Let us, however, begin with the opera that he did write. Mendelssohn began to compose Die Hochzeit des Camacho in the summer of 1824, at the tender age of 15. He had already composed in the Singspiel and Liederspiel genres, creating modest works for private performance by family and friends, but he aspired to greater things. The libretto (by Friedrich Voigts) for this comic opera is based on an incident from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and is in two acts. By December Mendelssohn had set Act I to music, and in February 1825 he composed the overture. In August he finished the score and submitted it to Berlin’s Shauspielhaus for consideration. However, the remarkably talented young composer with hopes for a successful premiere soon discovered that the life of an opera composer wasn’t always easy.

Some Mendelssohn biographers have pointed to Gaspare Spontini, the theatre’s manager, as the source of the problems that hobbled Camacho‘s production. Although, as Royal Kappellmeister, Spontini held the most prestigious musical office in Prussia, the Italian composer was no great admirer of German music. He made Camacho a low priority: he waited almost a year before he met with Mendelssohn to discuss a staging, and then demanded revisions. Rehearsals did not begin until April 1827. As well, there were further delays when the singer portraying Quixote fell ill.

The premiere, on April 29, did not go well. The choruses were weak, and as the opera progressed audience enthusiasm waned. Distraught, Mendelssohn left the theatre before the performance was over, and withdrew the work before its scheduled second night. Die Hochzeit des Camacho – a youthful effort written in a pastiche of Italian and German styles – was never again staged in its composer’s lifetime. Although Mendelssohn often revised works that did not satisfy him, he did not do this with Camacho.

In one sense, this is the end of the story of Mendelssohn as an opera composer – but in another sense, it’s just the beginning. Mendelssohn spent the rest of his life searching for a libretto that would inspire him to compose a successful opera. Moreover, playwrights, poets, singers and theatre directors (not to mention his own father) didn’t let him forget that they hoped he would return to opera: according to the Mendelssohn scholar Monika Hennemann, more than fifty operatic subjects were proposed to him over two decades. Some he contemplated for several years; others he probably rejected in a matter of minutes. Ironically, it was only at the end of his life that he found what he was looking for.

Following Camacho, Mendelssohn’s next dramatic effort was Heimkehr aus der Fremde, known in English as Son and Stranger, which he wrote during his first visit to Britain, in 1829. This was another Liederspiel intended for private enjoyment by friends and family in Berlin (although after Mendelssohn’s death it received some public performances, including an 1851 staging at London’s Haymarket Theatre.) It was also in 1829 that he first received offers to compose for the English stage: both the Convent Garden and Drury Lane theatres courted him, but Mendelssohn didn’t like the librettos he was offered.

Two years later, in 1831, the prospects of a second full-scale opera by Mendelssohn brightened when he accepted a commission to compose an opera for Munich. Mendelssohn promptly enlisted the Düsseldorf-based writer Karl Immermann to fashion a libretto on the subject of The Tempest. However, the composer’s enthusiasm turned to disappointment when he found the playwright’s libretto unsuitable, for both musical and dramatic reasons. Mendelssohn broke his contract with the Munich opera house.

Nevertheless, Mendelssohn soon found himself drawn deeper into the world of the theatre. At the urging of Immermann, in 1832 the mayor of Düsseldorf offered Mendelssohn the position of municipal music director. Mendelssohn readily accepted the post, which made him responsible for the city’s orchestral concerts and church music. As well, Mendelssohn conducted at the opera house, beginning with a production of Don Giovanni in 1833. According to Immermann, the cast was inadequate and showed Mendelssohn little respect – and the opening night was reduced to a fiasco when some patrons noisily disrupted the performance to protest an increase in ticket prices.

Mendelssohn persevered as music director of the theatre throughout 1834, conducting operas by Mozart, Weber, Marschner and Cherubini. As well, at this time he took a strong interest in August von Kotzebue’s play Pervonte, urging his friend Carl Klingemann to write a libretto on the subject. (Unfortunately, when Klingemann complied with the request, the result was not to Mendelssohn’s liking.) Yet despite the extent of his operatic activities at this time, Mendelssohn, in a letter to his father, confessed that he harboured "no sympathy for actual theatrical life, or the squabbles of the actors and the incessant striving after effect." And before long, Mendelssohn was himself acting like a prima donna: he quarreled with Immermann over artistic and administrative issues, and then resigned from his operatic duties in Düsseldorf. When he accepted the position of music director of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus in 1835, he was no doubt pleased that his new job didn’t include any operatic responsibilities.

