Mendelssohn's Biography: A Condensed Version

MENDELSSOHN the CHILD & TEEN-AGER

When Felix Mendelssohn was born in 1809, 200 years ago, in the German city of Hamburg, most of Europe was dominated by wars with the French Emperor, Napoleon. Mendelssohn's father was a banker who was involved in what we might call the Resistance against the French, so when they took over the city in 1811, he took his family and fled in the middle of the night, moving back to Berlin to joining the family bank's “home office.”

The Mendelssohn children would get up at 5am to begin their lessons for the day which included languages (German, French and English, Greek and Latin), literature, math, history and a number of other courses including music lessons. On Sundays, the children could sleep in until 6am. He was studying the piano when he was 6 and taking composition lessons when he was 10. When he was 11, he started composing several small symphonies for a string orchestra. He also took violin lessons.

The Mendelssohn home was a gathering place for the best minds in Berlin. They would come for Sunday's afternoon musicales – where the children would often perform with their teachers and friends – drink tea, eat great food and have discussions about the latest ideas in the arts as well as in science and philosophy.

For some of these musicales, Mendelssohn's father Abraham would hire musicians to come play works his son and daughter had composed. Felix Mendelssohn (see right) would conduct his little symphonies, standing on a chair so the musicians could see him over their music stands. His older sister, Fanny, was an excellent pianist and a composer, too. They often wrote works for each other to perform. Mendelssohn wrote two concertos for two pianos which they could play together with the orchestra. They were both child prodigies – children who exhibited a highly advanced level of talent many adults would envy.

When Mendelssohn was 13, his composition teacher took him to play for the greatest living German writer, Goethe (pronounced in German, GER-teh). When he was a boy, Goethe had heard the child Mozart play the piano and some of his compositions, too. Mozart was probably the most famous child prodigy in music. Goethe thought Mendelssohn was more advanced.

Mendelssohn composed a great deal. Suddenly, in the midst of all the music he was composing then, he wrote a piece for his violin teacher's birthday, the Octet for Strings, that most people would assume it's good enough to be by a mature genius. So they're very surprised when they're told Mendelssohn wrote it when he was 16.

(You can hear the second half of the piece in this music video post. Odin Rathnam and members of the West Branch Music Festival will be coming to John Harris High School to perform it on September 16th.)

The next year, Mendelssohn composed an overture inspired by reading Shakespeare's play “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” This is another one of those “I-can't-believe-he-wrote-it-when-he-was-a-teen-ager” pieces.

You can hear a 'video' of the music posted here, along with a time-line where you can hear the different themes and how they relate to the story.

It would become one of his most popular pieces. Some people think – with maybe a couple of exceptions – he never wrote anything better than these two pieces.

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MENDELSSOHN'S FAMILY: WEALTH & FAITH

After he attended some classes at the Berlin University, he was 20 when he conducted a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion. This is a very long work that had not been performed since before Bach's death in 1750, eighty years earlier. It was such a success, Mendelssohn is given credit for starting “The Bach Revival.” Bach is generally regarded as one of the Great Composers today – one of the 3 B's along with Beethoven and Brahms – but in Mendelssohn's time, not too many people knew his music.

Unlike most composers who were always dealing with financial worries, Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy family. His parents were both from two of the wealthiest families in Berlin – here is a post about his mother's family; in this post you can see some pictures like this one (right) of the Mendelssohn's house in Berlin where these Sunday musicales took place and where Mendelssohn composed all this music (this is a house, not a palace or a government building). The bank his father and uncles founded was also one of the biggest banks in Germany and it continued to be a major banking company up until World War II.

Mendelssohn was born into the Jewish faith. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn (see left), was a famous philosopher at a time when Jews were just beginning to be accepted into society though there were still anti-Semitic reactions in many areas. Mendelssohn's maternal grandfather had been a prominent merchant and banker working in the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Given the religious attitudes of the time, several members of the family – from Moses Mendelssohn and his sons to brothers of Mendelssohn's mother – favored either “assimilation” where Jews consciously become more like the society they live in or outright “conversion” to the Protestant faith. None of them were especially devout and Abraham Mendelssohn was convinced his children would get ahead in the world with greater ease if they were Protestants. So when Felix was 7, his father had the children baptized in the Lutheran faith.

