Being honored with the Echo Classic (2009) and Professor of the Year (2017) awards, Martin Schmeding is one of the most sought-after international concert organists and organ teachers. Born in 1975, he studied in Hanover, Amsterdam, and Düsseldorf, and among his teachers are Ulrich Bremsteller, Lajos Rovatkay, Hans van Nieuwkoop, Jacques van Oortmerssen, and Jean Boyer. During his studies, he was a prizewinner in many international competitions.
Between 1999 and 2004 Martin Schmeding filled two important posts for church musicians in Germany. In 1999 he was appointed music director at the Neander Church in Düsseldorf. As titular organist at the Kreuzkirche in Dresden, a place with a more than 700-year-old tradition of church music, he worked from 2002 until 2004.
After faculty positions in Hannover, Leipzig, Weimar, and Dresden, he taught as organ professor at the University of Music in Freiburg from 2004–2015. Since autumn 2015 he has served as professor at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” in Leipzig, alongside the directorship of the European Organ Academy. In addition, he is professor of organ at the Royal College of Music in London.
Martin Schmeding has made numerous radio and CD recordings. In 2009, 2017, and 2020 he was awarded the Prize of the German Record Critics. He has written for many publications and has given concerts as a soloist, chamber musician, and with orchestras all over the world, including important festivals.
Martin Schmeding is also active as a competition jury member, guest-lecturer at masterclasses, and he publishes articles and music editions. In 2021 he finished his PhD degree summa cum laude at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden.
Introduction
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) is often portrayed as an innovator and driving force in the musical culture of the nineteenth century, primarily because of several remarkable achievements. Those include his work as a conductor, especially at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, but also throughout Germany and internationally; his initiative to found the first German music academy, the Leipzig Conservatory; and his promotion of historical music, which led to the outstanding revivals of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829 and at Leipzig’s Saint Thomas Church in 1841, as well as to the first printed editions of Bach’s organ works.
Innovation, however, is rarely associated with Mendelssohn’s music, perhaps due to the stubborn persistence of certain prejudices since the writings of Richard Wagner. Mendelssohn’s compositional output for organ is often categorized either as an homage to J. S. Bach (as in Präludien und Fugen für die Orgel/Preludes and Fugues, opus 37) or as a point of departure for a new tendency in organ music that led to “symphonic” works for organ by Franz Liszt, Julius Reubke, and Max Reger. However, in such cases, Mendelssohn’s organ works are regarded as lacking the same degree of significance and intensity as the works they inspired.
Robert Schumann’s perspective, shared in a letter to Mendelssohn on October 22, 1845, offers a fresh lens through which to view Mendelssohn’s work. According to Schumann, Mendelssohn had not merely composed but created something entirely new: a musical genre with its own distinct meaning, architecture, and dramaturgy—the organ sonata. Schumann was thrilled to observe “‘a forward striving everywhere” in “truly poetic new forms perfectly exemplified in every sonata.”1
We shall assert that Mendelssohn’s re-invention of the genre of organ sonata not only introduced novel aspects of organ composition in terms of structure and content, but also made a profound hermeneutical contribution to the ongoing dialogue between theology and music. These works mark the dawn of organ music in the nineteenth century and stand as pioneering ventures that launched an entirely new tendency.
Felix Mendelssohn and the organ
As one of the few central German composers of the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn was trained on the organ and in the strict compositional method established by the Berlin School in the succession of the style of J. S. Bach. Starting in late 1820, Mendelssohn received lessons from August Wilhelm Bach, titular organist of the Marienkirche in Berlin, on the organ built by Gottfried Silbermann pupil Joachim Wagner and modified “orchestrally” according to Abbé Vogler’s system of simplification. Mendelssohn was also taught composition by Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Berlin Singakademie and former pupil of Carl Friedrich Fasch. Zelter closely followed J. S. Bach’s systematic method, which had been handed down by Bach’s pupil Johann Friedrich Fasch and his son. The method foresaw a comprehensive grounding in thoroughbass, three- and four-part chorales, double counterpoint, canon, and fugue. Indeed, by examining the young Mendelssohn’s exercise notebook, we can ascertain that all those steps were part of his musical training.
