Of red roofs and hunting horns: Mendelssohn's song aesthetic, with an unpublished cycle (1830)

Abstract

Despite considerable progress in many areas of Mendelssohn research in recent decades, his approximately 135 solo songs still require a reappraisal. To date, the relatively few studies that have considered the songs either have approached them from the perspective of the highly dramatic song aesthetic cultivated by Schubert, Schumann, and most composers of the later nineteenth century, or have considered them purely in terms of musical style, treating them as modestly romanticized extensions of the song aesthetic of the so-called Second Berlin School (most prominently represented by Mendelssohn's teachers Carl Friedrich Zelter and Ludwig Berger). However, the determining factor for both Mendelssohn's song aesthetic and the later reception of his songs was neither an inherently nondramatic approach to the genre nor a historically outmoded musical aesthetic. It was, rather, a profound skepticism regarding the communicative abilities of verbal language and the firm belief in music's ability to communicate in a fashion that was both universal and consummately subjective-a view less consistent with the Enlightenment ideas of Hegel (who is typically cited as the source of Mendelssohn's song aesthetic) than with the more romantic perspective espoused by Schopenhauer. This interpretation is borne out by a comparison of the text/music relationships in a well-known Mendelssohn Lied ("Ferne," Op. 9 no. 9) and those in an extraordinarily dramatic unpublished song cycle composed in 1830.

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