Many people still considered Mendelssohn Jewish despite the conversion. It became more of a problem after his death when anti-Semitic campaigns were launched against his music. Eventually, when the Nazis took over Germany in the 1930s, Mendelssohn's music disappeared, statues of him were taken down, and museums dedicated to his life and music were closed. The family's banking company was taken over by a government sanctioned bank and all the Jewish employees were fired.

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MENDELSSOHN, the YOUNG MAN

After Mendelssohn turned 20, he spent some time traveling, going first to England and then to Italy for extended trips. He performed as a concert pianist, conducted and played his own music.

He writes several pieces, including an orchestral work inspired by his visit to a cave on a little island off the Scottish coast called Fingal's Cave. You can see a modern day trip to the cave in this post and then a performance of the music it inspired Mendelssohn to compose.

Another piece he composed around this time was based on an old legend about a water nymph who wants to become human so she can fall in love. This same story inspired Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, “The Little Mermaid” which in turn inspired the Disney film. Mendelssohn called his work “The Fair Melusine.” You can hear it here on one of the Music Video posts.

When he was 25, he writes a large choral work, an oratorio based on the story of St. Paul. In the New Testament, Paul was originally a Jew who persecuted Christians but “on the road to Damascus” was converted to Christianity in a blinding flash and would become one of the leading figures in the history of the early Christian church.

At 26, Mendelssohn settled in Leipzig where he became the conductor of an orchestra in Leipzig called “The Gewandhaus Orchestra.” Gewandhaus (geh-VONT-house) referred to the old Cloth Merchants' Guild building where the orchestra performed (see right). It was originally founded in 1743 and the orchestra still performs today. You can hear more current members of the orchestra play music Mendelssohn conducted with them over 170 years ago.

Mendelssohn composed five symphonies. The first – not counting those “string symphonies” he composed between the ages of 11 and 14 – was written when he was 15 but the two best known works were musical souvenirs of his trips to Scotland and to Italy. It took him 11 years to finish the “Scottish” Symphony. He never did publish the “Italian” Symphony which, for some reason, he felt needed to be revised. He just never got around to it.

(You can hear the opening of the Italian Symphony at the beginning of this post - while he was in Rome, he met Hector Berlioz whose music he thought sounded... well, "dirty." At the end of that post, you can hear the last minute of a piece by Hector Berlioz that he was writing in Rome the same time Mendelssohn was writing his Italian Symphony.)

An earlier symphony was written to celebrate the 400th anniversary of an important event in the Lutheran Church history. He quotes Martin Luther's hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” in the last movement. But it was rejected by the committee planning the anniversary festival – it was more than they were looking for, but word had it they didn't perform it because to them Mendelssohn was a Jewish composer: what right did he have to be quoting Martin Luther?

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MENDELSSOHN, the SLIGHTLY OLDER MAN

Much of Mendelssohn's biography reads like an appointment book: this year he wrote this, performed that, conducted here and there. He was very busy as a composer, conductor, pianist, organist, teacher and music festival organizer.

When he was 28, he married the daughter of a French Protestant minister and during his honeymoon wrote a string quartet, a setting of a Psalm for chorus and orchestra, and his 2nd Piano Concerto which he went off to perform in England a few months after the wedding.

In 1842, he met Queen Victoria of England. After a performance there of St. Paul, he spent 9 days of constant traveling to get back to his home in Leipzig in time to conduct a concert: after several carriages, boats and steamships and very little sleep, he arrived in Leipzig around 2:00 and walked on stage to conduct the concert at 6:00 that evening. He admitted to being “a little tired” after the concert (the 19th Century version of jet-lag).

The King of Prussia invites him back to Berlin to compose music for several plays and to direct concerts and found a music-school. Not much comes of these projects except he does finally write music for the complete play, “A Midsummer Nights Dream” by Shakespeare. He had written the Overture when he was 17, then wrote the rest of the music (including the famous Wedding March which you can hear in this music video post) when he was 34.

Since he couldn't get a music school started in Berlin, he started one in Leipzig instead, associated with his orchestra. As if he didn't have enough to do...

