Mendelssohn in Performance

1. Mendelssohn’s Audience

Reflecting on Mendelssohn shortly after the composer’s death, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl wrote, He was the first musician who actually made music for “fine society”—in the best sense of the term.He was . . . a versatile,cultivated,socially adroit,wealthy, exquisitely mannered man,personally known in almost the whole of Germany, in demand in all select circles. . . . Mendelssohn also wrote in the spirit of this cultivated society, which now spread itself evenly and by proxy into all classes. . . . It is the present North German delicacy and versatility of culture, with its smoothing out of all rough national characteristics, that found expression in Mendelssohn’s music. . . . No other art can show a man who, in his artistic work, stood so much in the middle of the social life of our cultivated circles and who in addition was so comprehended and valued by them as Mendelssohn. . . . Mendelssohn’s influence must forthwith become a universal one, for the “cultivated society” in which he worked and lived, in whose spirit he created, is the same throughout Germany.1 In approaching any music of the past, we should keep in mind the contexts of that music’s historical performances. We commonly reconstitute music using period instruments, styles of ornamentation, choices of tempo. We take a less conscious attitude, however, toward reconstituting ourselves as period listeners. Not that we could ever succeed completely in such an undertaking ,of course,but we should imagine music’s intended listeners,at least to make ourselves conscious of the gap between them and us, for awareness of the differences between ourselves and others forms the necessary first step toward understanding both.Approaching the study of Mendelssohn in performance , it behooves us to reflect on the contexts in which his works were first heard and on the audiences for whom he intended them. 1 Mendelssohn’s Audience douglass seaton There are at least three ways to view Mendelssohn’s audience. First, we can outline the demographics of the population generally, describing the audience in terms of economic situations, vocational and professional status, daily living conditions, education, and so on. Second, we can take snapshots of actual audiences, focusing on individual listeners who attended Mendelssohn’s performances of his (and others’) works. Third, we can consider the relationships of Mendelssohn’s music to the audiences that it addressed. And we must observe the interplay among these perspectives. When we describe the audience for Mendelssohn’s performances in his lifetime, we easily make the generalized observation that his primary listeners were the German Bürger of theVormärz or Biedermeier period. We would then extend our view to include the English middle class and, stretching further in time and place, peripheral publics in France, the United States, and other countries. Such observations become meaningful , however, only to the extent that we understand what these generalizations mean, for each of these populations encompasses a wide range of different people, and more narrowly defined audiences heard performances in different milieus. The present discussion concentrates on the primary audience of Mendelssohn’s performances, the German Bürgertum of the 1820s–40s—as Riehl put it, “this cultivated society, which now spread itself evenly and by proxy into all classes.” For a start, we should take note of the sizes of the cities in which Mendelssohn was most importantly active.The urban population grew rapidly throughout Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Berlin the population doubled from about 200,000 in 1815 to over 400,000 in 1850. During the same period Leipzig grew from 45,000 to 63,000. Among other cities at the end of this period the population of Cologne stood at 97,000; that of Frankfurt am Main at 65,000; and Düsseldorf ’s at 27,000.2 These are, of course, small numbers by today’s standards; thus the audiences for concert and operatic music were proportionately higher in the early nineteenth century than now. The German word Bürger does not translate directly into the French bourgeois. It may be the equivalent of either bourgeois, literally a city dweller, or more restrictively a citoyen, one with the legal status of citizen.3 Mendelssohn’s audiences consisted of the educated urban society as a whole, but this comprised only about 5 percent of the German population. Nor did the Bürgertum form a homogeneous population.The Bürger were distinct from peasants and laborers, and less so from the aristocracy, but a general...