In 1851, as part of the first phase of posthumous
publications of works by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Julius Rietz
edited and published with the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf &
Härtel a “Concert Arie für die Sopran–Stimme
mit Begleitung des Orchesters,” assigning the aria the
posthumous opus number 94. Beginning in 1853, inventories of the
composer’s works added the title “Infelice,”
extracting this title from the text incipit of the recitative
portion of the work.[1] This
information was repeated in the catalog of Mendelssohn’s
published works released by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1873,
but the press now added that the aria had been composed in 1834 and
revised in 1843, also identifying Metastasio as the poet.[2] In 1876 Rietz reissued his edition in
Series 15 of the edition of Mendelssohn’s collected works
published by Breitkopf & Härtel.
Thus, since the 1870s all editions and recordings of
this aria, as well as catalogs of Mendelssohn’s output, have
consistently identified this music by the recitative’s text
incipit (“Infelice”) and
ascribed its initial composition to the year 1834, at the same
presenting the work as it existed in 1843. The Op. 94 aria has been
viewed as the later of two manifestations of a single compositional
concept and thus vested with greater compositional authority, in
accordance with the premises of the editorial philosophy of the
Fassung letzter Hand. In so doing, these posthumous
commentaries, editions, and performances have placed this aria in
the company of a sizeable number of works by Mendelssohn whose
genesis spanned many years, and whose latest versions the composer
explicitly granted artistic primacy as the “best”
versions of works whose earlier renderings had but imperfectly
realized his compositional aims.
At first blush, the traditional understanding of
Mendelssohn’s Op. 94 has much to commend it. Both
incarnations of this compositional concept set poetry by
Metastasio; both are written for female voice with orchestra; both
are in B–flat major; both employ the well–known form of
“scena and aria”; and both include a brief but
prominent return of the music from the cavatina near the end of the
cabaletta (after the model of Beethoven’s Ah,
Perfido!). Finally, the music of the recitative of the 1843
composition is clearly derived from that of its 1834 counterpart,
and the essential thematic material of the cavatina is almost
identical.
Despite these similarities, however, there is no
evidence that Mendelssohn and his contemporaries considered the
1843 aria as a revision of the 1834 one. Rather, contemporary
reviews and the composer himself referred to the 1843 composition
as “new.”[3] Moreover,
there are major extensive differences in the two works’
texts, circumstantial origins, music, and large–scale
interpretive gestures. These differences suggest that while
Mendelssohn would have recognized both the 1834 aria and its 1843
counterpart as abbandonata–style concert arias for
female voice with orchestra, he surely would have considered them
as autonomous compositional responses to their respective
texts.
The present remarks trace the two arias’
histories, identify several salient similarities and differences,
and comment on some significant implications of the divergences
between the two. Ultimately, I propose that Mendelssohn’s
musical maturity produced not one concert aria based on texts by
Metastasio, but two – and that this realization offers to the
musical world an entirely new composition whose identity has for
more than 150 years been wrongfully subsumed into that of another
work.[4]
Composition
The first of Mendelssohn’s mature Metastasio
settings resulted from an 1832 commission from the Philharmonic
Society of London for an overture, a symphony, and a vocal
piece.[5] Although
Mendelssohn completed two of the commissioned works in the spring
of 1833, he was unable to begin work on the vocal piece until
February 1834. By that point, he had decided that the work would be
a setting of verses by Metastasio, and would be clearly tied to two
of the leading figures of contemporary musical life. The composer
wrote to his family on February 19, 1834:
… my vocal scena for the Philharmonic will be
finished in a few days. The text is the most beautiful nonsense by
Metastasio (recitative, adagio, and allegro) assembled from four
different operas – but all that should be made good again by
a solo violin which accompanies the voice, and for which I’m
speculating on de Bériot.[6]
As may be obvious, “de Bériot” is a
reference to the contemporary violin virtuoso Charles–Auguste
de Bériot (1802-70), who at the time was engaged in an
extramarital affair with renowned soprano Maria Malibran. The
importance of this relationship is indicated in Fanny
Hensel’s response to her brother’s letter a few days
later:
Concerning your vocal scena you write only that it
contains an obbligato violin part for Beriot [sic]; from that we
surmise that you’re thinking of Malibran as the soprano. Does
the key fit?[7]
Mendelssohn completed the aria on 3 April 1834. On 14
May his London friend Karl Klingemann reported that Maria
Caradori-Allan (1800-65) would be the soprano soloist, and the
premiere occurred at the Philharmonic Society’s concert on
May 19, with concertmaster J. D. Loder as violin soloist and Thomas
Cooke conducting.[8] A second
performance was given on 11 April 1836 with the same orchestra and
soloists under the direction of Ignaz Moscheles. This performance,
given just two weeks after the marriage of Malibran and de
Bériot, was the last in the composer’s lifetime.
