Premiere of a Great Oratorio, Mendelssohn's Elijah
Felix Mendelssohn with his beloved sister Fanny.
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 already written another oratorio, St. Paul, which was produced in 1836. It was filled with evocative arias and lush choruses.
Ethnically Jewish, Mendelssohn was Lutheran by upbringing and practice. His father, the son of Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, had converted to Christianity. Felix's full baptismal name was Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. With the Birmingham contract in hand, his Jewish heritage asserted itself.
He had begun work several years earlier on a libretto (text) about Elijah, and wrote, “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.” Unable to persuade his librettist Klingemann to provide him the text he needed, he turned to another, Julius Schubring.
The two shared ideas 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.
It took him over a year to bring the composition to completion. Although Mendelssohn spoke English and knew the English Bible well, he asked another friend, William Bartholomew, to make the English translation.
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 later, 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 left a wife, Cécile, three sons, and two daughters.
—Dan Graves
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Exploring Biblical Jordan takes you to the region where Elijah sometimes worked
or read Christian History #95, The Gospel According to J.S. Bach
