Selected letters of Mendelssohn/Letter 27
TO THE MUSICAL DIRECTOR, JULIUS RIETZ, DÜSSELDORF.
Dear Rietz,—Yesterday evening we performed your overture to Hero and Leander and also the battle-song; both met with general acclamation, and with the unanimous approval of musicians and public. During the rehearsal, when we reached the passage in D major at the end of the overture, I saw already smiling faces and nodding heads among the players, which pleases me much when the piece is yours. They were all greatly struck with it, and the audience, who sat yesterday still as mice and without a murmur, broke out at the end in the most vigorous applause, and abundantly confirmed their judgment.
Both rehearsals and performance have afforded me great satisfaction; there is something so genuinely artistic, so really musical in your management of the orchestra, that I felt at home from the first bar, and it riveted my interest till the last.
But since you insist on my putting on my critical spectacles, I may say that both pieces suggested to me one desire, namely, that you would write much and continuously. My reason I need not give, at least the chief one; that lies on the surface. But there is another. Especially in the overture there is apparent to me a certain tendency which I am only too well acquainted with, for, as I believe, it ruined my own Reformation symphony, and which can yet be unfailingly overcome by repeated and varied composition. Just as the French attempt to make their ideas appear elevated and interesting by much tormenting and juggling with them, so, I believe, a natural distaste for this sort of thing may lead one to the opposite extreme of complete timidity at everything piquant and flashing, so that, in the end, the bare musical idea lacks boldness and interest. Leanness takes the place of corruption; it is the contrast of the Jesuit churches sparkling with tinsel to the four white walls of the Calvinists; true piety may be in either, but the true path is between them. Heavens! excuse my sermonising tone, but how is one to explain one’s meaning on such matters? The leading ideas both in your overture and in my Reformation symphony, which, I think, resemble each other precisely in this, are interesting rather for what they signify, than simply in themselves. Naturally, I don’t mean they should be exclusively the latter, for that would bring us back to the French style, but neither should they be the former alone, for the two should be welded together and interpenetrate each other.
To give a theme real musical interest in and for itself, as you can do it down to every second hautboy and trumpet in your instrumentation, that, I take it, is the chief point to concern oneself with. In your next works I look to see you steer a clear course in this direction, and that without your admirable command of outline, or your masterly control of instruments, etc., in detail, suffering in the least from an increased polish or sharpness of musical ideas. And as ideas are not things to polish or to sharpen, but to be taken and used as they come, and as God sends them, so labour is the single thing that remains to desiderate in an artist like yourself and in creative work like yours; only the direction in which it is applied may here and there be a point of discussion……