Thus, Malibran and de Bériot never performed the
1834 aria despite the important role they played in its conception.
Although it most likely was in good hands in its performances by
Caradori-Allan, she possessed neither the brilliant technique nor
the popular fame of the intended soloists on whom Mendelssohn had
been “speculating” when he wrote the piece. Moreover,
the well–known romance between the two soloists would have
granted the aria an undeniable topical appeal. This circumstantial
influence is significant, for as will be shown presently,
Mendelssohn’s setting of Metastasio’s text develops an
elaborate and obviously amorous musical relationship between the
two soloists which would have paralleled their real–life
relationship.
As shown in Table
1, there are three surviving manuscripts for
Mendelssohn’s 1834 Metastasio aria. Mendelssohn had the first
of these – the autograph composing score, dated at the end
“Düsseldorf den 3ten April 1834” – bound ca.
1839 into what would become Volume 28 of the Mendelssohn
Nachlaß.[9] As shown in
Figure
1, this autograph reveals extensive revisions to both the
text and the music of the aria. A second manuscript, produced by
Mendelssohn’s favorite copyist in Düsseldorf, J. G.
Schauseil, is found in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in
London; this manuscript also reveals several revisions in
Mendelssohn’s own script, primarily in matters of text
setting.[10] Finally, the
Royal Academy of Music library also contains a reduction for voice
and piano. This manuscript is in the script of William Goodwin, a
copyist who had worked with the Philharmonic Society since at least
1829.[11]
By contrast, documentation pertaining to the 1843
aria is sparse. It exists in only one known contemporary
manuscript: the autograph full score that would be bound in volume
38[12] in the
Mendelssohn Nachlaß found in the Biblioteca
Jagiellońska, Kraków, sometime after November 1844; its
final page is dated 15 January 1843. The work was performed at an
“Extraconcert” given by Sophie Schloß in the
Leipzig Gewandhaus on 9 February 1843, and two more performances
were given during Mendelssohn’s lifetime; both featured
Schloß as soloist. This aria was posthumously published in
1851 by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig (with Italian and
German text) and Ewer & Co. in London (with Italian and English
text).
Mendelssohn mentioned the 1843 aria in two surviving
letters. The first of these was written to his brother Paul on 17
January 1843, just two days after the completion of the score:
I want to tell you about the programs of our upcoming
concerts; perhaps one or another of them will appeal to you or
Albertine [Paul’s wife]… On 9 February there is the
concert by Mlle [Sophie] Schloß in which Mme [Clara] Schumann
and [Gewandhaus concertmaster Ferdinand] David will also perform,
individually and together, and in which a new concert aria by me
which I have written for Mlle Schloß will be given, and
probably also my Meeresstille…[13]
Mendelssohn again referred to the work in a letter to
his friend Ferdinand Hiller written on 3 March, and here he makes
explicit that the 1834 work was the historical starting point for
the same aria that he had described as “new” in his
letter of 19 January:
I sought out the Scena for Mlle Schloß’s
benefit concert, wrote a new Allegro for it, and thereby did my
part. Beyond that it is of little use.[14]
Since contemporary reviews published in the Leipzig
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift
für Musik clearly concur with the composer in describing
the 1843 aria as “new,”[15] and since these reviewers were clearly
responding to information provided in the program itself, we may
safely conclude that the work was billed as “new” at
the time. This evidence contradicts the conventional assumption
that the 1843 aria represented a revision of its 1834 counterpart,
– a reworking that was consequently more authorized. Indeed,
by stating that the 1843 aria was “of little use”
Mendelssohn denied that aria’s artistic merit and critical
authority.
Text
An examination of the texts and textual sources of
these two arias immediately raises problems for the conventional
understanding of the relationship between them, since compositions
with any amount of substantively different similar texts are
generally considered either as contrafacta or as revisions of the same
textual/musical concept. In order to be designated contrafacta
compositions must employ essentially the same music for all
textually divergent portions; and in order to be considered
textual/musical revisions the text must be essentially the same in
the two versions. Neither of these criteria fits well in the
instance of these two arias: the music for most of the arias
(recitative, cavatina, and cabaletta alike) differs far more than
is permissible under the rubric of “contrafacta” and
the textual divergences are too great and too substantive to permit
classification as a “revision” according to normal
standards. In other words, from a textual perspective
Mendelssohn’s 1843 Infelice cannot be considered the
same work as the 1834 aria.
