Premiere of a Great Oratorio, Mendelssohn's Elijah
(ABOVE: Mendelssohn, age 26—Frontispiece, F. G. Edwards, The History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio Elijah. London; New York: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1896. Public domain)
IN JUNE, 1845, the Birmingham (England) Music Festival commissioned an oratorio from Felix Mendelssohn. At thirty-six-years old, Mendelssohn was a world-famous composer with most of his best-known works behind him. A child prodigy, he had written a well-received Octet at sixteen and his beloved Overture to Midsummer Night’s Dream at seventeen. (He would later write incidental music to the entire Shakespearean play.) Mendelssohn had also written the oratorio, St. Paul. It was filled with evocative arias and lush choruses. Its success fired him with enthusiasm to write another oratorio.
No sooner was St. Paul performed in 1836 than Mendelssohn asked his librettist, Carl Klingemann, to provide another libretto. Among his suggestions was the prophet Elijah. The following year Mendelssohn visited Klingemann with a sketch of Elijah in hand and urged him to write the libretto. Unwilling to undertake the project, Klingemann returned the sketch by mail.
Ethnically Jewish, although a practicing Lutheran, Mendelssohn found the character of Elijah irresistable. He turned for help to his friend, Julius Schubring, writing him in 1838: “With Elijah, I had actually thought of a proper prophet of the kind we could use today—strong, zealous, occasionally angry and wrathful and dark, in contrast to the hangers-on in our courts and towns and almost throughout the world, and yet borne aloft on angels’ wings.”
The two shared ideas and drafts over a seven year period, and at one point Mendelssohn wrote Schubring, “The personages should act and speak as if they were living beings—for Heaven’s sake let them not be a musical picture, but a real world, such as you find in every chapter of the Old Testament ...” Mendelssohn himself drafted a good deal of the libretto. Thus, when Birmingham commissioned him in 1845, he had a German text to work from.
It took him over a year to draft the musical score. Meanwhile, although Mendelssohn spoke English and knew the English Bible well, he asked another friend, William Bartholomew, to make the English translation. They exchanged many letters with amendments to Elijah's words and music until just two weeks before the first performance; the score had to be printed so the musicians could practice.
On this day, 26 August 1846, the world heard its first performance of Elijah. Mendelssohn conducted the world premiere. The audience recalled Mendelssohn again and again with their applause, most unusual in England at that time. Eight numbers had to be encored, including the popular chorus, “Thanks Be to God.” Along with Handel’s Messiah, Elijah is considered one of the greatest English-language sacred oratorios. Mendelssohn immediately revised it into the version usually performed today.
Two years after Elijah's premiere, Mendelssohn died at age thirty-eight following a series of strokes. His mother and father had died in a similar manner as had his beloved sister Fanny, also a composer, just four months earlier. Mendelssohn was survived by his wife, Cécile, three sons, and two daughters.
—Dan Graves
Exploring Biblical Jordan takes you to the region where Elijah sometimes worked
or read Christian History #95, The Gospel According to J.S. Bach