For a performance in England, he agrees to write another oratorio, this one based on the biblical story of Elijah. He conducts the premiere in England but returns to Leipzig exhausted. Shortly after he arrives home, he receives the news that his sister Fanny died suddenly, apparently of a stroke. She was 41.

They had been very close as children and remained close throughout their lives. Her death affected him so deeply, he had to go to Switzerland to recuperate from an illness he never really recovered from. Less than six months later, he died of a series of strokes himself. He was only 38 years old. (Read more in this post about his last year and especially the peoples' reactions to the news of his death.)

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LOOKING BACK ON MENDELSSOHN the MUSICIAN

Mendelssohn was a celebrity, one of the most popular composers of his day. His music, like the culture he grew up in, was “comfortable” and “polite,” not stormy and dramatic like many of the composers around him. His personality was reserved, not flamboyant. He didn't write music to “storm the heavens” like Beethoven did and he wasn't writing “Music for the Future” like his contemporary Richard Wagner would write. If these men had personalities that gave them “super-hero” personalities, Mendelssohn was very human.

His music often expresses a youthful exuberance and may at times be dramatic but never so “over-the-top” as some of his friends' music was. When it was sad, it was never tragic. He wrote not for intellectuals or people interested in adventure. He wrote to comfort people and to connect on a human level with amateur music-lovers and performers who sometimes got lost in the “modern” music of their day.

Today, we talk about people with “left brain” or “right brain” personality traits – some of these can be applied to musicians (composers and performers) and described basically as “classical” or “romantic” styles. Music of the “Classical” style was more abstract and tended to be concerned more with clearer forms and textures. Music of the “Romantic” style was more subjective and emotional and more concerned with spontaneity and the blurring of lines in music's forms and textures.

Mendelssohn was a little of each, perhaps “2 parts Classical to 1 part Romantic.”

One of his teachers, the German philosopher Hegel, is probably best remembered today for what is called the “Hegelian Dialectic.” Simply put, you take an idea (a thesis) and contrast it with its opposite idea (an antithesis) and then combine the best aspects of both to create something of a compromise (a synthesis).

In a sense, (2 Parts Classical) + (1 Part Romantic) = Felix Mendelssohn.

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn's Life, Mendelssohn's Death

MENDELSSOHN & ENGLAND

The Mendelssohns were Anglophiles. They loved English customs and spoke the language fluently. They consumed vast quantities of English tea unlike most of their Berlin neighbors. They read English writers mostly in English, including Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, often before their books were available in German. It wasn't surprising, when Felix had a chance to travel on his own, he chose to go to England.

During his first trip – in 1829 when he was 20 and this portrait of him was painted – George IV was king. Jane Austen, who had died 12 years earlier, was the famous writer of novels like “Pride & Prejudice” and “Emma.” Her books reflected life during “The Regency” with plots superimposed on the family's concerns for respectability and getting the daughters married to respectable husbands to ensure their fortune.

His next several visits were during the reign of William IV, younger brother of the previous king.

Following his honeymoon in 1837, Mendelssohn visited London to perform his new 2nd Piano Concerto, arriving a few months after the death of William IV when Victoria became Queen at the age of 18.

(You can read more about the British Royals of the Early 19th Century in this post.)

MENDELSSOHN AMONG THE ROYALS

Victoria enjoyed music and liked to sing. Her husband, Prince Albert, either accompanied her or sang duets with her after dinner ( he disliked the English custom where, once the meal is done, the men stayed in one room and smoke while the women went to a different room and talk). He was also a fine organist.

It wasn't until his visit in 1842 when Mendelssohn, already a musical idol to the London audiences, met the Royal Family. He first met Prince Albert who invited Mendelssohn to come to Buckingham Palace to play the organ there and when he arrived, he found the prince alone in the music room. While they were talking, the Queen walked in by herself, dressed in a regular house-dress, no state robes or any formal escorts – we always seem to think the Royals sit around in these outrageous court costumes – and flustered because they were getting ready to leave for a country estate for a holiday. Wind from an open window had scattered loose pages of sheet music from the organ all over the floor, so she hurried to pick them up and sort through them. Albert then played the organ for Mendelssohn while the Queen listened (see illustration, right). Then Mendelssohn sat down to play for them. When he started playing a chorus from his oratorio, St. Paul, the royal couple both started to sing along.