Moreover, touring Europe as a child prodigy, Mendelssohn also had the opportunity to play many different organs, as attested in letters to his family. One of his own drawings shows him with a group of friends at the organ of the Heiliggeistkirche in Heidelberg (Example 1).
Mendelssohn was particularly interested in grave, mellow sonorities and sweetness of tone. In a letter to Zelter, he praised the sound of the organ built by Aloys Mooser in Bulle, Switzerland: “I find particular beauty in the mellow stops, as well as in the full Organo Pleno.”2 In contrast, he did not hesitate to mock or deride certain instruments or performance styles that did not meet his criterion. For instance, he wrote that the organs in post-revolutionary Paris sounded “like a full choir of old wives”3 and that the organists in Italian churches played too operatically. (“Such nonsense is hard to bear!”4)
Mendelssohn loved to improvise, and improvisation was central to his approach to organ composition. In a letter to his sister Fanny, he enthusiastically recounted an experience in the Swiss abbey of Engelberg:
This afternoon I was once more asked to play alone for the monks. They gave me the most beautiful themes in the world to improvise upon, including the Credo. In the latter case, today I managed to invent a fantasia—the first of this kind in my life. Oh! I would so much have loved to write it out in full, but I only remember how it went in general. So at this point I beg your permission to copy down a passage I don’t want to forget, so that I can pass it on to you. . . . Toward the end, the semiquavers sounded fantastic: I added arpeggios in G minor across the entire organ keyboard, under which I added the theme in long note values in the pedal, leading to a cadence on A. The note A then became a pedal point on which I played a new series of arpeggios; at that moment, I had the idea of playing the arpeggios with the left hand alone. This, in turn, allowed me to reinstate the Credo theme starting on A, more or less as follows [Example 2].
The arpeggios stopped on a final note; then there was a rest, after which I concluded the fantasia. I wish, Fanny, that you could have heard it! I think you would have liked it.5
This passage’s resemblance to the last variation in Mendelssohn’s sixth organ sonata is obvious, offering proof of the close relationship between improvisation and composition in his output for organ.
Reports of Mendelssohn’s recitals in Germany are somewhat rare; on the other hand, we know that his multiple concert appearances during his tour of England in 1829 were met with widespread enthusiasm. Through that tour, Mendelssohn developed a series of ongoing friendly contacts with organists, audiences, and publishers—contacts that in turn would lead to the composition of the organ sonatas. In 1837, for instance, he wrote a letter to his wife, Cécile, recounting an acclaimed recital he gave at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London:
Early in the morning, I wrote you my previous letter, and then I went to play the organ. About a thousand people had congregated; the church was full to the brim, and I could barely make it through the crowd to the organ bench. . . . I played for a long time, and this was met with a tumultuous reaction. Everyone was crowding around me and wanting to shake my hand, as only people in England do: you see hands coming at you from all sides, and so many people are calling you, you don’t know where to turn.6
In Mendelssohn’s musical notebook, we find a theme he sketched out for an improvisation as part of an organ recital given at Saint Paul’s. Once again, the theme bears an astonishing resemblance to another later work, Prelude in C Minor, opus 37, number 1 (Example 3).
Mendelssohn acquired such fame that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert repeatedly invited him to perform private auditions for them. The Queen enthusiastically recalled, “We gave him two [themes], Rule Britannia and the Austrian national anthem. He began immediately, and really, I have never heard anything so beautiful.”7
Although Mendelssohn went on writing and sketching organ works for the rest of his life, only two cycles were published. Dedicated to Mendelssohn’s friend Thomas Attwood, the titular organist at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Three Preludes and Fugues for organ, opus 37, are closely related to the Six Preludes and Fugues for piano, opus 35, and to Paulus, opus 36, Mendelssohn’s first oratorio. Later, he wrote the Six Organ Sonatas, opus 65, and the latter work’s relationship with England is even more thorough and direct.
The origin of the six sonatas
As a result of his contacts with British music life in general and the organ scene in particular, Mendelssohn had received his first editing commissions. Thus in 1844, he prepared and anthologized a series of organ works by J. S. Bach (forty-four chorale preludes from the Orgelbüchlein and fifteen of the Leipzig chorale arrangements, along with partitas, BWV 766 and 768, which were published in 1845 and 1846 by Coventry & Hollier). Immediately afterward, the same publishers commissioned Mendelssohn to compose a series of organ works they intended to publish as voluntaries.