As shown in Table
2, Mendelssohn compiled the texts for the two arias from
several different opera seria libretti by Metastasio. The original
source of the titular incipit is unknown; it may well stem from
Mendelssohn himself, or from any number of other Italian operas.
After that exclamation, the recitative of the 1834 aria presents
excerpts from Il Trionfo di Clelia, III/3; Romeolo ed
Ersilia, III/5; and Giustino IV/7, with the interpolated
line “e l’amo pur” from some other textual source
that remains unidentified; these texts are reused, with slight
modifications and the additional interpolation “E pur odiar
nol posso ancor!,” in the 1843 aria. The cavatina of the 1834
aria returns to Il Trionfo di Clelia and Giustino,
while the 1843 aria retains only lines 15, 20, and 21, replacing
the other lines with more material from an unidentified source.
Finally, the cabaletta of the 1834 aria returns to Giustino
for the entirety of its text, while the cabaletta of the 1843 aria
retains only three of the lines from that opera, replacing the
remainder with material from an unidentified source. It is
possible, of course, that these untraced lines come from more than
one source, or that they were penned by Mendelssohn himself.
These textual interrelationships make clear that
Mendelssohn’s 1834 Metastasio aria offered no more than a
compositional Auftakt for the text of the later one –
for in selecting and/or writing the various replacement texts that
are present in the later work, the composer probably had to return
to his source of Metastasio’s poetry and find new text, with
the full knowledge that this new text would also lead to new music.
This approach normally dictates that the music written for the new
text grant to the composition the status of an autonomous work.
Music
An examination of the music of the two arias
corroborates this impression. As shown in Examples
1a and 1b,
the recitatives of two arias employ similar harmonic plans, but the
later aria dispenses with the fugato textures of the earlier one,
replacing the agitation suggested by the doubled cascading eighth
notes in the 1834 aria instead with a series of throbbing
syncopated harmonies in the later strings.
An instance of more pronouncedly divergent
parallelisms obtains in the two cavatinas: As shown in
Examples
2a–b, the two employ the same essential thematic
material. This material comprises two ideas: the signature gesture
of the first comprises a triadic descent leading to the dominant of
the subdominant, while that of the second comprises a set of
dotted–eighth and sixteenth–note embellishments of the
dominant of the new key (F major).
The most prominent musical divergences, however,
occur in the cabaletta. As shown in Example
3a and 3b,
the 1834 Allegro is based on five discrete melodic ideas, and these
bear little or no affinity to the three ideas on which the 1843
Allegro is based. The disparity is, of course, only natural, for as
noted above the texts of the cabaletta sections are completely
different.
Interpretation
Finally, the music of the two arias reflects
Mendelssohn’s substantially different compositional
interpretations of Metastasio’s poetry. As already noted, the
music and text of the recitatives differ but little: both introduce
the persona of the poem’s love-forsaken protagonist and set
her words to music that bespeaks her psychological and emotional
turbulence. In the cavatina, however, the works unfold in a
substantially different fashion. In the 1834 aria Mendelssohn also
introduces the persona of the lyric persona’s lost love,
allegorized in a finely wrought obbligato violin part (which, as
noted above, would have been personified by de Bériot).
Indeed, it is this lover whom we first encounter, for the cavatina
begins with a presentation of its lovely Italianate main melody in
the solo violin (Ex.
4a). After a full cadence, this melody is taken over by the
protagonist, wistfully remembering the “età
dell’oro” when her lover was still present (Ex.
4b); she then loses herself in the memory of those happy
days, when “a tender shrub and a limpid stream nourished the
people.” Finally, the two personae are united in an elaborate
and finely wrought duet, the solo violin alternately weaving
graceful countermelodies around the soprano lines and, toward the
end, moving in parallel thirds and sixths with those lines
(Ex.
4c).
The elaborate development involved in this
meticulously crafted Andante deserves comment for two reasons.