Later, Albert said to his wife she should sing for Mendelssohn but she couldn't find the sheet music she was looking for – it had already been packed for the holiday. Eventually, they found it and Queen Victoria sang for Mendelssohn one of her favorite of his songs. Accompanying her at the piano, he diplomatically had to correct her when she sang a wrong note. The only thing was, it was not by Felix Mendelssohn – it was by Fanny Mendelssohn! It was one of his sister's songs he'd published under his name just to get it published and before the public (it wasn't that he was trying to steal credit for it). He wrote all this down in a letter to his family back in Berlin, telling them he had to admit (joking that “pride goeth before a fall”) the composer's true identity. Victoria recorded this fact in her own diary but made no comment about her reaction to the deception.

By the end of the visit, Mendelssohn asked the Queen if he could dedicate his new symphony to her – this would be the “Scottish” Symphony – which he was soon to premiere. She accepted and gave him a beautiful ring engraved with her initials and the date, 1842.

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MENDELSSOHN, LONDON'S PIED PIPER of MUSIC

By now, Mendelssohn had become the most popular living composer in England: all the Royal Philharmonic had to do to make a financial surplus from ticket sales was program some of Mendelssohn's music. His sweet style – not too “heady” – resonated with the English audiences.

Unfortunately, the London musicians could make no sense out of Schubert's “Great” C Major Symphony which Mendelssohn had just premiered in Leipzig – they rebelled at its length (over 45 minutes) and found it tiring to play. So Mendelssohn withdrew it from the program and refused to premiere a new overture of his everybody had been waiting for.

He was the Pied-Piper to English music-lovers. When they asked him to take over the directorship of the Birmingham Choral Festival, he declined, but agreed to write them a new oratorio – based on Elijah – which he'd come back and conduct for them.

Here's something typical of Mendelssohn's traveling: in 1842, he left Birmingham as soon as the performance of St. Paul was over, about mid-afternoon, arriving by coach in London around midnight. He took the mail-coach to Dover, arriving around 9am to catch a boat without taking time for breakfast so he could get to the steamer that would take him to France – he was seasick, as usual – followed by an immediate coach-ride through Belgium to the Rhine. There, he immediately caught a steam-boat that got socked in by fog in the middle of the night, so he got off the steamer, was rowed to shore where he caught one coach before switching to another at 3am to arrive in Frankfort where he met his wife, Cècile, whom he'd left there visiting family and friends. Immediately into another carriage, it took 3 days to reach Leipzig where he arrived at 2pm. He walked out on stage at 6pm that evening to conduct the first concert of the season with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. After the concert, he admitted to being a little tired... following nine continuous days of travel, the 19th-Century equivalent of jet-lag.

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MENDELSSOHN: BACK in LEIPZIG

After he returned to Leipzig, he started work on founding a new music school there, comparable to one the Prussian king had proposed for Berlin but which several years later had still never gotten off the ground. The next spring, Leipzig's new conservatory (see left) opened to take in its first students with Mendelssohn as its director. He asked Robert Schumann to teach composition and Clara Schumann to teach piano. Later, he would conduct the premiere of Schumann's Piano Concerto with Clara Schumann at the piano.

There was also an old friend he brought in to teach the violin, Ferdinand David who was the Gewandhaus Orchestra's concertmaster or principal 1st Violinist. A year later, Mendelssohn would begin composing his Violin Concerto for him (you can hear two prodigies play the last movement of it in this music-video post).

During Mendelssohn's lifetime, the concert experience was primarily a hodge-podge of orchestral works (sometimes excerpts) interspersed with piano solos or chamber music or songs and short choral works. Most of the music was written by living composers or those – like Beethoven – who may have died only recently. Mendelssohn regularly began to program more “old music,” especially by Bach and Mozart, something unheard of then. He would mix old and new music with a soloist playing a concerto or singing a group of selections which became the formula still heard in most symphony concerts today.

Another fairly new idea was “the conductor.” Even in Beethoven's time, most orchestras were led by the concertmaster or the principal 1st Violinist (Odin Rathnam, who'll be performing on September 16th with friends of his from the West Branch Music Festival, is also the concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony). But as the music became more complicated and concerts became more varied, the concertmaster went from sitting at the front of the violin section to standing in front of the orchestra, conducting with his violin bow. In 1820, violinist Ludwig Spohr used a short wooden stick called a “baton” to beat time with so the musicians could follow him better. This is usually how conductors today still communicate visually to the musicians.