This new project, however, raised a series of problems for Mendelssohn, which in turn oriented him in an entirely different, innovative direction. In July 1844, he wrote to his sister Fanny:
Moreover, I am making many drawings and composing even more (by the way: please go find the organ piece in A Major I composed for your wedding and which I wrote down in Wales; send it to me immediately with the coach postal service to Frankfurt). . . . For the unfortunate sake of mere mammon, I have promised an English publisher to deliver an entire volume of organ pieces. As I compose one after the other, I suddenly recall the one I wrote for you back then.8
Thus, although Mendelssohn was highly productive, writing a substantial number of diverse organ studies between July and September, he seems to have regarded the task as a mere fulfillment of duty. Nevertheless, starting in August, he began to have some cyclical ideas that inspired him to develop more complex forms based on the individual études. He presented the idea to Coventry in a letter dated August 29, 1844:
I have also been very busy about the organ pieces, which you wanted me to write, and they are nearly finished. I would like to call them 3 Sonatas for the Organ instead of Voluntaries. Tell me if you like this title as well; if not, I think the name of Voluntaries will suit the pieces also, the more I do not know what it means precisely.9
In the meantime, another publisher had sent Mendelssohn the description of a typical voluntary for organ: “Slow introduction: 1 page—2nd movement introducing solo stops: 2 pages—Fugue: 3 pages.”10
However, Mendelssohn seems to have started to focus on the idea of composing organ sonatas, especially concerning their content and the connection to the instrument. He wrote to his friend Karl Klingemann that these were “pieces in which I believe I have dealt with the instrument differently and better than before.”11
On November 14, he sent twelve studies as a gift to Fanny—eventually to compensate for the work in A major he never finished writing for her wedding. The subsequent period shows how detailed and meticulous Mendelssohn was in compiling and developing the sonatas until the cycle was completed in April 1845. Mendelssohn’s Opus 65, the six organ sonatas, emerged in the following chronological succession:
? 1830 Chorale prelude “Nimm von uns, Herr” E minor, Variation 1 (D minor), Sonata VI
March 8, 1831 Postlude in D major second movement (C Major), Sonata II
July 14, 1839 Fuga in C major third movement, Sonata II
July 21, 1844 Andante (Trio) in F major July 22 Allegretto in D minor second movement (B minor), Sonata V
July 23 Andante+Var. in D major July 25 Allegro in D minor (like Sonata V, first movement)
August 9 Con moto maestoso in A major, first movement, Sonata III
August 16 Andante. Con moto in A major, second movement, Sonata III
August 18 Allegro vivace in F major fourth movement, Sonata I
September 9 Allegro in D major third movement, Sonata V
September 9 Andante in B minor second movement, Sonata V
September 10 Chorale in A-flat major November 14 Studies (dedicated to Fanny)
December 19 Fuga in C major third movement, Sonata II
December 19 Adagio in A-flat major second movement, Sonata I
December 19 Chorale in D major first movement, Sonata V
December 21 Grave–Andante con moto in C minor, first movement, Sonata II
December 21 Allegro maestoso in C major December 28 Allegro moderato e grave in F minor, first movement, Sonata I
December 28 Andante in F major third movement, Sonata IV
December 31 Allegro in B-flat major January 2, 1845 Allegro con brio in B-flat major, first movement, Sonata IV
January 2 Andante alla Marcia in B-flat major, second movement, Sonata IV
January 2 Moderato in C major second movement, Sonata II
January 26 Chorale in D minor first movement, Sonata VI
January 26 Andante in D major third movement, Sonata VI
January 27 Fuga in D minor second movement, Sonata VI
April 2 Fuga in B-flat major fourth movement, Sonata IV
? Andante Recitativo in F minor, third movement, Sonata I
The six sonatas emerged in a series of preparatory stages on several different levels. For instance, in the preliminary version of the second movement of Sonata IV, Mendelssohn switched the meter from alla breve to common time (4/4), halving the note values and adding legato slurs. This altered the music’s character; Mendelssohn correspondingly changed the title from “Andante alla Marcia” to “Andante religioso” (Examples 4a and 4b).
