Felix Mendelssohn

• 1. Introduction

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  Felix Mendelssohn was born on the 3rd of February 1809 in Hamburg, in the same house where, exactly one year later, the violinist Ferdinand David would be born. That coincidence would prove fitting: David would one day give the world premiere of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, one of the most beloved in the entire repertoire. By the time Mendelssohn died at just 38, he had written some 750 works, conducted orchestras across Europe, revived music that the world had nearly forgotten, and founded a conservatory that would carry his conservative ideals forward for generations. He was the grandson of a famous Jewish philosopher, a child prodigy who impressed Goethe, a visitor to Britain ten times over, and a man whose private temperament was far stormier than his public reputation suggested. How did a banker's son from Hamburg become the musician Robert Schumann called "the Mozart of the nineteenth century"? And why did his reputation collapse so dramatically after his death, only to be rebuilt again a century later?

• 2. Family, Name, and Faith

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  Abraham Mendelssohn, Felix's father, was the son of Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated German Jewish philosopher. The family's flight from Hamburg in 1811 captures something of the era's danger: they left in disguise, fearing French reprisal after the Mendelssohn bank helped break Napoleon's Continental System blockade. They resettled in Berlin, where Abraham and his wife Lea built a salon frequented by figures such as Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, who would later marry Felix's sister Rebecka. The musician Sarah Rothenburg wrote that "Europe came to their living room."

  The children were baptised on the 21st of March 1816, in a private ceremony at the family's Berlin apartment, conducted by the Reformed Protestant minister of the Jerusalem Church. Felix was seven. The surname Bartholdy was added at the suggestion of Lea's brother, Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, who had inherited a property of that name and taken it as his own. Abraham's rationale was stark. In an 1829 letter to Felix he wrote: "There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius." Felix never fully obeyed. He signed his letters and printed his visiting cards as "Mendelssohn Bartholdy" rather than dropping Mendelssohn entirely, and his sister Fanny wrote that year of "Bartholdy … this name that we all dislike."

  Faith remained a complicated matter throughout his life. Mendelssohn was a conforming member of the Reformed Church, yet he was openly proud of his Jewish ancestry and of his connection to his grandfather Moses. He proposed to the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus a complete edition of Moses Mendelssohn's works, and pursued the project with his uncle Joseph's support. His friend Eduard Devrient observed that Mendelssohn's deepest convictions were rarely spoken aloud: "only in rare and intimate moments did they ever appear, and then only in the slightest and most humorous allusions." In a letter to his sister Rebecka, rebuking her for a remark about an unpleasant relative, Felix asked pointedly: "What do you mean by saying you are not hostile to Jews? I hope this was a joke."

• 3. The Making of a Prodigy

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  Piano lessons with his mother began when Felix was six, and by seven he was studying with Marie Bigot in Paris. Back in Berlin, all four Mendelssohn children studied with Ludwig Berger, himself a former pupil of Muzio Clementi. From at least May 1819, Felix studied counterpoint and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, a teacher almost certainly recommended by his great-aunt Sarah Levy, who had been a pupil of W. F. Bach and a patron of C. P. E. Bach. Sarah had assembled an important collection of Bach family manuscripts, which she eventually bequeathed to the Berliner Singakademie. Her influence shaped the direction of Zelter's teaching, and through Zelter, the direction of Mendelssohn's entire musical sensibility.

  In 1821 Zelter introduced the twelve-year-old Felix to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then in his seventies. Goethe had earlier heard the young Mozart in Frankfurt, and the exchange between Goethe and Zelter that followed the boy's playing was one of the earliest explicit comparisons between the two prodigies. "What this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous," Goethe said. Zelter reminded him of Mozart; Goethe replied that what Felix already accomplished "bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child."

  By age 16 Felix had written thirteen string symphonies, several chamber works, and his first published piano quartet at 13. At 16 he wrote the String Octet in E-flat major, a work that has been described as marking "the beginning of his maturity as a composer." A year later came the Overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which scholars consider perhaps the earliest example of a concert overture: a piece written not to accompany a staged performance but to evoke a literary theme in the concert hall. A 2009 survey by the BBC of sixteen music critics concluded that Mendelssohn was the greatest composing prodigy in the history of Western classical music.

