sep 1, 1836 - Paulus

Description:

Oratorio about St. Paul.

Paulus shows Mendelssohn's extraordinary activities as conductor, advocate, civic musician, and religion composer. The St. Matthew Passion performances seven years earlier had marked a watershed in the growth of German choral music. Hundreds of German oratorios were composed for summer choral festivals that drew large audiences. In keeping with the nature of the venue, festival oratorios nominally followed the Handelian rather than the Bachian model: secular works on (usually) sacred themes, rather than actual service music.

An important aspect of many of the newly written oratorios, by composers including Carl Loewe and Ferdinand Hiller, is the way they managed to crossbreed a Bachian element in to the Handelian mold. Most of them incorporated traditional German-language chorales, which retained the function that Martin Luther had originally valued: a sense of community. The Lutheran repertory of chorales was considered the common property of all Germans, even by composers, like Loewe, who were themselves devout Catholics. A religious repertory of chorales was considered the common property of all Germans, even by composers, like Loewe, who were themselves devout Catholics. A religious repertory was in effect co-opted in the name of a nation. This was striking testimony to the ascendancy of the national--and eventually the nationalist--ideal and its transformative power in post-Napoleonic Europe. Now nation trumped even religion as a definer of human community, and the chorale became for all intents and purposes a brand of spiritual folklore--Volkstumlichkeit made holy.

In Paulus, we can see the chorale in its new cultural context. We can also gain a further perspective on the relationship between religious and national culture in Germany asmediated by the oratorio, since the composer was by birth neither a Protestant nor a Catholic but a Jew. The plot of the oratorio, assembled from scripture by the composer with some assistance from others, concerned the career of the Apostle Paul of Tarsus, born a Jew, who, after an early career as a persecutor of Jewish heretics, received a divine revelation on the road to Damascus and devoted the rest of his life to preaching the Gospel. (We saw a much earlier setting of this story in Chapter 8 with Heinrich Schutz's Saul Saul, was verfolgst du mich?)

Felix was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated Jewish philosopher and apostle of the Enlightenment. Yet despite descent from what might be called the German-Jewish aristocracy, the composer's father, Abraham Mendelssohn, a banker, had his children baptized in 1816 to facilitate their assimilation as "emancipated Jews"--Jews who enjoyed full civil rights--into German Society. (Abraham added the Christian surname BArtholdy to the family name; the composer is often called Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, which is the way he usually identified himself.) Mendelssohn's oratorio could thus be viewed as an allegory not only of the composer's own career but of his family history as well.

This was not the first time chorales had played a symbolic role in a work by Mendelssohn. In 1829, right after his epochal performance of the St. Matthew Passion, he had accepted a commission for a symphony, now known as the "Reformation," meant to be performeed the next year in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, which marked the official beginning of German Protestantism as a genuine "-ism." Traditional Lutheran music figures various parts of the Reformation Symphony, which ends with an impressive chorale fantasia on Luther's hymn "Ein ' feste Burg" (A Mighty Fortress). By Mendelssohn's time, chorales had become increasingly common in secular instrumental pieces where they sometimes appear at a culminating moment, such as in the finale of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 66. As teh chorale became more common in instrumental music, composers tended to use not famous existing melodies but instead the generic musical textures and gestures of chorale writing. One can therefore go searching a very long time for a source tune before realizing that hte composer invented it. If composers could manufacture their own folk songs, why not their own chorales as well?
The chief chorale in POaulus i "Wachet auf, ruf tuns die Stimme" on which JS Bach did BWV 140. It was a perceptive choice for an oratorio about receiving God's call and spreading God's truth. The presence o the chorale melody is felt from teh beginning as the oeverture is, in effect, a prelude and fugue for a traditional brass-heavy festival orchestra.

The last chorale setting in Paulus is the most significant both symbolically and musically. Here Paul, having found his true calling, addressed the Heathen, who have just mistaken him and his miracle-performing companion, Barnabas, for the gods Jupiter and Mercury. He rebukles them for their idolatry, preaching that "God does not reside in temples made by human hands." Instead, he exhorts them, "You yourselves are God's temple, and the Spirit of God dwells in you." These words are then illustrated by Mendelssohn in a remarkable exchange between St. Paul and the chorus. Paul sings, "But our God is in heavenl he creates all according to his will" to a melody that is not a chorale but a simple tune of a type that can be plausibly transferred to a crowd of heathen "folks." dWhen they take up the refrain , however, the second sopranos sing the chorale melody "Wir glauben all an einen Gott", the tune to which Luther's translation of the Nicene Creed had been sung since the earliest Lutheran hymnbooks. The whole first verse of the Lutheran creed passes in review, enshrined in an oratorio given its first performance before an audience largely made up of Catholics, to consecrate an ideal of national religious union. This vividly demonstrates the link that German Romanticism had forged among langauge, folk, and "spirit" in the name of Nation. Through his ostensibly sacred work, Mendelssohn emerges as perhaps the nineteenth century's most important and successful civic musician.

Added to timeline:

Date: