Bach in Berlin

Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the "St. Matthew Passion"

Celia Applegate

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801455810
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música clásica

Bach's St. Matthew Passion is universally acknowledged to be one of the world's supreme musical masterpieces, yet in the years after Bach's death it was forgotten by all but a small number of his pupils and admirers. The public rediscovered it in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the work before a glittering audience of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Prussian royals, and civic notables. The concert soon became the stuff of legend, sparking a revival of interest in and performance of Bach that has continued to this day.Mendelssohn's performance gave rise to the notion that recovering and performing Bach's music was somehow "national work." In 1865 Wagner would claim that Bach embodied "the history of the German spirit's inmost life." That the man most responsible for the revival of a masterwork of German Protestant culture was himself a converted Jew struck contemporaries as less remarkable than it does us today—a statement that embraces both the great achievements and the disasters of 150 years of German history.In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans' collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were "the people of music." Applegate assesses the impact on music's cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself.

1

Great Expectations

Mendelssohn and the St. Matthew Passion

This momentous event, the rediscovery, preparation, and performance of Bach’s incomparable masterpiece, seems to have had an almost accidental genesis. We could say that it began with Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn’s decision, in 1819, to have Carl Friedrich Zelter instruct their two elder children, Fanny and Felix, in music theory. The decision was a wise one, characteristic both of Lea’s musical intelligence and of her and her husband’s careful management of their children’s lives. It tells us, first, about the Mendelssohn family, which had emerged from the poverty of grandfather Moses Mendelssohn’s lifetime into a position of wealth and status.1 This change in turn reflected two intertwined social developments at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first was the emergence of a class of people whose identity came from the possession of property and knowledge rather than privilege and place, and the second, fatally linked to it, was the emancipation of European Jews.

THE MENDELSSOHNS OF BERLIN

As is well known, when Moses Mendelssohn arrived in Berlin in 1743 to continue his studies with his former teacher David Frankel, now the new chief rabbi of Berlin, he had none of the markers of social position, old regime or new, except for the beginnings of an education. Indeed, as an unprotected foreign Jew, coming from Dessau in the small principality of Anhalt-Dessau, he entered the Prussian capital only with the permission of Jewish gatekeepers, who were appointed by the elders of the Berlin Jewish community to keep the numbers of Berlin Jews within the strict bounds of an edict of 1737.2 Nearly three-quarters of a century later, in 1812, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia passed the edict of emancipation, which at least briefly gave “the same rights and freedoms of citizenship as for Christians” to all Jews living in Prussia.3 Shortly thereafter, Moses’s son Abraham, by then a prosperous banker living in a fine house close to the Gendarmen-markt, was elected to the city parliament. The juxtaposition of these dates suggests progress and frames the rise to public prominence and commercial fortune in the family of Moses of Dessau.

At the same time, these dates frame a narrative of loss—a loss of religious and cultural identity and to some extent also of family ties. Through his unremitting intellectual labor, the first Mendelssohn became a legend in his time and thereafter as a leader of the German Enlightenment, as “the Jewish thinker of modern times” and as the “first modern German Jew” altogether.4 But for his children, the beginnings of a mutual recognition between German Christian and German Jewish culture seemed to die an untimely death. Four of them—Abraham, Henriette, Dorothea (born Brendel), and Nathan—converted to Christianity, an act that denied all that Moses Mendelssohn had struggled for in his lifetime and would certainly have pained him deeply had he lived to witness it.5 Henriette never married, lived in Paris much of her adult life, and remained isolated in her religious life even from Abraham and Lea. Dorothea’s estrangement was more marked and deliberate, deepening as she moved ever further into the Christian-romantic enthusiasms of her second husband, Friedrich Schlegel, and his intimates. Likewise, Abraham’s wife Lea had a brother Jacob, who converted to Protestantism, changed his name to the Christian-sounding Bartholdy, broke off all contact with his observant Jewish parents, and lived in Rome, where his house became the meeting place for the Christian-romantic painters known as the Nazarenes. This same Jacob persuaded Abraham some years later to add the name Bartholdy to the unmistakably Jewish Mendelssohn.6 Far from being a natural step in the path to enlightenment—as Lavater had tried unsuccessfully to prove to Moses in their exchanges in the 1770s—conversion brought disruption, dislocation, alienation, and no assured acceptance.

Given all this, Abraham’s conversion seems the least likely. Not subject to the emotional turbulence that marked Dorothea’s flight into the nineteenth century, Abraham had joined his elder brother Joseph’s bank in Berlin—a bank that prospered until 1933—and married the granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, revered leader of Berlin’s Jewish community and financial genius of Friedrich II’s Prussia. Together they had four children, each of whom were named with exquisite attention to the claims of family and Christian society: Fanny, for instance, born in 1805, was given the more Christian-sounding name of her great-aunt on the Itzig side, Fanny von Arnstein (at her conversion in 1816, her parents added the even more Christian Cacilia to her name, after great-aunt Cacilia Zipporah von Eskeles); Paul, born in 1813, was given a significantly modified version of Saul, the brother of Moses Mendelssohn.7 Abraham had by all accounts a complex and demanding personality, shaped by a profoundly ambivalent relationship to his father and what he symbolized. On the one hand, no Mendelssohn was more conscious of the claims of family and tradition: this is the consciousness, after all, that lay behind his ironic quip that “earlier I was the son of a father and now I am the father of a son.”8 It accounts also for the tortured logic behind his at times belligerent insistence that Felix append Bartholdy to his name, especially in public. “A Christian Mendelssohn is an impossibility,” as he wrote to Felix in London in 1829. “Nor should there be a Christian Mendelssohn; for my father himself did not want to be one…. If Mendelssohn is your name, you are ipso facto a Jew.”9