• 4. Reviving the Forgotten

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  Four years before the Bach revival that would make him famous, Mendelssohn's grandmother Bella Salomon gave him a manuscript copy of Bach's St Matthew Passion, a work that had fallen into near-total obscurity since Bach's death. In 1829, with the backing of his teacher Zelter and the practical assistance of the actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance of the Passion in Berlin, using the orchestra and choir of the Berlin Singakademie. It was one of very few performances since Bach's death, and the first ever outside of Leipzig. The success earned the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn widespread acclaim, and it became the central event in the revival of Bach's music across Europe. Mendelssohn's own comment on the occasion has been quoted ever since: "To think that it took an actor and a Jew's son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!"

  The pattern repeated in Düsseldorf in the spring of 1833, when Mendelssohn directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival with a performance of Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, prepared from the original score he had found in London. This set off a Handel revival in Germany comparable to what the St Matthew Passion had done for Bach. Later, in Leipzig in 1839, Robert Schumann discovered the manuscript of Schubert's Ninth Symphony and sent it to Mendelssohn, who premiered it on the 21st of March 1839, more than a decade after Schubert's death.

  Mendelssohn's editorial instincts were rigorous. When preparing Handel's Israel in Egypt for the London Handel Society in 1845, he refused to add dynamics where Handel had given none, and resisted pressure to add trombone parts. He also edited Bach's organ music and, with Schumann, discussed the possibility of producing a complete Bach edition. His conservatism was not timidity; it was a principled fidelity to the source.

• 5. Britain and Its Pull

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  Mendelssohn first arrived in Britain in 1829, where Ignaz Moscheles, who had settled in London, introduced him to the city's most influential musical circles. He made ten visits in total, lasting altogether about twenty months, and during those visits many of his major works received their premieres. He won a following that enabled him to shape British musical life in lasting ways, editing for British publishers the first critical editions of Handel's oratorios and Bach's organ music.

  Scotland proved especially generative. A visit to Holyrood Palace in 1829 gave him the opening theme of the Scottish Symphony, which he worked on intermittently for over a decade before completing it in 1842. A trip to Fingal's Cave on the Hebridean isle of Staffa during his Grand Tour prompted a different kind of inspiration: he was so struck by the place that he scribbled the opening theme of The Hebrides overture on the spot and included it in a letter home that same evening.

  On his eighth visit in the summer of 1844, he conducted five Philharmonic concerts in London and wrote that "never before was anything like this season." On his last visit in 1847, he performed as soloist in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 and conducted his own Scottish Symphony before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, both of whom greatly admired his music. Prince Albert had inscribed a libretto for the oratorio Elijah in 1847, calling Mendelssohn "the noble artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of false art, has been able, like a second Elijah, through genius and study, to remain true to the service of true art."

  The oratorio Elijah itself had been commissioned by the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival and premiered on the 26th of August 1846, at the Town Hall, Birmingham, with an English text prepared by William Bartholomew.

• 6. Jenny Lind and Private Life

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  Mendelssohn married Cecile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud on the 28th of March 1837. She was the daughter of a French Reformed Church clergyman, and the couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Lili and Felix August. Carl became a professor of history at Heidelberg and Freiburg universities. Paul pioneered the manufacture of aniline dye. The family papers descended through Marie's and Lili's children and now form part of the Bodleian Library collection at Oxford University.

  Alongside his marriage, Mendelssohn developed a close attachment to the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whom he met in October 1844. The full nature of their relationship was long obscured. In 2013, George Biddlecombe confirmed in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association that the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Lind, entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of pressure. Those letters were destroyed after being discovered following Lind's death.

  Their professional collaboration was undisputed and intense. Mendelssohn began an opera, Lorelei, based on the legend of the Lorelei Rhine maidens, specifically for Lind; it remained unfinished at his death. He is said to have tailored the aria "Hear Ye Israel" in the oratorio Elijah to her voice. In 1847 he attended a London performance of Meyerbeer's Robert le diable, an opera he musically despised, simply to hear Lind's British stage debut. The critic Henry Chorley, who was with him that evening, described "the smile with which Mendelssohn turned round and looked at me, as if a load of anxiety had been taken off his mind."

