[Laura Stokes]

Mendelssohn Network
AMS Pre-Conference Meeting
October 30–31, 2019
“In the Salon with the Mendelssohns”: Performances, Readings and Discussions of Nineteenth-Century Music, Literature and Art

Wednesday afternoon, 3 p.m.–6 p.m.

Prevost Room, Blumenthal Family Library, New England Conservatory 

Salon Music with Kenneth Hamilton

Fictionalization 1

• Reading and Discussion: Thomas Bernhard, Beton (Concrete) (Monika Hennemann)

Salon Music (possibly not by Mendelssohn) with Kenneth Hamilton

Fictionalization 2

• Video and Discussion: The Great Composers: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a.k.a. Requiem for Fanny (Laura Stokes)

 

Dinner: Mei Mei Restaurant (506 Park Drive) Please contact Monika Hennemann (HennemannM <at> cardiff.ac.uk) ASAP for more information and to RSVP. 

 

Current Developments in Mendelssohn Research

Thursday morning, 9 a.m.–noon

Harbor III, Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel (conference hotel) 

Mendelssohn’s Style (9–10:30 a.m.)

• Tekla Babyak, “Goethe, Mendelssohn, and the Surrealist Intermezzo”
• Benedict Taylor, “Tonal growth and interthematic elision in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s D major Quartet, Op. 44 No. 1”
• Discussion
• Break

Meaning in Music: The Case of Mendelssohn (10:30 a.m.–noon)

• Julius Reder Carlson, “The cultural politics of Mendelssohn’s ‘British’ music”
• Hazel Rowland, “Individual and communal expression in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Op. 64”
• Douglass Seaton, “Mendelssohn and Musical Meaning”
• Discussion

• This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Laura Stokes.

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[Laura Stokes]

With apologies for the formatting of the program above–HC is not complying with my attempts to make it prettier. . . .

On the dinner: we are thinking of the family-style meal at Mei Mei (https://www.meimeiboston.com/family-style-dinners), which will run about $40 pp, not including drinks.  Please contact Monika with RSVPs, questions, or dietary preferences/concerns; Monika is handling the reservation.

[Laura Stokes]

Abstracts for the Thursday morning meeting

Tekla Babyak, “Goethe, Mendelssohn, and the Surrealist Intermezzo”

Felix Mendelssohn has often been celebrated for his innovative approaches to form and genre, an ability that he developed at a precocious age (Benedict Taylor 2011). One of his very earliest innovations, however, has remained largely unexplored: his use of the title “Intermezzo” for the scherzo-like third movement of his Piano Quartet Op. 2 (1823). In the early 19th century, the intermezzo was a genre associated primarily with incidental music and opera: its use in the context of absolute music had only a tiny handful of precedents (e.g. Dussek, Piano Sonata Op. 35, no. 3, 1798). My paper examines the possible reasons why the young Mendelssohn chose to incorporate this theatrical genre into several of his chamber works, beginning with Op. 2 and continuing in his String Quintet Op. 18 and String Quartet Op. 13. I seek to demonstrate that Mendelssohn’s interest in the genre of the intermezzo was shaped by a section in Goethe’s Faust titled “Walpurgis-night Dream or The Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania: An Intermezzo,” first published in 1808. As many scholars have noted (e.g. Larry Todd 1993; Julie Prandi 2002; John Michael Cooper 2007), Mendelssohn was fascinated with this section. In fact, according to his sister Fanny, it served as his inspiration for the Scherzo in his Octet. Surprisingly, however, scholars have not situated Mendelssohn’s actual intermezzi in the context of the Faustian intermezzo. To this end, I aim to explore resonances between Goethe’s Shakespearean surrealism in Walpurgis-night dream and the fanciful nature of Mendelssohn’s intermezzi, both in his chamber music and in his own Shakespearean project, the incidental music for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. For instance, I interpret the playful trills in the Op. 2 Intermezzo as a musical counterpart of the “Frog-in-the-Leaves and Grasshopper” in Walpurgis-night dream. The call-and-response figures in the Op. 2 Intermezzo similarly resonate with the comic patter that echoes throughout Walpurgis-night dream. I will situate many of these parallels in the context of early 19th-century theories of dreaming.

Benedict Taylor, “Tonal growth and interthematic elision in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s D major Quartet, Op. 44 No. 1”

This talk examines the elaborate compositional processes at work in the opening movement of Mendelssohn’s Quartet Op. 44 No. 1 (1838).  Most conspicuous of these is the role taken by the key of F# minor, iii of the tonic D major, which comes to assume increasing prominence over the course of the exposition, culminating in a curious ostensible secondary theme (b. 71) that appears initially to contradict the tonality of A major just confirmed.  (The surviving manuscript sources shows this feature to have been deliberately brought out into greater relief by Mendelssohn during the compositional process.)  This harmonic argument runs alongside a fluid approach to phrase and interthematic structure, in which not only is the erstwhile first theme and transitional material subject to functional transformation but the latter further elided with potential secondary material, while no terminating cadence (or EEC) is present either.  Current analytical approaches cannot fully elucidate the subtlety of Mendelssohn’s procedure (one might variously argue for an overridden Medial Caesura, a secondary theme starting in multiple places, or a continuous exposition without secondary theme at all), and yet certain precedents for individual aspects of Mendelssohn’s design can nonetheless be found earlier in Haydn and Mozart.  Mendelssohn’s movement raises significant questions for recent approaches to theorising nineteenth-century form and its relation to classical precedents, not all of which can be easily answered.

