Ill Op. 28, this was one of the few large-scale piano works Felix published.
In
Implausibly enough, given his full social calendar, Felix found time for
creative work. First, he acquainted Moscheles and Klingemann with re­
cent compositions, among them a new cantata in A minor, VVer nur den
lichen Gott Idfit walten (based on the seventeenth-century chorale by
Georg Neumark), which Klingemann found pale and almost sentimen­
tal.'* No dated autograph survives, but the cantata presumably stems
from the early months of 1829; in July, Felix gave a manuscript copy to
Charles Neate.** Its four movements include a homophonic setting of
the chorale; a polyphonic chorus with the melody placed as a cantus-
firmus in the bass; a freely composed Andante for soprano solo (w’hich
Fanny found “overly simple,” even “childish”);* and a final statement of
the chorale by the chorus in unison, accompanied by dissonant figura­
tion in the strings. The cantata is unabashedly Bachian, though when it
was composed, Felix did not yet know Bach’s cantata on the same cho­
rale (BWV 93), to which Felix’s work nevertheless bore some affinities.61
In London Felix dispatched several musical curiosities, including a
miniature Scherzo in B minor for piano, characterized by delicate stac-
cati and shifts from major to minor, all revisiting the Midsummer Night's
Dream Overture. On May 24 he penned for the contralto Marian
Cramer (daughter of Franz) a setting of Thomas Moore’s amorous poem
The Garland, with a gently pulsating figure in the piano accompani­
ment tor “my love shall twine thee round her brow.” But Felix had not
yet forgotten Betty Pistor and planned to dedicate his major new work
of the summer, the String Quartet in E b,Op. 12, to her. By the beginning
of July, he had progressed as far as the slow movement.
May 1829 Fanny acknowledged borrowing a melodic phrase Felix had used
in the work the previous year. From this evidence we may date the sonata
to 1828, though on July 7, 1829, Klingemann playfully asserted to Fanny
that it still remained to be finished in England.65 Like so many of Felix’s
larger works, it continued to gestate long after its first draft.
The piece opens with a dreamy, Andante fantasia in the minor, fol­
lowed by a lighter, major-keyed Allegro. The impetuous finale, again in
the minor, erupts as a substantial sonata-form Presto that dramatically
shifts the weight of the composition. Externally Felix modeled the com­
position upon Beethoven’s own three-movement hybrid of fantasy and
sonata, the “Moonlight” Sonata, but Fanny was attracted to Felix’s mu­
sic because of its evocation of Scotland in the first movement. As Roger
Fiske observed, it “begins with some preluding meant to sound like a
harp, presumably the Celtic sort, and this leads into a slow movement
which might well have suggested an Ossianic melancholy in Berlin.”,‘6
Several stylistic features betray Felix’s attempt to capture a Scottish mood—
there are widely spaced chords and open-fifth sonorities, turbulent cre­
scendos, and misty applications of open pedal, as at the end of the first
movement, where the brooding first theme echoes among vestigial wisps
of arpeggiations, anticipating the magical close of the Hebrides Over­
ture (ex. 7.1).
Fanny herself coped with the separation through composition. The
day Felix departed, April 10, Droysen brought her some verses, which by
early June had expanded into a Liederkreis of six songs dedicated to Felix
“during his first absence in England, 1829,” with illustrations drawn on
the manuscript by Wilhelm Hensel.67 The cycle shows a taut tonal plan
Ex. 7.1: Mendelssohn, Phantasie in F# minor, Op. 28 (1834)

sempre jGuX #

favoring sharp minor keys and gives compelling evidence of Fanny’s lyri­
cal gifts and her attempt to extend individual Lieder into a larger, cycli­
cal work. Droysen’s poems continue in the same vein as Wartend, set by
Felix one week before, but now the “dreaming maiden” is fully awake
and acts out her fantasies about separation and reunion. In the first song,
Lebewohl, she would steal into her brother's dreams; in the second, spring
tulips and clematis appear dreary to her; and in the third and fourth, she
begins to think of his homecoming. No. 5, Hochland (Highlands) stands
by itself. Here Fanny imagines her brother roaming the Scottish high­
lands; she transplants herself from Berlin to join him on a secret island
in the middle of a loch, probably an allusion to the second canto of Sir
Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, in which Helen and her father Douglas
seek refuge on an island in Loch Katrine. Cast in a volkstumlich style,
Fanny’s Lied clearly imitates the inflections of Wartend, linking her style
to her brother’s with jaunty dotted rhythms and the key of B minor,
common to Wartend and the Hebrides Overture. The sixth, concluding
song closes the cycle by treating the homecoming (Wiedersehen), though
in a surprise setting: the piano falls silent, and an a cappella trio sings of
the joyful life the future holds. Here Fanny borrowed a phrase from Felix’s
“Scottish” Sonata, again symbolically stressing the siblings’ bonds.63 But
the scoring, for two sopranos and a tenor, is enigmatic. Who is reunited?
 AMATEUR GENTLEMAN -> 213

and attired in “an English tailcoat with Scottish accessories,1’ while a dol­
phin nibbles at some music in his pocket. Revolving around the com­
poser, like so many spokes of the wheel, are his siblings and several friends,
including Albert Heydemann, Droysen, and Albertine Heine, who later
married Paul. But Wilhelm, tethered by a chain to Fanny and Rebecka,
appears as a brake shoe on the wheel. The droll symbolism is clear enough:
by August 1829, when Felix received the drawing in Scotland,69 he was
still Fanny’s “alpha and omega and everything in between.”70