  Lind's tribute after his death was direct: "He was the only person who brought fulfillment to my spirit, and almost as soon as I found him I lost him again." In 1849 she established the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation, which awards a prize to a young resident British composer every two years. The first winner of the scholarship, in 1856, was Arthur Sullivan, then aged 14.

• 7. Conservatism as a Musical Stance

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  Mendelssohn's conservatism was not a default position; it was a deliberate philosophy. He told one correspondent that the music he loved expressed thoughts that were "not too indefinite for me to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite." When playing for Goethe, he gave what he called "historical exhibitions" at the keyboard, performing works by great composers in chronological order and explaining how each contributed to the development of music.

  Schumann called him "the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant musician, the one who most clearly sees through the contradictions of the age and for the first time reconciles them." The musicologist Greg Vitercik has argued that Mendelssohn's stylistic innovations solved a genuine structural problem in Romantic music: the classical sonata form's recapitulation section tended to feel anticlimactic within the emotional logic of Romanticism. Mendelssohn's solution was to vary the recapitulation harmonically and melodically, so that the movement could build toward a final climax without abandoning formal structure. Berlioz and others solved the same problem by adding extended codas; Mendelssohn solved it from inside the form.

  His contemporaries recognized the difference. Berlioz remarked, not entirely as a compliment, that Mendelssohn had "perhaps studied the music of the dead too closely." Mendelssohn for his part described Berlioz's overture Les francs-juges as "such a frightful muddle... that one ought to wash one's hands after handling one of his scores." Of Liszt's compositions he wrote that they were "inferior to his playing, and only calculated for virtuosos." He got on cordially with Berlioz, Liszt, and Giacomo Meyerbeer but expressed these opinions freely in his letters.

  His opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho, based on an episode in Don Quixote, was produced in Berlin in 1827 and received coolly. Mendelssohn left the theatre before the conclusion of the first performance. He never completed another opera, despite considering many subjects, including the Nibelung saga that Wagner would later adapt. In his last years the opera manager Benjamin Lumley tried to contract him for a Shakespeare opera from a libretto by Eugene Scribe, even announcing it publicly in 1847. Mendelssohn died before writing a note of it.

• 8. Aftermath and Reassessment

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  Mendelssohn's sister Fanny died on the 14th of May 1847. Less than six months later, on the 4th of November, Felix died in Leipzig after a series of strokes, aged 38. His grandfather Moses, his sister Fanny, and both his parents had all died from similar apoplexies. The String Quartet No. 6, his last major completed work, written in grief after Fanny's death, has been described by the historian Peter Mercer-Taylor as exceptionally powerful and eloquent.

  In the immediate aftermath of his death, Wagner's anti-Jewish pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik, published three years later, set the tone for a long denigration. Wagner accused Mendelssohn of producing "washiness and whimsicality" and denied that Jewish artists could produce works with genuine emotional depth. By the early twentieth century, critics including Bernard Shaw were condemning Mendelssohn's music for its association with Victorian respectability. Shaw complained of "kid-glove gentility, conventional sentimentality, and despicable oratorio-mongering."

  The Nazi regime banned performance and publication of his works, citing his Jewish origins. Carl Orff was among those who agreed to rewrite incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream for use in place of Mendelssohn's. The German Mendelssohn Scholarship for students at the Leipzig Conservatory was discontinued in 1934 and not revived until 1963. The monument dedicated to Mendelssohn in Leipzig, erected in 1892, was removed in 1936; a replacement was erected in 2008.

  The rehabilitation has been slow and specific. Charles Rosen, in his 1995 book The Romantic Generation, called Mendelssohn "the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known" and noted that his command at age 16 surpassed that of Mozart or Chopin at 19. The critic H. L. Mencken concluded that if Mendelssohn missed true greatness, he missed it "by a hair." The scholar R. Larry Todd noted in 2007 the intensifying revival of Mendelssohn's music and wrote that musicians and scholars had "begun viewing him from new perspectives." A scholarly edition of his complete works is in preparation and is expected to run to more than 150 volumes.