Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the Problem of Program Music

Mendelssohn believed that music was even more meaningful than verbal language. So he wrote in the famous letter of 15 October 1842 to Marc-André Souchay: «people often complain that music is ambiguous, that their ideas on the subject always seem so vague, whereas everyone understands words; with me it is exactly the reverse, not merely with regard to entire sentences, but also as to individual words; these, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so unintelligible when compared with genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to be put into words, but, on the contrary, too definite». Here, he clearly assumes that it is impossible to explain adequately the meaning of music in words, but it seems possible the reverse, that music can very well express an extra musical meaning, also unsupported by extraneous ideas. My paper aims to investigate this esthetic and compositional topic in the first half of XIXth Century, focusing first on the creative process of the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture op. 21 (1826), that was clearly influenced by the esthetic thought of Adolf Bernhard Marx, particularly by his booklet Über Malerei in der Tonkunst (1821). This process was not so easy: the young composer shared a draft with Marx, who could not perceive any Midsummer Night’s Dream in the music; so Mendelssohn recast the work in a more descriptive way. But his intention was not to write program music, as his later correspondence with the works editor could demonstrate. How can we interpret his attitude toward music expression and musical meaning?