In Leipzig, Mendelssohn set about transforming the Gewandhaus Orchestra into one of the finest ensembles in Europe, and completing his first oratorio, St. Paul. But proposals for operas continued to come to his attention. In 1838, the English publisher William Chappell commissioned James Robinson Planché (librettist for Weber’s Oberon) to outline an opera based on Edward III’s 1346 siege of Calais. Mendelssohn was initially interested, but grew increasingly critical – until, two years later, he withdrew altogether from the project. Two years later, the Paris Opera attempted to bring Mendelssohn into an operatic collaboration with the famous French librettist Eugène Scribe, but Mendelssohn declined.

More ideas came and went. With his sister, Fanny, Felix discussed the possibility of writing an opera based on the Nibelungenlied. A chemist named William Bartholomew wrote from London, offering librettos on the subjects of Titania and Sappho. (Although Mendelssohn declined Bartholomew’s proposals, this initial contact led to a productive relationship: Bartholomew later served as Mendelssohn’s English translator for Elijah, Die erste Walpurgisnacht and several other vocal works. And it was at Bartholomew’s request that Mendelssohn wrote Hear My Prayer.) Other suggestions for operas included Faust, Kenilworth, King Lear and Hamlet. Mendelssohn rejected all of them – but he was increasingly aware that the lack of an appealing subject wasn’t his only problem. When one librettist wrote to him with several proposals, Mendelssohn replied that he was more concerned with the challenges of collaboration than the choice of subject matter.

Mendelssohn’s operatic ambitions took on a new life when he met Jenny Lind in 1844. Deeply impressed with the "Swedish Nightingale," he conceived the idea of composing an opera expressly designed for her talents. Armed with fresh enthusiasm, Mendelssohn once again began to seek out ideas and collaborators. He developed a clear sense of what he was looking for, explaining to his friend, the singer and actor Eduard Devrient, that his ideal libretto would be "German, and noble, and cheerful," and should originate in "a legend of the Rhine, or some other national event or tale." By 1846 he had settled on the legend of the Lorelei, and on the librettist Emanuel Geibel.

Others also took a renewed interest in the idea of a Mendelssohn opera. In 1846 Mendelssohn was approached by both of London’s opera houses – Her Majesty’s Theatre and Covent Garden – with offers of commissions. As usual, Mendelssohn expressed interest while remaining uncommitted in his dealings with both theatres. Benjamin Lumley, the manager of Her Majesty’s, pressed the issue, at first proposing Francesco Maria Piave as a librettist; but later engaging Scribe to write a libretto, which was forwarded to the composer for his consideration.. And in January 1847 Lumley publicly announced that Mendelssohn had agreed to write for his theatre. According to The Times of January 23, the composer had been engaged to "produce an opera expressly composed for Her Majesty’s Theatre, the libretto founded on The Tempest of Shakespeare, written by M. Scribe."

Frederick Beale, the manager at Covent Garden, clipped this announcement from The Times and sent to Mendelssohn, urgently requesting a clarification of the situation. Mendelssohn was astonished – he had made no formal agreement with either theatre – and he was also offended by Lumley’s presumptuous use of his name. He wrote to Lumley, insisting that he could not possibly write an opera for the forthcoming season, and demanding that the impresario desist from any further statements to that effect.

Lumley penned a suave response that was simultaneously flattering and patronizing. (Not for nothing was he the manager of an opera house!) "My dear Sir," he began, "If I did not well know the sensitive organization of genius, your letter would have alarmed me." Continuing in this vein, he expressed complete confidence that Mendelssohn would somehow fulfil his request, and promised that he was prepared to support the project "with every imaginable resource" at his disposal. Mendelssohn was not won over: he underscored his refusal to compose an opera for Lumley by returning Scribe’s libretto. (Years later, Lumley absolved himself of all responsibility for the collapse of the enterprise, writing in his memoirs that the root of the problem was a conflict between the "German and French natures" of the composer and librettist.)

