Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

Mendelssohn composed Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in 1828 and revised it in 1832; he led the first performance on December 1, 1832, in Berlin. Wilhelm Gericke led the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance in January 1886. Christoph von Dohnányi led the BSO's first Tanglewood performance of the piece on August 19, 2010.

Felix Mendelssohn was scion to one of Berlin’s wealthiest and most cultured families, and it was inevitable that the lessons provided for him by the city’s best tutors would include readings from Germany’s greatest man of letters and thought, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Mendelssohn early developed a taste for Goethe’s writings, and he returned to them throughout his life. In 1821 he was presented to Goethe in Weimar by his composition teacher, Carl Zelter, a longtime friend and musical adviser to the writer. Mendelssohn played his works and improvised for Goethe, who tested the boy’s powers of sight-reading with manuscript copies of music by Mozart and Beethoven; the poet (age 72) was delighted with the precocious musician (age 12). Mendelssohn reported home in one of his first letters: “Every morning I get a kiss from the author of Faust and Werther, and every afternoon two kisses from my friend and father Goethe. Think of that!” The two remained fast friends and regular correspondents until Goethe’s death in March 1832. On his last visit to Weimar, in 1830, Mendelssohn received from the great man a copy of Faust with the following inscription: “To my dear young friend F.M.B[artholdy], the powerful and gentle master of the piano, as a remembrance of happy May days in 1830—J.W.v. Goethe.”

To enhance the experience of his first excursion upon the ocean, taken during a family holiday in 1824 at the Baltic resort of Dobberan, Mendelssohn read Goethe’s pair of brief poems titled Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which had previously served as the subject for song settings by Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Schubert and a choral work of 1815 by Beethoven. In June 1828, the verses inspired a concert overture from Mendelssohn, which was given a private tryout at a concert in the family mansion on September 7. (Goethe sent his congratulations: “Sail well in your music—may the voyage always be as prosperous as this!”) Mendelssohn continued to tinker with the piece until 1832, when he conducted its formal premiere at the Berlin Singakademie on December 1. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage thereafter became a regular entry on his programs, and it was the music with which he opened his first concert as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in October 1835.

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is arranged in the form of two musical chapters (slow—fast) capped by a majestic coda suggesting the safe arrival of the vessel. Though the age of motorized ships has made the “calm sea” merely a symbol of good fortune, Mendelssohn’s time of wind-driven vessels viewed such a condition with foreboding, as Goethe’s poem indicates:

Deep and tranquil are the waters,
Not a stir now moves the sea,
And with worried look the seaman
Sees but smoothest waves around.
Not a breath from any angle!
Deathly silence, horrible!
In the vast expanse and surface
Not a ripple moves, nor a wave.

Mendelssohn’s music is solemn, nearly motionless: “the calm dream of movement without being able to move,” wrote Niels Gade, the Danish composer and conductor, and friend and successor to Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus. A breath of air—a rising wisp of melody from the flute—signals the resumption of the voyage:

Now mists tear asunder,
The skies are much brighter,
And Aeolus [god of the winds] loosens
The anxious ties.
Winds now blow gently,
The skipper gets busy.
Make haste, make haste!
The waves now are parted,
The distance comes nearer;
Now I behold land!

Music of optimism and vibrant energy, fitted into a finely crafted form modeled on the Classical sonata, depicts the vessel on its journey. A noble coda, perhaps indicating an official ceremony of welcome, greets the travelers on their arrival in port. The work closes, however, not with fanfare brilliance, but with a tiny, quiet thematic reminiscence of the voyage, “a poetic surprise of a high order,” according to the esteemed English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey.

RICHARD E. RODDA

Cleveland-based musicologist Dr. Richard E. Rodda provides program notes for orchestras and chamber music series across the country. Program note copyright ©2010 Richard E. Rodda.