On Mendelssohn's Elijah

Felix Mendelssohn’s interest in oratorio—an un-staged, un-costumed drama told through choruses, arias, and recitative—grew out of his love of the music of J.S. Bach and Handel, two masters of the genre. In 1829, at twenty years of age, an indefatigable, precocious Mendelssohn conducted the revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which had not been performed since Bach’s death in 1750. Some understand Mendelssohn’s first oratorio, St. Paul, as a response to Bach’s Passion, its many chorales and resolutely Christian subject matter a reflection of the great Lutheran master. Mendelssohn’s second composition in the genre, Elijah, demonstrates a deeper debt to Handel. Indeed, the ever-popular Messiah was performed at the same Birmingham Festival that premiered Elijah, and audiences would surely have noticed how Elijah’s aria “Is not His Word Like a Fire?” recalls “For He is Like a Refiner’s Fire.” The vivid orchestral writing, with its depictions of galloping horses of fire, tempests, deluges, and earthquakes—not to mention the notion of the Israelites in exile—recall Handel’s brilliant treatment of the plagues and exodus in his Israel in Egypt.

Mendelssohn synthesized these influences and marshaled the musical resources of his own era to magnify them. Elijah towers over the oratorio genre: Its namesake role is a tour-de-force for baritone, augmented by beautiful solos for the other three voice parts. The ethereal reassurance of the unaccompanied trio “Lift Thine Eyes” is a mainstay of women’s and children’s choirs around the world. And, perhaps most notably, the oratorio rolls out one blockbuster chorus after another. Backed by imaginative instrumental artillery, the choruses illuminate the wrath, barbarity, terror, and awe that bring the story so vividly to life. When the earth quakes and fire consumes all in its path, Mendelssohn’s music delivers the tremors and the heat. But the lighter choruses rival the fiery ones with an equally powerful, transcendent beauty. “Blessed are the men who fear him” is a marvel of elegant restraint, and its opalescent, gossamer orchestration captures in sound both wonder and reverence. Compared to the richly-hued chromatic harmonies of the era immediately following his death, Mendelssohn’s harmonies are appealingly tidy and earnest, with archaic qualities redolent of the exquisite clockwork of Bach’s chorales and the quick cadence of Protestant hymns. Mendelssohn’s melodies mix classical balance and big-boned gesture in graceful proportion. To my ear, the music of Elijah speaks directly, unapologetically, and beautifully, without relying on the unabashed decadence and rococo embroidery of the opera house.

Mendelssohn’s musical accomplishment was not lost on one of his most vaunted listeners, England’s Prince Albert, himself a passionate amateur musician and composer. After attending a performance of Elijah in London, the prince sent his copy of the libretto to Mendelssohn with the inscription, “To the Noble Artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of debased art, has been able, by his genius and science, to preserve faithfully, like another Elijah, the worship of true art, and once more to accustom our ear, amid the whirl of empty, frivolous sounds, to the pure tones of sympathetic feeling and legitimate harmony: to the Great Master, who makes us conscious of the unity of his conception, through the whole maze of his creation, from the soft whispering to the mighty raging of the elements.” If classical music lovers seek to “preserve faithfully the worship of true art,” they will find much to praise in Elijah.

Just as the prophet Elijah’s significance stretches beyond the historical record of his life, the oratorio, Elijah, has more than musical significance for listeners because its drama pulls us into the narrative. For some, of course, there is religious resonance: Elijah’s story of faith and perseverance plays an important role in several religious traditions, and Elijah enlivens that story with music. The most spectacular moments in the work portray the miraculous events that are the hallmarks of the narrative: the revivification of a dead child, spontaneous combustion, the “still, small” voice of God, and ascension to heaven in a fiery chariot drawn by flaming horses. Mendelssohn’s music brings the Bible to life in colorful, memorable fashion, enhancing its spiritual dimension. Yet even as the supernatural events that substantiate Elijah’s stature as a godly prophet distance his world from our own, the oratorio has resonated with audiences since its premiere, retaining the power to connect the past to our present day from historical, cultural, and political perspectives.

Some of these resonances are quite immediate and literal. While working on Elijah it has been difficult for me to pick up a newspaper without noting how current events resemble and recycle the historical events chronicled in its libretto. King Ahab reigned from 874 to 853 BCE. His queen, Jezebel, brought from Phoenicia the worship of Baal (a stand-in for a panoply of “heathen” gods). Elijah, prophet and protector of the first commandment, promoted the one true God, Jehovah. The struggle between their monotheistic and polytheistic belief systems unfolds amidst a drought and famine that parched the land and brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Elijah blamed the troubles on the royal couple’s worship of Baal, which led their people away from Jehovah. Ahab and Jezebel, in turn, blamed Elijah and his prophecy. Their subjects sought explanation and salvation through allegiance to and worship of various kings and gods. The same area of the world now divides itself among established and hoped-for religious states, disputed territories, and wealthy monarchies, and nearly three millennia later, squeezed by political pressures and exacerbated by the harshness of nature, clashes among religions still stir up the sands of the Middle East. The outcries of the stricken, starving Israelites in the opening chorus, “Help, Lord!” are echoed by many peoples today, as sectarian and political conflicts as well as drought and famine spawn refugee crises in the Middle East and around the globe. And of course, many suffer from hunger, poverty, and displacement here in our own country.

