Composition and Premiere
Mendelssohn's oratorio St. Paul (Paulus), Op. 36, was his first major oratorio and a work he had been planning since the early 1830s. The premiere took place at the Lower Rhine Music Festival in Düsseldorf on May 22, 1836, under the composer's direction, to an enthusiastic reception. Within two years the work had been performed throughout Germany, in England, and in the United States, rapidly establishing itself as one of the major works of the Romantic oratorio tradition.
Mendelssohn had been deeply influenced by his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn's philosophical legacy and by his own ambiguous position as a Christian of Jewish descent. His fascination with the apostle Paul - himself a Jew who became the primary theologian of Christianity's expansion beyond its Jewish origins - was not accidental. The Paulus represents Mendelssohn's most sustained engagement with the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, Synagogue and Church, Law and Gospel.
Biblical Sources
The libretto was compiled by Mendelssohn himself in collaboration with his friend Julius Schubring, drawing primarily on the Acts of the Apostles and supplementing the narrative with texts from Paul's letters and from the Psalms. The work falls into two parts: Part 1 covers the stoning of Stephen (Acts 6:8-7:60), the conversion of Paul on the Damascus road (Acts 9:1-19), and his early ministry; Part 2 covers the first and second missionary journeys, the persecution by the Jews, and Paul's testimony before the authorities.
The stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:54-60) is the dramatic and theological pivot of Part 1. Stephen's speech before the Sanhedrin - which surveys the whole of Israel's history as a pattern of rejecting God's messengers - enrages the council, and he is dragged out and stoned. His final words, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Lord, lay not this sin to their charge' (Acts 7:59-60), explicitly echo Jesus's own words from the cross (Luke 23:34, 46), making Stephen the first martyr and the paradigmatic witness. Mendelssohn sets these dying words with a soprano aria of extraordinary tenderness and peacefulness, in deliberate contrast with the crowd's violent outburst in the preceding chorus.
Acts 9:3-6 provides the conversion scene: the blinding light, the voice from heaven asking 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?', and Saul's terrified response. Mendelssohn depicts the light with a sudden orchestral and choral outburst that cuts through the preceding darkness, and the divine voice is given to a chorus singing in unison - a deliberate aural distinction from the polyphonic crowd scenes, giving the divine speech a character of singular authority.
Acts 13:2 - 'While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them"' - marks the beginning of the missionary work that constitutes Part 2 of the oratorio. Paul's subsequent adventures, including the extraordinary scene at Lystra where he and Barnabas are mistaken for gods (Acts 14:11-15), are treated with a mixture of dramatic narrative and theological reflection.
Lutheran Chorales
One of the most distinctive features of Paulus is its systematic use of Lutheran chorales at key points in the narrative. These chorale insertions - borrowed from the tradition of Bach's Passions - give the oratorio the feel of a collective Lutheran response to the dramatic events: the congregation (represented by the chorus) responds to each narrative development by singing a familiar hymn of the faith, placing the Acts narrative within the ongoing life of the Christian community.
The chorales create a specifically German Lutheran interpretive frame for a narrative that was, in its original biblical context, set in the Jewish and Hellenistic world of the first century. Mendelssohn's use of this Lutheran device reflects his formation in the German Protestant tradition even as his Jewish heritage gave him a particular sympathy for Paul's complex negotiation of two religious worlds.
Musical Analysis
The oratorio opens with an overture built on the chorale 'Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme' (Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying), one of the most celebrated of all Lutheran Advent chorales. This choice is programmatically significant: it frames the entire narrative of Paul's ministry as a waking to the gospel, an arousal from spiritual sleep to the light of faith. The overture's polyphonic development of the chorale melody displays Mendelssohn's Bach-influenced counterpoint at its most fluent.
The soprano aria 'Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets,' sung as a lament over Jerusalem before the stoning of Stephen, is among Mendelssohn's finest vocal writing: its combination of grief, love, and prophetic denunciation draws on the tradition of the Hebrew prophets that both Stephen and Paul inhabited. The subsequent stoning scene builds with extraordinary intensity through multiple shorter choral movements before reaching the climax of Stephen's death.
Historical Significance
Paulus is generally considered the work that re-established the oratorio tradition in Germany after a generation's relative neglect following the death of Handel. Mendelssohn's decision to combine Bach's counterpoint and chorale technique with the dramatic narrative tradition of Handel produced a model that influenced German sacred music throughout the nineteenth century. His successor work, Elijah (1846), refined and deepened the approach, but Paulus remains a major work in its own right and a significant contribution to the biblical narrative in music.
For Mendelssohn personally, the choice of Paul - the apostle who argued most systematically for the continuity between the Jewish and Christian covenants - reflected his own lifelong negotiation of his dual heritage. The oratorio's sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish community's perspective, alongside its celebration of Paul's conversion and mission, gives it a theological complexity unusual in nineteenth-century sacred music.