The middle movement of Sonata V emerged in different two phases. First, Mendelssohn transposed an earlier postlude in D major to C major, making minor melodic adjustments. In the final stage, he introduced dotted rhythms and nuanced the phrasing. The movement thus became more energetic, which in turn justified changing the movement marking from “Moderato” to “Allegro maestoso e vivace” (Examples 5a, 5b, and 5c).
We can tell how sensitive and meticulous Mendelssohn’s approach to composition was by examining the three successive versions of the first variation on Vater unser im Himmelreich, initially a chorale arrangement of Nimm von uns, Herr. In this case, he only modified minimal aspects of articulation and pedal phrasing to achieve a more harmonious, homogeneous whole (Examples 6a, 6b, and 6c).
Finally, on April 10, 1845, Mendelssohn wrote to the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig:
I have now finished composing the work for organ: it has become considerably more extended than I had initially thought. It now consists of six sonatas in which I have attempted to present my manner of conceiving music for the organ and treating it as an instrument.12
Coventry & Hollier also soon received news that Mendelssohn had finished composing the new work.
Dear Sir, I beg you will let me know whether a letter which I wrote to you some weeks since has reached you or not. It contained the communication that I had written a kind of Organ-School in Six Sonatas for that instrument, and the question whether you would like to have the whole work or only one half of it. I beg you will let me have an immediate answer.13
Coventry immediately adopted the idea of an “Organ-School,” which was undoubtedly suitable for sales purposes. Mendelssohn attempted in vain to correct their choice of title, as his intentions were less pedagogical and more related to the form of the organ sonata per se (Examples 7a and 7b).
On September 15, 1845, Mendelssohn’s Six Organ Sonatas appeared as his Opus 65 simultaneously in four territories: London (Coventry & Hollier), Germany (Breitkopf & Härtel), Paris (Maurice Schlesinger), and Milan (Ricordi).
“New forms”
To grasp what was so unique and innovative about Mendelssohn’s organ sonatas, one needs to take stock of the situation of the sonata genre in the mid-1800s. Beethoven’s late piano sonatas had stretched the “classical” form to its limits and ultimately disintegrated it. Subsequent composers experimented with free-recitative elements or created works that were frequently in one movement, resembling fantasias, e.g., Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s sonatas composed with improvisational elements or Franz Liszt’s Fantasia quasi Sonata.
What conditions did Mendelssohn encounter in the genre of organ sonata in his day?
1) In organ music, there had never been a long-lasting sonata tradition. J. S. Bach’s trio sonatas had been a unique summit of the art of transposing a chamber music form to a solo instrument, and he had had few imitators. The “sonatas” by Bach’s sons were written for manuals only, thus conceived for any kind of keyboard instrument and not specifically for organ.
2) The organ had specific instrumental features. Until Mendelssohn’s time, sonorities on the organ were essentially conceived as static, which stands in contrast with the dynamic progression associated with sonata form. He thus had to introduce and develop innovative aspects in the area of instrumental technique.
3) The organ tends to function as a “church” instrument. As a baptized Protestant from a family of Jewish origin, brought up in strict Lutheran tradition, Mendelssohn had already dealt intensely with theological issues. Sonatas for a “church” instrument necessarily required and implied a special approach to religious aspects, including the constructive use of chorale elements.
In each of these sonatas, Mendelssohn tried a different approach to the traditional sonata genre and the possibility of transferring the genre’s formal aspects to the organ’s instrumental potential and liturgical context.
The “Classical” sonata: Number IV
The fourth sonata is the one in which Mendelssohn most directly incorporates elements of the traditional sonata genre. A first sonata movement is usually determined by a contrast between two themes, generating a dynamism with potential for further thematic development. The fourth sonata’s first movement, “Allegro con brio,” also draws its energy from that principal feature; however, Mendelssohn adapts it to the timbre possibilities of the organ. The main theme’s pianistic arpeggios are underpinned by a pedal point, which provides grounding and continuity in terms of sonority. Organs in the first half of the nineteenth century were not yet technically capable of producing abrupt changes in dynamics; neither were such changes foreseen in performance and repertoire. Thus, instead of leading into a soft, lyrical second theme, Mendelssohn introduces a rhythmic contrast in the form of a dotted second theme. He chooses the parallel minor instead of the usual dominant key for such a theme, giving it a distinctive character. As the instrument’s inherent lack of dynamic contrast would make a complete, bar-by-bar reprise of both thematic sections seem too long, Mendelssohn chooses to directly combine the two themes simultaneously in the main key at the moment where the reprise begins, thus skillfully creating a new kind of formal equilibrium by shortening the last section (Examples 9a, 9b, and 9c).