First, in creating two different personae – one associated
with the solo soprano, the other with the solo violin –
Mendelssohn identified the work with its intended performers; for
the extramarital affair of Malibran and de Bériot was well
known by 1834, and a performance of the work featuring the two of
them in such conspicuously amatory solo roles inevitably would have
invited contemporary audiences to identify the textual and musical
personae with the performers themselves. Second, since the
development of the lovers’ relationship graphically depicted
in the Andante is entirely absent (or at best an unstated thing of
the past) in Metastasio’s text, the creation and development
of that relationship was obviously an important consideration in
Mendelssohn’s composition of the aria. Such gestures are by
nature assertions of a composer’s identity, confirmations of
a Romantically individualized reading of the original text.
Now, there is no doubt that the Cavatina of the 1843
aria takes its 1834 counterpart as its starting point, since it
reuses the essential thematic material (Ex.
5). Nevertheless, the 1843 cavatina is markedly shorter and
includes no violin obbligato. Consequently, this 1843 Andante does
not graphically develop the lovers’ past relationship, but
remains firmly grounded in the present; indeed, rather than
becoming lost in her memories this speaker is consciously aware
that she is reminiscing, especially in lines 19–22:
“Ah, when I look inside myself I am always reminded of the
day he vowed to be true to me.”
Likewise significant are the widely differing
compositional interventions Mendelssohn made in the cabalettas of
the two arias. Initially, the 1834 cabaletta returns to the
comparatively straightforward style of text setting established in
the recitative, and the Allegro as a whole is characterized by
tonal instability and angular melodic lines – musical
gestures conventionally associated with the affective turbulence of
the soprano persona’s thoughts. As shown in Example
6, however, Mendelssohn introduces into the 1834 cabaletta
a conspicuously static discursion into D minor. This D-minor
interlude constitutes a reminiscence episode in which the solo
violin and the soprano, reunited in dialog, resume the pastoral
text and texture of the Andante wherein they were first joined:
“the world was happy then, when a tender plant [and] a limpid
brook nourished the people” (ll. 18-21). The reminiscence
implicitly becomes more real as the music returns to F major, the
key from which it initially departed, but the tonality abruptly
turns to F minor in measure 258, and the return of the
agitato running doubled eighth notes in the strings at that
point emphasizes that the episode was only a fleeting daydream, far
removed for the bitterness of the present.
The end of the reminiscence episode seems to mark a
crucial recognition for the speaker in the 1834 aria and a dramatic
turning point in the composition, for the agitato mood
prevails to the end. The text with which the Allegro began
(“D’amore nel regno” etc.) is now set as a series
of short, breathless, modulatory phrases rather than a bona fide
melody, and the restatements of other material are all modified to
heighten tension, primarily through increased harmonic instability.
This section finally dissolves into a crescendo in which the solo
soprano repeatedly exclaims “disrupt it again”
(“la turba ancor”) in appropriately fragmented
phrases. As shown in Example
7, the climax of this intensification – a tonic 6/4
chord with a fermata – is followed by a final brief return of
the music and text of the Andante featuring both the solo soprano
and the solo violin – a reflective duet–entreaty for a
return of that “bell’età.” The plea remains
unanswered, however, and the aria closes with a series of
reiterated cries of “Ah, ritorna!,” followed by a final
turbulent statement of the doubled–eighth–note
figure.
In short, although Mendelssohn’s 1834 aria
responds sensitively to the salient affects of Metastasio’s
texts, it also represents both his own highly personalized reading
of that text and a setting that would have possessed considerable
topical appeal for a musical public whose familiarity with
Metastasian aesthetics was at best limited.
The 1843 aria Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, età
felice likewise reveals much about Mendelssohn’s
compositional agenda and the context for which it was written, but
its treatment of Metastasio’s text differs considerably
– not least of all, of course, because the two cabaletti
employ different texts. As already noted, the thematic material is
unrelated to that of the 1834 aria. Moreover, the 1843 aria offers
no reminiscence episode in the cabaletta. Most important, however,
is that the 1843 aria offers a final resolution entirely absent in
the 1834 composition: “And yet just the memory of those
love–filled days can soothe this bitter grief!” (ll.
29-32). Mendelssohn evidently recognized this exclamation’s
potential for resolving emotional conflict, for in the first part
of the 1843 cabaletta he cultivates an unstable, dramatically
charged musical style that emphasizes the protagonist’s
emotional tension (“B” in Example
3b, above), but in the final bars he musically suggests
that the consolation possible through memory has in fact been
attained: the second theme from the main Allegro, formerly in an
unstable G minor, is now presented firmly in B-flat major, as the
subject of the coda (Ex. 8).
