Mendelssohn (1809-47) - Overture: Ruy Blas
It's always
nice to discover a morsel of mere mortal lurking within a great composer,
because then we mere mortals can better relate to his humanity. Mendelssohn,
it seems, was just as prone as anyone to getting nettled. In 1839,
the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund commissioned this overture and a song
for a performance in Germany of Victor Hugo's play of 1838. Feeling a bit
lazy (more mortality!), he wrote the song but couldn't really be bothered
with the overture. The Fund wrote to express their thanks for the song,
regretting that he had not managed to produce the overture, hoping that
he might be able to do so the next year after longer notice. Whether it
was a deliberate diplomatic ploy by the Fund is open to conjecture, but
it had what can be construed as the desired effect: Mendelssohn was duly
nettled by the implication that he wasn't up to it, and rattled off the
overture in a mere three days. Moreover, according to W. A. Chislett, he
“succeeded admirably in depicting in music the mixture of chicanery, burning
ambition and love, which are the principal ingredients of Hugo’s drama”.
As one
who's never harboured a “burning ambition” to study Hugo, I can't argue,
but I can easily imagine “burning ambition” in the forbidding wind declamation
that opens the overture, as I can “chicanery” in the nervous twitching
of the first subject (presaged in the introduction) and “love” in the mellifluous
tones of the second. Two things in particular are striking. Firstly, that
“declamation” returns twice, not (as you might expect) to announce the
development and recapitulation, but to bridge between the two subjects,
deliberately blurring the outline of the sonata-form. Secondly, the two
subjects, which are already similarly structured, tend to “converge”, a
further blurring giving us not so much a “mixture”, but more a “compound”,
and a very potent chemistry: the refinement of Mendelssohn steering dangerously
close to the turbulent waters of Berlioz.
.
© Paul Serotsky
29, Carr Street,
Kamo,
Whangarei 0101,
Northland,
New Zealand
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