Synthesis before the Catastrophe – Hommage à Joachim Mendelson

“I relay to you the information from Mr. Joachim Mendelssohn (the composer of the Octet), not to be confused with Felix Mendelssohn, that he is willing to bear the costs for the performance, in the hope that they do not exceed the sum of 2000 Francs that he planned for this purpose.” Finding information on the life and works of Joachim Mendelson is akin to the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. The only documents concerning his existence available at the time this text was written – aside from the five works issued by the French music publisher Max Eschig, of which four are presented here in first recordings¹ – are a photo and a biographical note of a few lines in the publisher’s archive,² a short entry in Issachar Fater’s encyclopedia Jewish Music in Poland between the Two World Wars,³ and several passages in the correspondence between Simon Laks and Nadia Boulanger from late 1929, in which the introductory quote is to be found. Joachim Mendelson,⁴ or Mendelssohn, as he apparently still wrote it at the time of his arrival in Paris in 1929, was born in Warsaw in 1897. Nothing is known about his family background. The quoted passage from Laks’s letter suggests that Mendelson came from secure financial circumstances, since covering the costs of an octet performance at the S.M.I.⁵ would certainly not have been possible for many of the young Polish composers who had joined the “Association des Jeunes Musiciens polonais,” which had been founded in Paris in 1927. Mendelson apparently suffered from a condition associated with dwarfism, similar to that which had afflicted Toulouse-Lautrec. It is not clear whether the illness, which Laks mentioned in his letter as the reason why Mendelson was not able to conduct his own business dealings, had anything to do with this handicap. Apparently language also played a role. Mendelson, who had moved to Paris from Berlin, seems not (yet) to have been fluent in French, and was presumably exactly for this reason dependent on the help of colleagues such as Laks, who occupied a central position in the administration of the Association. Not only the publisher’s information, but also the dedications of Mendelson’s published works give evidence of his quick assimilation in Parisian musical life: the Quatour Roth, the French counterpart of the Kolisch Quartet, which devoted itself especially to the contemporary repertoire, played Mendelson’s First String Quartet, composed in the 1920s, repeatedly and also on tour; Alexandre Tansman, alongside Szymanowski, Paderewski, and Rubinstein, one of the most important supporters of the Association and who numbered among the most successful European musical personalities at the end of the 1920s, was the dedicatee of the Violin Sonata;⁶ the Irish-American composer Swan Hennessy, who was likewise living in Paris and also had his works published by Eschig, was the dedicatee of the Chamber Symphony. In 1935 Mendelson accepted a position as lecturer in music theory and harmony at the Warsaw Academy of Music, where he himself had studied with Henryk Opieński and Felician Szopsky. Fater additionally mentions Mendelson’s engagement in the Jewish Music Society in Warsaw. With the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, where Mendelson was killed in 1943, all his personal documents and manuscripts were lost. With the systematic burning of Warsaw following the uprising in 1944, anything that might have served as a reminder of the personal life of this wonderful musician before 1939 was destroyed. What remains are the five works of outstanding quality published in France, works that compare favorably with the compositions of established composers of the first half of the twentieth century.

Since the sources concerning the genesis of the works documented in world-premiere recordings on this CD are probably irretrievably lost,⁷ a precise dating is not possible: the publication dates on the scores are not necessarily identical with the dates of composition. Yet, stylistic parallels between the works as well as differences in comparison to the String Quartet, which was written already in the mid 1920s, make a time of composition close to the date of publication seem plausible.

Whoever encounters Mendelson’s music for the first time will initially have orientation problems, since they defy any kind of stereotype classification. Upon closer investigation, an intimate knowledge of the most varied stylistic tendencies of the 1930s in Europe becomes apparent. The period of study in Berlin left stronger traces in his work than, for example, in that of Jerzy Fitelberg, who, in spite of his studies in Schreker’s master class, moved from the very beginning in the direction of Stravinsky.⁸ On the contrary, not only is the encounter with Schreker evident in the works by Mendelson documented here, but also an intensive occupation with Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg, Weill, and Ravel. Although created in a neoclassical environment, the present works are far removed from all neoclassical and neo-Baroque stereotypes and make a rather strange impression in the context of the Stravinsky-like néoclassicisme of the “Paris school” of the Jeunes Musiciens Polonais. Although neoclassical strategies, such as the recourse to Classical and Baroque forms and compositional techniques, and the integration of folkloristic elements, can be found, they do not, however, appear in the manner of a conformist use of long-since established anti-impressionistic and anti-expressionistic postulates of the 1920s. Mendelson finds his way to a classicism of synthesis that can integrate the refinement of French “impressionism” as well as Mahler’s Weltschmerz and Strauss’s emphatic style, the austere, rhythmically pointed inflection of the “New Objectivity” as well as the dance-like soulfulness of Slavic provenance. Yet, how does Mendelson prevent his musical cosmos, which lives from the strongest contrasts, from falling apart?

The secret of this style presumably lies in its theatrical origin. The more familiar one becomes with the works, the clearer their musical characters emerge as protagonists of an imaginary, dance-pantomime theater in which – like on Strauss/Hofmannsthal’s Naxos – jocular prelude and serious epilogue flow into one another. Is it a harlequinade in which the commedia dell’arte figures with Ensor’s masks have a bizarre rendezvous? Or are they Shakespearian characters that take shape before our mind’s eye? As if with a breakneck jump crowned by a somersault onto the stage, the first violins, encouraged by the percussion, open the first movement of the Second Symphony. We see Puck bounding about with dance-like élan on the boards that mean the world, a world that is just about to come apart at the seams. Is it perhaps a twentieth-century Mendelssohn who raises the curtain on a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in whose forest lost lovers, comical journeymen, and elemental spirits romp about? As in Shakespeare’s nocturne, everything flows together also in Mendelson: the ridiculous and the sublime, the bizarre and the delicate, the rogue and the mystery. And Mendelson, too, allows his journeymen a “grand finale” at the end. Of course, not a bergamasque, but rather a ravishing “Tempo alla Mazurka,” possibly the last music that he composed as a free man.

After the occupation of Poland by the Germans, any form of public, professional cultural activity was forbidden, and the playing of music with national background punished as an act of sabotage. Hitler’s middle-term goal was not only the extermination of Poland’s Jewish civilian population, but also the effacement of the Polish nation’s cultural identity with the aim of creating a people of slaves subordinate to a Germanic master race. The fate of Mendelson, of whose existence at least the five completed compositions give evidence, is a dramatic example of the incomprehensible devastations that five years of German terror wreaked in Poland and about which to the present day – at least with regard to musical history – hardly any attempt has been made to come to terms with.

I would like to thank the musicians who came together for this homage from the three countries that mark the axis of Mendelson’s life (Poland, Germany, and France); Małgorzata Małaszko, the director of the Second Program of Polskie Radio, Bogna Kowalska, the director of the Polish Radio Orchestra as well as Łukasz Borowicz, chief conductor and artistic director of the Polish Radio Orchestra in Warsaw for their continuing support over many years; Nelly Quérol from Universal Music for help in making available the performance material; the family of Mendelson’s brother Stanislas, in particular Marion Mendelsohn, for providing a photo of the composer as well as for confirming the biographical dates and, last but not least, Gérald Hugon, former editor at the Max Eschig Publishing House, who acquainted me with Mendelson’s works at an unforgettable meeting in Paris on 11 September 2001, and without whose encouragement this production would not have come into being.