The consolation so emphatically denied in the earlier work is thus
granted in the 1843 aria – a Romantic interpretive
intervention that transforms the essentially static composite text
into an end–weighted gesture whose goal and culmination is
the resolution of the speaker’s emotional conflicts in the
final measures.
There is, in fact, much more to be said about these
two largely unknown arias. Most important for purposes of this
paper, however, is the insight the works provide into changes in
Mendelssohn’s view of the public composer’s role
vis-à-vis that of the poet in dramatic works. For while both
arias present Romantic compositional reinterpretations of
Metastasio’s texts, the two works also represent
conspicuously different points in his career. The 1834 aria,
written during his first professional engagement and at the
beginning of what promised (but was by no means certain) to be an
illustrious public career as a musician, deliberately cultivates
association with established celebrity: Beethoven’s Ah,
perfido!, the glamorous Malibran and de Bériot, and a
stylistic idiom overtly indebted to the lyrical drama of
contemporary Italian opera. By contrast, when he composed the 1843
aria Mendelssohn stood at the early height of his international
prestige as public figure, composer, and conductor. The aria
acknowledges this different relationship between poet, composer,
and musical public not only through the more intrinsically dramatic
mezzo-soprano tessitura of its vocal soloist, but also by its
emphasis on a last-minute climactic resolution of dramatic
conflict. The two works thus represent contrasting approaches to
the quintessential Romantic issue of the role and artistic
obligations of the composer as interpreter and dramatizer of poetry
– and Metastasio, however unwittingly, played a central role
in Mendelssohn’s struggle with the nature of Romantic
artistic identity.
In conclusion, we must ask whether these two arias
represent an instance of compositional revision, or simply of the
recycling of musical material between two generically similar
works. If the former is the case, the implications are that
Mendelssohn reused material from the earlier composition in a later
one; that he presumably considered the later work as an improved
realization of the concept first executed in the earlier aria; that
he viewed the later work not as “new,” but as
“old”; and that he intended the later work to supersede
the earlier one. In this instance, the two Infelice arias
would emerge as counterparts to Mendelssohn’s two settings of
Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht. In this view, however, we
must concede that the Infelice arias occupy a troublingly
exceptional status: for the textual and musical differences between
the two arias normally would automatically grant them musical
autonomy according to conventions of musical identification, and
the musical differences between these two versions are
significantly greater than those in any other known instance of
Mendelssohn’s extensive revisions. Finally, we must remember
that the 1843 concert aria, unlike the Walpurgisnacht,
remained unpublished until after the composer’s death:
Mendelssohn never granted the later version greater authority than
the earlier one.
On the other hand, if the 1843 aria represents a
recycling of some text and music in the context of an ultimately
autonomous composition, this has significant consequences. This
view is appealing not least of all for methodological reasons,
since it accounts for the textual and musical variances between
these two settings in a fashion that is consistent with accepted
practices for identifying texted musical works (consider, for
example, the conventions of identifying and separating out works
using “Ave Maria” texts). Moreover, such an approach
places Mendelssohn’s two Infelice arias in a group not
with the Walpurgisnacht and the “Scottish”
Symphony, but with his two settings of “Was betrübst Du
dich, meine Seele, und bist so unruhig in mir? Harre auf Gott; denn
ich werde ihm noch danken, daß er meines Angesichts Hilfe und
mein Gott ist.“ This verse, stated in both Psalm 42 and Psalm
43 in the Lutheran Bible, naturally figures in Mendelssohn’s
settings of those two works. His setting of Psalm 42 was composed
in 1837 and published Op. 42 in 1838/39, and his setting of Psalm
43 was composed in 1844 and posthumously published as Op. 78 No. 2
in 1849. Although they are scored for radically different
ensembles, both settings not only share this text, but also use the
same music for all shared material – yet unlike the two
Infelice arias, the psalm settings are conventionally
assigned discrete identities in inventories of Mendelssohn’s
oeuvre. Finally, this view liberates the 1834 aria from the
anachronistic shadow of its 1843 counterpart, shedding new light on
an otherwise entirely unknown composition that represents
Mendelssohn’s first masterful essay in the early
nineteenth–century Italian operatic style.
|
________________________
[Bio] John Michael
Cooper is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of
North Texas (Denton). He is the author of Mendelssohn’s
“Italian” Symphony (Oxford, 2003) and Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Guide to Research (New York,
2001).
e-mail: mchlcooper@yahoo.com
[1] Thematisches
Verzeichniss im Druck erschienener Compositionen von Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 1st Auflage, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf
& Härtel, [1853]). On the posthumous publication histories
of Mendelssohn’s works, see Friedhelm Krummacher,
“Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix (Ludwig Jacob),” article
in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd
ed., ed. Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil Bd. 12 (Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 2003), col. 1559-61; further, my “Knowing
Mendelssohn: A Challenge from the Primary Sources,”
Notes 61 (2004): 35-95, esp. 38-40, 93-95.
