Other notes - Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was an enormously talented and versatile composer, conductor and performer. He was the grandson of the famous Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who strongly promoted Jewish assimilation into German culture and society. Mendelssohn’s father converted the family to the Lutheran faith when Felix was a young boy, adopting the additional surname Bartholdy, which was the name of a family estate.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to Mendelssohn’s smaller sacred works, on texts associated with the Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran traditions. They include a series of choral cantatas, inspired equally by Mendelssohn’s admiration for the music of Bach (whose St Matthew Passion he famously revived in Berlin in 1829 at the age of 20) and by his love of Martin Luther’s hymns. Over the course of his career, Mendelssohn devoted nineteen entire compositions to setting of psalm texts.  This is not surprising given the deeply personal nature of the psalm texts themselves, and that the psalms are the only biblical texts clearly conceived as musical compositions.

Psalm 115, Mendelssohn’s first in a series of five large scale psalm setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra, took almost six years to complete, from the initial sketches and the first version of 1830 in Rome to the final version of 1835. Its premiere at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, did not take place until 1838. Unlike his other orchestral psalms, Mendelssohn took the Latin words ("Non nobis Domine") from the Vulgate as his principal text that stems from Psalm 113. When he later prepared his own German translation, he made use of Psalm 115 from the Luther Bible as heard today.

The influence of Bach is immediate in the opening chorus. After an opening ritornello characterized by upward arpeggios in the strings, the chorus enters in an imitative fashion that gives way to a four part homophonic partial statement of the chorale tune “Nun danket alle Gott.”  This immediately leads to a fugue whose subject is derived from the preceding chorale. Following an abridged restatement of the opening material, the movement concludes with a final reference to the chorale phrase.

The second movement, a soprano/tenor duet with chorus, has strong elements of romantic lyricism in the soaring melodic vocal line. All the while, at the entrance of the full chorus, Mendelssohn manages to weave in a melodic fragment of the great passion chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.” It is interesting to note that just a few weeks before commencing work on Psalm 115, Mendelssohn has composed a chorale cantata on the very same passion chorale tune.  A lyrical arioso for baritone, movement three, employs a psalm intonation associated with the polyphony of Palestrina.  This motive, heard first in the orchestral introduction, Mendelssohn also used imitatively in the first movement of his Reformation Symphony composed in the same year.

The final chorus introduces a celebratory and robust eight part a capella chorus, a style he would continue to use especially in the Sechs Sprüche, op. 79 of 1843. The grandeur of the opening shifts to a sotto voce reverence in triple meter that recalls the opening choral subject. The psalm comes to a quiet close with peaceful affirmation.

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