While Mendelssohn had already worked extensively on a detailed version of the second movement, he presents a unique, personal version of a second, slow movement featuring a highly distinctive and individual approach to the traditional periodicity of the ABA form. His concept includes several unexpected two-bar extensions of the usual eight-bar symmetry, a constant alternation between one- and two-bar dialogue structures, and a formally motivated change of direction of sequence structures (Example 10).
The most skillful idea in the third movement is not the choice of tempo or short articulation, but rather a frequently unexpected manner of phrasing capable of combining divergent elements or introducing unforeseen caesuras (Example 11).
The fourth sonata is the one on which Mendelssohn worked the longest. This can be seen in the significant differences between the first and the final version of the fugue theme. Here, he created a kind of theme that is more appropriate for the organ, with sixteenth-note runs typical of the organ repertoire of the day (Examples 12a and 12b).
The “overture” sonata: Number III
Early on, Mendelssohn had started experimenting with expanding the organ’s dynamic possibilities in his improvisations. Thus in 1823, in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), he witnessed an audition given by that town’s titular organist, Friedrich Wilhelm Berner. “Standing beside him, an altar boy pulled out or pushed in the stops that Berner indicated with a short finger tap amid his performance.”14 Only five years later, in October 1828, Mendelssohn wrote a letter from Brandenburg detailing the way he had started to change registrations himself without an assistant:
Then I fantasized on the chorale Christe, du Lamm. First, I played it with flute stops and then increased the volume (as I registered myself since the organist was absent). Toward the end, I managed to decrease in order to conclude with the soft chorale.15
This same passage could serve as a reasonably accurate description of the succession of musical events in the third organ sonata, apart from the outer framework in organo pleno provided by the wedding march he had started to write for his sister Fanny. Once a dramatic progression has concluded in the first movement, the only appropriate continuation is a “song without words” to tranquilize the listeners or inspire them to contemplative “prayer” (Gebet).
In terms of structure and content, this sonata’s first movement is strongly reminiscent of the overture to Mendelssohn’s oratorio Paulus. In the latter case, the chorale Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (in A major) serves as an outer formal framework for a fugue in the parallel minor key, featuring the characteristic theme intervals of the second and the diminished seventh; here, in the third sonata, the wedding march on two manuals (once again in A major) serves as an outer framework around a fugue in A minor on the “de profundis” chorale Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir. Here, the implicit theological background is the concept of redemption: from darkness to light (Example 13).
The chorale is incorporated in a dramatic progression, providing the sonata with a theological background that transcends the purely technical circumstances usually associated with crescendo and accelerando in a symphonic overture. This close relationship with theology can also be observed in the similarity of the intervals in this sonata’s main theme with the intervals of the overture of the oratorio Elijah, on which Mendelssohn was working at the same time. The latter led into the chorus’s cry: “Help us, O Lord!” (Examples 14a and 14b).
To be continued.
Notes
1. Andreas Schroeder, “Mendelssohn und die Orgel,” Ars Organi 57/03 (2009), pages 154–161.
2. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Sämtliche Briefe, Band 1 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017), page 98.
3. Mendelssohn, Band 2, page 469.
4. Mendelssohn, Band 2, page 224.
5. Mendelssohn, Band 2, page 372.
6. Mendelssohn, Band 5, page 337.
7. George R. Marek, Gentle Genius: The Story of Felix Mendelssohn (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1972), page 293.
8. Mendelssohn, Band 10, pages 229–230.
9. Mendelssohn, Band 10, page 247.
10. Peter Ward Jones, “Mendelssohn and his English Publishers,” Mendelssohn Studies, ed. R. Larry Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), page 253.
11. Mendelssohn, Band 10, pages 248–249.
12. Mendelssohn, Band 10, page 22.
13. Mendelssohn, Band 10, page 456.
14. Mendelssohn, Band 1, page 103.
15. Mendelssohn, Band 1, page 254.
