautier’s novel; La Femme de Tabarin (1887); Médée (1898),
in three acts and in verse; La Reine Fiammette (1898), a conte
dramatique in six acts and in verse, the scene of which is laid
in the Italy of the Renaissance; Le Fils de l’étoile (1904), the hero
of which is Bar-Cochebas, the Syrian pseudo-Messiah, for the
music of C. Erlanger; Scarron (1905); Ariane (1906), for the
music of Massenet; and Glatigny (1906). His critical work
includes: Richard Wagner (1886); L’Art au théâtre (3 vols.,
1896–1900), a series of dramatic criticisms reprinted from
newspapers; and a report addressed to the minister of
public instruction and of the fine arts on Le Mouvement poétique
français de 1867 à 1900 (new ed., 1903), which includes a bibliographical
and critical dictionary of the French poets of the
19th century. Perhaps the most famous of his novels are:
Le Roi vierge (1880) in which he introduces Louis II. of Bavaria
and Richard Wagner; La Maison de la vielle (1894), and Gog
(1897). He married in 1866 Mlle Judith Gautier, younger
daughter of the poet, from whom he was subsequently separated.
