Mendelssohn’s Elijah

Mendelssohn’s "Elijah" - Program notes by Dr. Gordon Paine

The nineteenth-century industrial revolution created in England a middle class that embraced singing as a leisure activity. As choral associations and festivals sprang up they needed literature, which they obtained largely from the works of Purcell and Handel until Haydn’s The Creation appeared in print in 1800. Two generations later, another Teutonic composer joined the Handel-Haydn oratorio pantheon: Felix Mendelssohn.

A prodigy of Mozartean caliber, by age ten Mendelssohn mastered the piano, violin, and organ and was cutting his teeth as a composer. At twelve he was literate in French and Latin, was writing poetry, and had composed dozens of keyboard, chamber, and choral works. By his mid twenties he had become one of the premier composers and conductors in Europe.

His brilliance was a product of nature and nurture in auspicious proportion. His grandfather, Moses, was the most eminent Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, and his father, Abraham, founded a banking house that survived until the Third Reich. The wealth and contacts of Abraham and his wife, Lea, a pianist, permitted them to provide their children with both education and opportunity. Felix was not the only precocious child in the household: His elder sister Fanny, who served as her brother’s lifelong muse and critic, was a fine composer and pianist in the own right.

The one disadvantage the Mendelssohns faced was being Jews in a culture with an anti-Semitic history. Owing to the prominence of Felix’s maternal great grandfather and paternal grandfather, the family possessed rare letters of protection from the crown that granted them “all the rights of Christian citizens” within Prussia. Even this, however, did not seem sufficient insurance to the Mendelssohn parents, who in 1816 baptized their four children as Protestants. The composer’s Christian upbringing and Jewish heritage were to be of significance in the subjects he chose for his two oratorios: St. Paul concerned the Christian conversion of another Jew, while Elijah (1846) dealt with an Old Testament prophet.

St. Paul met with spectacular success at the Rhine Music Festival in Düsseldorf, and shortly after it premiere there on May 22, 1836, Mendelssohn was inspired to write a second oratorio, on the subject of the ninth-century B.C. prophet Elijah, whom Jehovah charged to bring the disloyal Israelites back to him. Before anything else, the project needed a libretto, but Mendelssohn’s preferred librettist dawdled so long that the composer abandoned him and turned instead to a minister named Julius Schubring, the librettist for St. Paul, who doubtless felt slighted to be second choice.

Conflict soon surfaced. While Schubring envisioned a work of religious piety, Mendelssohn insisted on a real drama: “I imagined Elijah as a grand, mighty prophet, of the kind we might require in our own day, energetic and zealous, but also stern, angry, brooding, in striking contrast to the rabble you find both in court and in the populace—indeed, up against the whole world—yet borne aloft on angels’ wings . . . . The personages should act and speak as if they were living beings.” The disagreement unresolved, Schubring soon quit, and Elijah went onto the back burner, where it rested for seven years.

In June, 1845 Elijah sprang back to life when the Birmingham Festival commissioned a Mendelssohn oratorio for its 1846 festival. This time it was the composer who procrastinated. On December 16, just over eight months before the scheduled premiere, he approached Schubring once again, sending him a libretto of his own for the first part of the oratorio, for which he sought criticism and suggestions.

In late May, Mendelssohn wrote to his collaborator, “I have now quite finished the first part, and six or eight numbers of the second are already written down. In various places in the second part, however, I require a choice of really fine Scriptural passages, and I do beg of you to send them to me!”

With just three months remaining, and the composer committed to a half dozen conducting engagements in three countries, most of the second part of Elijah—which still had no libretto—still begged to be composed. Only after completion could the complete work be translated into English, engraved, printed, corrected, and rehearsed. In an age of sailing ships and quill pens, with the composer in Germany and the translator in England, the challenge seemed insurmountable. The last-minute pressure was so great that the translator himself had to write out the singers’ parts by hand. Mendelssohn did indeed meet his deadline—but he paid for it with his health, which was never to be the same.

On August 26, 1846 a huge ensemble of 271 choristers and 125 instrumentalists, directed by the composer, presented the first Elijah, after which the exuberant audience demanded eight encores. Performances thereafter revealed to Mendelssohn a number of weaknesses, large and small, and over the following months, despite exhaustion, he embarked on a detailed revision, resulting in the oratorio as we now know it.

Fanny Hensel, Felix’s beloved sister, died on May 14, 1847 of a stroke at age 41. Felix himself succumbed, likewise of a stroke, just six months later, at the age of 38, having outlived Mozart by just two years, ten months, and 24 days. Since that time, composers and oratorios have come and gone, but none save Handel’s Messiah has matched or exceeded Elijah in lasting popularity on both sides of the Atlantic.