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There was a splendid choir of nearly four hundred voices conducted by Zelter, at the Singakademie; if he would only lend his chorus to give a trial performance, under Mendelssohn's conducting, how splendid that would be! But Felix knew that Zelter had no faith in the public taking any interest in Bach, so there was no use asking.
But at that time and in that place not many were the books, outside the Talmud, accessible to a lad eager for learning, the only ones available being such as the Josippon, Zemah David, and Sheërit Yisraël on Jewish History, the Sefer ha-Berit, and a Hebrew translation of Mendelssohn's Phaedon on general philosophy.
The careless and indifferent manner in which he interpreted a Triple Concerto by Sebastian Bach positively astounded me. In the tempo di minuetto of the Eighth Symphony of Beethoven, I found that Hiller's rendering was even more astonishing than Reissiger's and Mendelssohn's.
Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelssohn's first studies; but even in his boyhood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits, which affected his life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, he caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native sagacity was already clearing up the surrounding darkness.
And the woman of the new generation no less apostate, Henrietta Herz bringing beautiful Jewesses under the fascination of brilliant Germans and the romantic movement, so that Mendelssohn's own daughter, Dorothea, had left her husband and children to live with Schlegel, and the immemorial chastity of the Jewess was undermined.
It was mainly through the endeavors of Dubno that Mendelssohn's Pentateuch, later regarded with suspicion, was everywhere bought and studied eagerly. But Maimon was doomed to suffer abroad even more than at home. He was one of those unfortunates whose sufferings are regarded as well-deserved. His exceptional ability was never to develop to its fullest capacity.
Now there's all the difference in the world between that sort of put-on culture and culture in the grain, isn't there? You may train up a grocer's son to read Dante, and to play Mendelssohn's Lieder, and to admire Fra Angelico; but you can't train him up to wear these things lightly and gracefully upon him as you and I do, who come by them naturally. WE are born to the sphere; HE rises to it.
Publicly I have heard Huber, the German opera, and Mendelssohn's "St. Paul," a rich, melodious oratorio, squeezing the utmost drop from the power of the orchestra, and uniform at a point of the most luminous delicacy, refinement, and grace.
And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer's "King of Heaven," and Mendelssohn's "O Rest in the Lord." When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all carefully wrapped, back into his room. I lingered with him while he rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.
To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saëns may be another example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of waxy coldness from which the amiable Félix was after all saved.
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