Julius Reder Carlson, “The cultural politics of Mendelssohn’s “British” music

In this lightning talk, I interpret the centrality of “British” themes and symbols in Felix Mendelssohn’s late works to reflect his efforts as a cultural politician in German-speaking Europe. Like many of his literary contemporaries, I assert, the mature Mendelssohn strove to shape the emerging “German” public sphere, referencing Great Britain in order to advocate an inclusive form of cultural nationalism that could reconcile internal differences and lead to liberal political reform. Two musical case studies, the Scottish Symphony and the Sechs Sprüche, serve to support my argument. Completed during Mendelssohn’s period of service to the Prussian crown, the Scottish Symphony can be heard to recapitulate the political themes of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, advocating the integration of minority groups into German modernity. Also written during his tenure at the Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s court, selections from the Anglican Church-inspired Sechs Sprüche can be interpreted as symbols of the Protestant-Catholic reconciliation modeled by 19th-century Great Britain, artistically resolving a conflict that was among the greatest obstacles to a unified German nation-state during Mendelssohn’s lifetime.

Hazel Rowland, “Individual and communal expression in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Op. 64” 

In drawing attention to the performer’s dazzling skill, virtuosity posed two interrelated problems for Felix Mendelssohn. First, it emphasized the performer’s individual subjectivity, putting it at odds with Mendelssohn’s belief in music’s ethical and communal function (Toews, 1994 and 2004; Taylor, 2014). Second, its prioritization of external display over the musical work itself was in contradiction of the importance Mendelssohn gave to inner expression (‘gehn [sic] Sie bei Ihren Werken nur immer tiefer in Ihr Inneres’ he wrote to his student Carl Eckert).

How then should we account for Mendelssohn’s decision to write his Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, a genre whose very nature demands impressive, virtuosic display? Indeed, the work places numerous technical demands on the soloist, from rapid arpeggiations and frequent double stops, to its expansive range. This lightning talk demonstrates, however, that the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is not merely a vehicle for virtuosity. Instead it views virtuosity as working within and alongside two distinct but interrelated expressive discourses: between public and private modes, and between individual and communal modes.

At the end of the predominantly virtuosic transition, for example, the violinist reaches the highest note it has played so far. Normally, this would be a moment of high drama that brings the soloist’s individuality and skill to the fore; yet Mendelssohn also marks this piano and tranquillo, thus alluding to a quieter and more relaxed setting from the private sphere. The violinist then sinks to its lowest note, which subsequently acts as the bass note for the ensuing subordinate theme in the winds. It is as if subordinate theme can only emerge once the violinist’s individuality has been tempered, first through becoming more inward by referring to the private sphere, and then by supporting the communal orchestra.

Through further examples, this lightning talk illustrates how Mendelssohn succeeded in composing an entirely new kind of communal concerto, one in which the individuality of the soloist is maintained alongside the movement’s larger collective aims.

Douglass Seaton, “Mendelssohn and Musical Meaning” 

One of the Big Questions in aesthetics is what it means to say that music expresses things or that it conveys meaning. The 2011 Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music offers chapters that critique expression theories, arousal theories, resemblance theories. Some, for example, argue that in an expressive work the music imposes emotions on the audience more or less directly as the result of the cognitive process of hearing intrinsic or of encoded features. Others insist that the emotions that a piece expresses must be understood as the emotions of someone—in naïve assumptions the composer, but in more sophisticated ones a fictive persona—to whose feelings the listener responds.

This brief presentation rereads some familiar but still thought-provoking evidence to consider these aesthetic issues. It holds that Mendelssohn’s famous response to Marc-André Souchay offers a much more complicated insight about musical expression than a simple reading might assume. In fact, it suggests a radically counterintuitive relationship between music and meaning or expression, a relationship in which meaning comes from a performer or listener exactly as if from an authorial voice. This is borne out in other documents, too—an earlier, somewhat similar letter from Mendelssohn to Josephine von Miller, and Schumann’s review of the op. 30 book of Songs without Words.

To explore how this works in practice, this essay takes a sort of phenomenological, hands-on approach to the Song without Words op. 53 no. 2. The piece is chosen for several reasons: it has a history of strikingly different interpretations, it fits exceptionally well Schumann’s treatment of the genre, and it has a number of characteristic features that one can easily identity, describe, and experience as expressively meaningful. Those features include elements of style—melody, harmony, accompaniment texture—and the pianist’s hands.

In the end, Mendelssohn’s letters—and Schumann’s imaginary performance—do not fundamentally answer the usual Big Question about musical expression; in fact, they refuse an answer in order to frame another, even more intriguing idea. Much more interestingly, they make a significant claim about who means the music. 

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