In 1847 Mendelssohn began to compose Die Lorelei, and by August he was able to report to Geibel that the first act had been almost entirely committed to paper. Yet at this time the composer was also struggling with personal grief: his sister Fanny had suddenly died of a stroke in May, and the unexpected loss filled Felix’s mind with morbid thoughts. When the English music critic Henry Chorley visited him and put forward an operatic idea of his own (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale), Mendelssohn replied, "But what is the use of planning anything? I shall not live." Tragically, Mendelssohn’s premonitions were soon borne out: in October he too suffered a stroke. After a short convalescence, he died on November 4.

What do Mendelssohn’s repeated attempts to compose an opera tell us about him as a composer and musician? It’s tempting to conclude that his efforts were doomed from the start because he was simply no "man of the theatre." To be sure, Mendelssohn was not fond of backstage intrigues, overbearing divas or dodgy impresarios. But who would deny the keen theatrical instincts displayed in his Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, composed at the tender age of 17 – or his working out of this youthful inspiration as complete incidental music for Shakespeare’s play, 17 years later? In fact Mendelssohn excelled at composing theatrical music, as is amply demonstrated by his scores to the plays Athalie, Antigone and Oediupus at Colonus. Nor could it be argued that he was in any way incapable of composing large-scale vocal works: his oratorios, St. Paul and Elijah, readily belie that proposition. Indeed, Elijah is so operatic in character that it has been staged in costume.

There were, however, other obstacles that inhibited Mendelssohn’s efforts as an opera composer. To begin, his rigorous childhood education emphasized Bach fugues and Beethoven sonatas, but didn’t place much value on opera. Also, the tepid reception of Die Hochzeit des Camacho seems to have left him wary of composing for the lyric stage: Mendelssohn rarely failed at anything he undertook, and the last thing he wanted was a second operatic flop. And further fueling his ambivalence was his jaundiced view of operatic fashion in the 1830s and 1840s: much of what he saw and heard in European capitals did not impress him. In Paris he reacted to Robert Le Diable (by his distant cousin Giacomo Meyerbeer) with artistic and moral disgust. "If the present epoch exacts this style," he disdainfully remarked, "then I will write oratorios."

Mendelssohn set high standards for himself – and while his ideals probably aided his productivity as a composer of concert music, they became an impediment to his operatic efforts. "Ever since I started composing," he explained in a letter to Devrient, "I have been true to the fundamental principle: not to write a single page just because the great public or a pretty girl wanted it so." He continued: "That makes it difficult, however, because most people, even most poets, do not think of opera anything more than a popular piece." According to Mendelssohn’s code of self-criticism, any opera he wrote would have to achieve a higher artistic stature than was commonly reached on the lyric stage in his era. He aspired to be an operatic reformer – and the goal of composing a better kind of opera became almost a moral imperative. "When I hear new German and foreign operas," he wrote, "then I feel as if I were obliged also to get involved and cast my vote in score."

Would Die Lorelei have succeeded by Mendelssohn’s own standards? Unfortunately, we are left with only a few fragments of the opera Mendelssohn might have composed. (These were published posthumously as his Op. 98, and have occasionally been performed in public: one early English performance took place at London’s Crystal Palace in 1867.) There’s an "Ave Maria" for soprano and women’s chorus, with a bell-like F-natural tolling ominously throughout. Also there’s a Vintner’s Chorus, written in a rustic style, with simple but effective four-part writing over an open fifth "bagpipe" drone. The largest and most elaborate fragment is an extended finale to Act I. This scene, full of tremolos and chromatic passages, owes much to Weber, and also to Mendelssohn’s own "fairy music" in its portrayal of the spirit world. Here, the heroine’s renunciation of love and her oath of vengeance against all men is suggestive of Dvorak’s Rusalka (composed more than half a century later) in its preternatural intensity.

Beyond that, however, not much more can be said. If Mendelssohn’s life had not been cut short at the age of 38, there is every reason to believe that he would have completed Die Lorelei – and if the opera had been a success, the story of Mendelssohn’s relationship with the lyric stage would have been cast in an entirely different light. And given Mendelssohn’s reformist zeal, it’s even possible that if he had achieved prominence as an operatic composer the history of the art form might have been altered. Yet because of his early death, we are left with a frustrating account of fussiness, over-caution and bad luck. Despite his intentions and efforts, Mendelssohn’s name is today included on the list of 19th-century Germanic composers – including Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler – whose music lives on in the concert hall but not the theatre. The history of opera has had to get along without the help of Felix Mendelssohn.

© Copyright Colin Eatock 2009

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