Taken less literally, Elijah’s story and music have the potential to reflect or promote broader cultural themes. Prince Albert’s paean to Mendelssohn suggests how this oratorio was positively perceived in the mid-nineteenth century. In Victorian England, a work like Elijah expressed and reinforced belief in England herself. Choruses like “Thanks Be to God,” “Be Not Afraid,” and “Lord, our Creator, how Excellent Thy Name is in All the Nations” thrum with pomp and circumstance worthy of a global empire. Elijah—and Mendelssohn himself—soon enjoyed extended popularity in the United States as well. In late-nineteenth-century America, historian Stephen Baur notes, “cultural activists promoted culture as a means to achieve social cohesion and administer moral instruction during a period of intense social change. As culture took on social functions traditionally ascribed to religion, some secular cultural practices— steeped in formality, presented in elaborate, ceremonious spaces, and understood to embody universal truths—assumed the character of sacred rituals.” The industrious Mendelssohn and his oratorio, Elijah, fit the bill. The tale of Elijah, who doubled down on his sense of duty, endured hardship, and enjoyed eventual recompense, reinforced a Glided Age moral code that exalted hard work (ideally for delayed reward) as epitomized in the Horatio Alger books so popular at the time. In other words, Elijah’s heyday in America coincided with a moment when the ideals it espoused were at the height of their hegemonic powers in the broader culture.

I can’t help but see Elijah through a contemporary political lens as well. The story of Elijah and the Widow establishes him as a man of God and a man of mercy, who has God’s ear and who can perform miracles. Elijah’s mortification of the Priests of Baal by summoning fire after they failed to—and ultimately destroying them—reinforces his role as a conduit of God’s power but also shows how obdurate he can be. Mendelssohn himself understood Elijah as a multifaceted prophet with implications for his own time. He wrote: “I picture Elijah as a grand and mighty prophet of a kind we would do well to have in our own day—powerful, zealous, but also harsh and angry and saturnine; a striking contrast to the court sycophants and the rabble; in antithesis, in fact, virtually to the whole world; yet borne on the wings of angels.” Today’s politicians are branded and displayed so ubiquitously in the media that they become icons, even idols. It’s hard for me not to hear, in the back and forth Elijah presents, echoes of our own opposing political parties, with ersatz prophets spouting their own “indisputable” truths and calling down doom upon their opponents. Every two or four years, we vote. In the preceding months and years, a panoply of political figures will seek our allegiance. Do we find faith in one true prophet, who can rise above the “court sycophants and the rabble” to commit acts of great mercy, or to bring the proverbial fire to the altar?

Finally, the most immediate and individual resonance comes from the trajectory of the central character himself. The story of Elijah reveals its hero at his most powerful—and and most dejected. Some may intimately understand Elijah’s feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and hopelessness. He fought tirelessly for something he believed in deeply. People he thought he had persuaded proved fickle, forcing him to question his fundamental purpose. Elijah’s aria “It is enough,” sung as he wanders alone in the desert, gives voice to something more universal and timeless. Hearing this aria, with its stark contrast to Elijah’s stentorian power earlier in the piece, I’m compelled to reflect upon the challenge of leadership and the crushing weight of disappointment. Where do we turn when our guiding light flickers? Where do we seek comfort? The music heightens the contrast between deep physical and/or spiritual thirst and the heavy quench of downpours of water, assurance, and/or love. Mendelssohn lamented his busy life, over-scheduled with commitments he felt bound to honor “by duty, not inclination.” His decision to highlight the moment when Elijah hears the “still, small voice” of God (perhaps, that is to say, silence) might come from his own longing for quiet and time for reflection. The fire that figures so prominently in the first half of the oratorio to prove the power of Jehovah, about which Elijah asks, “is not his word like a fire?” is conspicuously, deliberately absent in the movement near the end of the oratorio, when Elijah encounters God, where the chorus avows: “But yet the Lord was not in the fire.” In Mendelssohn’s imagination, God appears instead in the hushed pianissimo of a glistening E major chord.

Perhaps this moment of transcendent, radiant simplicity, and not the fiery spectacle, is the climactic moment of the whole oratorio, and, ultimately, the crux of the matter. To be sure, Elijah can be enjoyed passively: It’s great music, regardless of the extra-musical resonances it invites. But, if we choose not to sit back and relax but to lean in, listen carefully, and involve ourselves in the drama, we hear and feel how great oratorios like Elijah reconnect us to our human story. As a conductor, I worry that the impact of massive orchestral-electronic scores, hugely amplified in surround sound at the Cineplex, will forever obliterate the vividness and impact of acoustic classical music. But a monument like Elijah gives me hope. If we don’t approach it looking for great fires and shuddering earthquakes, but instead climb the edifice humbly and listen closely, we may just find that Elijah speaks most powerfully to us as God did to Elijah—in a still, small voice. The ability to draw us into reflective silence is a mighty power indeed.

Copyright 2015 Ryan James Brandau

For information about using these notes, please contact Ryan at ryanbrandau@gmail.com.