On the other hand, as the conversion narrative itself starkly reveals, Abraham did not regard Judaism as a viable tradition but rather as an “antiquated, corrupt, contradictory” religion. A rationalist deist himself, Abraham believed the forms of religious life were arbitrary masks that obscured the single truth of “one God, one virtue, one truth, one happiness.”10 But reason in its practical guise of self-interest demanded that one attend to the social mores of one’s times. Moreover, in 1816, a Prussian State Council interpretation of the 1812 edict of emancipation reneged on its promise of legal equality for Jews, throwing up yet another obstacle on the grudgingly built road to full inclusion in German society. On March 22, 1816, Abraham had his children baptized in a private ceremony in his home, performed by the minister Johann Jakob Stegemann. Six years later, in 1822, he and his wife converted, once again privately, in Frankfurt. Not until 1825 and the death of Lea’s observant mother did the family go public with the conversion and the name change to Mendelssohn Bartholdy, though long before that, many Berliners at least knew of the children’s conversion. As John Toews has observed, confessional identities in the family of Abraham Mendelssohn were “thus quite confused, and often secretive and hidden.”11

BACH AMONG THE MENDELSSOHNS

Never hidden was Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn’s determination to participate fully in the cultivated circles of Berlin society, a participation to which their own family background, education, and achievement gave them title, even as Jews. The Berlin salons of Jewish women were, after all, a famously vital part of Berlin life, and this second generation of Mendelssohns established their own, to which the leading writers, intellectuals, and leaders of Berlin all came. As the female patronage of salon life waned, the scope of the Mendelssohns’ connections expanded.12 From the start, this kind of cultivation through association with like-minded men and women formed the necessary backdrop to the formal education of the Mendelssohn children—an education that took place largely at home, under the tutelage first of the parents and then of an array of remarkable private teachers. From the start as well, music formed an integral part of this education, to such an extent that the Mendelssohn children became, in a sense, the living models for music’s claim to participation in the great humanistic project of the German Enlightenment. Their parents sought out the elite among the city’s instrumental instructors for their children. They secured Ludwig Berger, himself a former piano virtuoso and student of Clementi, as their piano teacher, and (to return to where we began) Carl Friedrich Zelter, the central representative in Berlin of serious, non-operatic music, became their instructor in music theory and composition.

Of course, to receive musical training does not always lead, now or then, to an interest in the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. As the nineteenth century began, the music of Sebastian Bach—as he was widely called in order to distinguish him from his more famous sons—was not so much unknown as obscure, the object of esoteric rather than general interest, of a specializing rather than a universalizing musical education. Berlin happened to be the main center for such esoteric knowledge, and through their family connections, the Mendelssohn parents had an unusually broad exposure to the elder Bach’s work.13 All the daughters of Daniel Itzig, including Lea Mendelssohn’s mother Bella (Babette), had contact with court musicians, among them Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, through their father’s position as a leading court Jew. According to Adolf Weissman, “at the Itzig house, a veritable cult of Sebastian and Philipp Emanuel Bach was in operation.”14 Lea’s aunt, Sara Itzig Levy, studied harpsichord with Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, during his decade in Berlin and was an important patron of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Sara Levy became the leading collector in central Europe of music of the early eighteenth century, especially members of the Bach family. Such collecting was all the more important given the paucity of Bach’s works available in print in the eighteenth century; even the Well-Tempered Clavier, his best-known work, circulated only in manuscript form before 1801. Sara Levy also began a musical salon, in the decade in which most salons were devoted to philosophizing and flirtation, and through its ambitious performances she became an influential exponent of Baroque musical aesthetics.15 Her sisters also played the harpsichord, though not as brilliantly as Sara Levy. Her sister Fanny studied with Johann Philipp Kirnberger, J. S. Bach’s student and a key figure in the Berlin circle of Bach disciples; her niece Lea regularly performed pieces from the Well Tempered Clavier. Little wonder, then, that when Lea’s first child was born, she exclaimed that the girl had “fingers for Bach fugues.”16

In the small world of privileged Berlin, Christian and Jewish, social, familial, and professional connections crossed and overlapped; moreover, coming together on the basis of common interests provides as good a definition of Enlightenment sociability as any.17 Musical interests, as we shall see, did not develop as a matter of course among the educated elite of the late eighteenth century, though they were not peculiar. Still, to care about music, especially Bach’s music, placed one in a small circle within the educated elite. It is therefore not surprising to find Sara Levy as an early member of a new musical organization in Berlin called the Singakademie. Carl Friedrich Fasch founded the amateur singing group in 1791. Its formal existence evolved out of an informal gathering of women, most of them wives of government officials and minor Prussian nobility, to sing religious choral works. Fasch’s involvement in this circle reflected the waning of musical activity at the Prussian court, where the days were long gone when Friedrich II had piped his way through flute concerti with his long-suffering harpsichord accompanists C. P. E. Bach and, apparently more patiently, Fasch himself.18

Frustration with the court and the need to find supplemental income took Fasch the short but significant distance from Potsdam to Berlin, from court culture into the growing world of urban enlightened sociability. The Singakademie, so called because in 1793 the group secured permission to move out of the living rooms of members and into a room of the Royal Academy of Arts, never in its early years performed publicly. Nevertheless, its amateur members, soon of both sexes, practiced and collected with increasing seriousness the works of J. S. Bach, Graun, Handel, and others.19 With Fasch’s health failing, the group acquired an assistant director in the person of Carl Friedrich Zelter, a former composition student of Fasch, tenor, fledgling composer, and master mason. By one of the more piquant coincidences that marked the life of a small city like Berlin, Zelter’s first masonry project had been to renovate one of the Berlin houses of Daniel Itzig in 1783.20 We do not know whether the young mason, who was pursuing his musical i...