The Life of Mendelssohn (review)

The Life of Mendelssohn. By Peter Mercer-Taylor. (Musical Lives.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [viii, 238 p. ISBN 0-521-63972-7. $17.95 (pbk.).]

In The Life of Mendelssohn, Peter Mercer-Taylor provides for the general reader a well-written and thoughtful account of the composer's life, into which he seamlessly weaves a survey of his music. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first is a clear and useful survey of Felix Mendelssohn's family background that, in a short space, paints a lively picture of Mendelssohn's intellectual inheritance from his grandfather Moses and his parents' characters and outlook; the remaining chapters treat Mendelssohn's life and works chronologically. Many extracts from letters and other contemporaneous sources, some of which make available less-familiar material, are used to good effect to illustrate the development of Mendelssohn's character, his career, and the impact he made on his contemporaries. Whether Mercer-Taylor succeeds in confronting "head-on the myth that Mendelssohn's was a happy, untroubled existence," as the text on the dust jacket suggests, is another matter. To do that effectively would require a longer study that examines more closely and critically the history of Mendelssohn's contemporary and posthumous reception; but that is perhaps not the primary purpose of a book such as this.

Mercer-Taylor's discussion of Mendelssohn's compositions contains many stimulating insights that are expressed without recourse to the kind of technical language that is fully comprehensible only to the professional. His discussion of the First Piano Concerto and Capriccio brillant (pp. 103-6) provides a good example. In a relatively short space, he is able to indicate the relationship of these works to Mendelssohn's earlier concerted pieces for piano and orchestra as well as summarize their salient formal and stylistic features in relation to the influences of Carl Maria von Weber (especially his Konzertstück), Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and John Field. On the other hand, he sometimes dismisses the music too hastily, leaving the reader with a seriously misleading impression. Such is the case, for instance, with his reference to the Bb-major string quintet. He remarks merely that Mendelssohn "completed his second String Quintet in Bb major, a work more polished than inspired, which pales beside the A-major quintet of nineteen years before" (p. 190). This statement is questionable on several counts. First, Mendelssohn did not "complete" the Bb-major quintet, as Friedhelm Krummacher has brilliantly demonstrated ("Mendelssohn's Late Chamber Music: Some Autograph Sources Recovered," in Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays on Their Music and Its Context, ed. Jon W. Finson and R. Larry Todd [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984], 71-84); he withheld it from publication because he was dissatisfied with it--particularly the last movement, which is surely incomplete in its surviving version--and he would undoubtedly have revised it (or suppressed it) had he lived longer. Second, though the composition as a whole is unsatisfactory for the reason given, the slow movement is one of his very finest and cannot fairly be described as "more polished than inspired." Elsewhere, too, there are unfortunate mistakes, such as the reference (p. 161) to the "brilliant early trios" (surely piano quartets), and a perpetuation of the error, derived from Eduard Devrient's recollections, that Karl Klingemann was the librettist of Mendelssohn's opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho; this was definitively demonstrated to be incorrect by Rudolf Elvers, who produced clear evidence to show that the principal librettist was Friedrich Voigts ("'Nichts ist so schwer gut zu componiren als Strophen': Zur Entstehungsgeschichte d. Librettos von Felix Mendelssohns Oper Die Hochzeit des Camacho," Veröffentlichung der Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft, 4 [Berlin: Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft, 1976]).

One especially disturbing aspect of the book is the paucity of references for quotations. Relatively few are given, and it is difficult to see what criteria have been adopted for deciding when the sources of direct quotations should be identified and when not. Whether these decisions were made by the author or the...