[2] Thematisches
Verzeichniss im Druck erschienener Compositionen von Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf
& Härtel, [1873]).
[3] See
Mendelssohn’s letter of 17 January 1843 to Paul Mendelssohn
Bartholdy, quoted later; further, “Concert von Fr. Sophia
Schloß,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 18 (6
March 1843): 80; F[erdinand] Pr[ager], “Aus London,”
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 23 (28 October 1845): 140;
Fr[anz] Br[endel], “Leipziger Musikleben,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik 25 (28 November 1846): 177.
[4] This essay is adapted
and revised from my “Mendelssohn’s Two Infelice
Arias: Problems of Sources and Musical Identity,” in The
Mendelssohns: Their Music in History, ed. John Michael Cooper
and Julie D. Prandi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
43-97.
[5] Letter of 5 November
1832 from William Watts (secretary of the Philharmonic Society of
London) to Mendelssohn (GB-Ob, GB II/72). For a detailed
exploration of Mendelssohn’s fulfilment of the terms of the
commission, see Peter Ward Jones, “Mendelssohn Scores in the
Library of the Royal Philharmonic Society,” in Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Kongreß-Bericht Berlin 1994
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1997), 70-74.
[6] Letter of 19 February
1834, held in the New York Public Library: “[I]ch bin jetzt
sehr fleißig und komme wieder in recht gute Schreiblaune
…; meine Gesangscene fürs Philharmonic wird in ein Paar
Tagen fertig sein. Die Worte sind der allerschönste Unsinn von
Metastasio, Recitativ, Adagio u Allegro aus vier verschiedenen
Opern zusammengestellt, aber das soll alles eine solo Geige wieder
gut machen, die die Stimme begleitet, und bei der ich auf de
Bériot speculire.”
[7] Translated from Marcia
J. Citron, The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn
Bartholdy ([Stuyvesant, New Jersey:] Pendragon Press, 1987),
456 (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, GB III/78):
“Du schreibst über Deine Gesangscene nur, daß eine
obligate Violine für Beriot dabei sey, daraus schließen
wir auf einen Sopran für die Malibran. Paßt der
Schlüssel?”
[8] Unpublished letter
from Karl Klingemann to Mendelssohn (Bodleian Library, GB III/145):
“Tomorrow there is a rehearsal, and your scena will be
played, sung by Caradori. I like it a great deal for this sort of
piece.” (“Morgen ist Rehearsal, u Deine Scena wird
gemacht, u gesungen von der Caradori. Sie gefällt mir sehr,
für seine Art Musikstück.”). See also Myles Birket
Foster, History of the Philharmonic Society of London,
1813-1912 (London: John Lane, 1913), 128.
[9] See Cooper,
“Knowing Mendelssohn,” 52-56; further, Hans-Günter
Klein, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Autographe und
Abschriften, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin –
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kataloge der Musikabteilung, series
1, vol. 5 (Munich: G. Henle, 2003), 61-65.
[10] See Ward Jones,
“Mendelssohn Scores,” 74.
[11] See Ward Jones,
“Mendelssohn Scores,” 74-75.
[12] See note 2, earlier.
[13] Letter from
Felix to Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, held in the New York Public
Library: “Ich will dir unsere nächste Concertprogramms
beschreiben., vielleicht reizt dich oder Albertine doch eins oder
das andre; theil sie auch Fanny mit, der ichs versprochen habe. . .
. Am 9ten Febr. ist das Concert von Dem. Schloss in dem Mme.
Schumann und David jeder einzeln u auch zusammen spielen, in dem
eine neue Concert-Arie von mir vorkommt, die ich für Dem.
Schloss gemacht habe, u wahrscheinlich auch meine
Meeresstille…”
[14] Letter from
Mendelssohn to Ferdinand Hiller, 3 March 1843, translated from
Ferdinand Hiller, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Briefe und
Erinnerungen, (Cologne: M. DuMont-Schuberg, 1874), 170.
[15]
See note 3, earlier.
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