By the time Mendelssohn was conducting in London the idea of using a baton was barely 9 years old and still, for some reason, “controversial,” probably because that wasn't the way they used to do it...

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MENDELSSOHN'S HOME in LEIPZIG

As there was a “Mendelssohn House” in Berlin where Felix grew up, there was now a “Mendelssohn House” in Leipzig (see left) where the composer lived with his wife and children. They had five children over a period of seven years but none of the children exhibited any musical talent. Cècile was considered a “placid” temperament who might help keep her husband calm but she did not inspire him to compose or shift his music to any higher level of intensity, intellectually or emotionally. It seems he didn't really discuss his music with her – that, he still reserved for his sister as he had always done. If anything, as some friends noted, his music became stuck in a more comfortable rut. That might not hold true for some of the works he composed in those years – finishing the Scottish Symphony, the Violin Concerto and most of all, the music for A Midsummer Night's Dream. It may be a criticism of the 2nd STRING QUINTET he composed in 1845, the year after he'd finished the Violin Concerto and two years after the Midsummer music: it's too comfortable, pleasant enough but perhaps too close to trying to recapture the spirit of the Octet he'd composed 20 years earlier.

This small corner study was where Mendelssohn composed, using a tiny spinet piano. On top of the desk's shelf is a portrait of his sister, Fanny, and on the wall (at least as its maintained now that it's a museum) are framed water-colors Mendelssohn had painted during his travels.

Mendelssohn frequently played for his wife and the children. Even though she was entirely devoted to him and his music, Cècile's favorite piano pieces were by Frederic Chopin. At one point, Mendelssohn writes a fan letter to Chopin asking him for a scrap of music written down with his autograph and a dedication to his wife.

The music room here was for his own music-making: friends would stop over to play music or famous guests when they were in town. He did not have time to organize anything as regular as the Sunday musicales of his childhood. After his mother's death in 1843, Mendelssohn inherited the Berlin family home which without a thought he gave to his sisters. Fanny was still holding the musicales there on her own.

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MENDELSSOHN'S FINAL YEAR

Much of Mendelssohn's biography reads like an appointment book – works he composed or conducted in Leipzig or London, responsibilities he took on or didn't. He wanted to write a new symphony and considered several possible subjects for an opera but rejected them all.

He heard the great soprano Jenny Lind (“The Swedish Nightingale” as she was called) and fell in love with her voice (there was an unsubstantiated rumor that he may have fallen in love with her, but there's no proof of that). He wrote the soprano solo in his new oratorio with her voice in mind. Unfortunately she chose not to sing the English premiere but agreed to sing the next performance in Vienna.

So Mendelssohn finished the oratorio Elijah in a single burst of creative energy during the summer of 1846. As soon as he was done with it, he went off to England to conduct its premiere. With a major work getting ready for its first performance, Mendelssohn still found time and energy to conduct a few orchestral concerts and play a Beethoven piano concerto along with several chamber music concerts, two appearances at Buckingham Palace and playing at a reception at the Prussian ambassador's home. Talk about “workaholic”!

Elijah was a great success, but Mendelssohn was exhausted by the time he returned to Leipzig. He had said when he said good-bye to Victoria and Albert – after she sang three of his songs and he played through several new pieces for them – he was so tired he could hardly raise his arms. Rather than travel straight through as he used to, he had to stop three times to rest.

He had only been home in Leipzig a few days when news arrived that his sister Fanny had died suddenly – she had been rehearsing a work of his for one of those Sunday musicales when she felt faint, her hands falling from the piano keyboard. She was carried to the next room but never regained consciousness: by 11:00 that night, she had died. She was only 41.

(see illustration, right, a portrait of Fanny & her husband, Wilhelm Hensel.)

When Felix received the news, he collapsed and remained “insensible for some time.” When he came to, he could not stop crying. Even though he seemed to recuperate, the shock changed him and so Cècile decided to take him away on a vacation to rest.

They met his brother Paul and Fanny's husband, Wilhelm Hensel, but the time together was uncomfortable, reminding him of who wasn't there. So Cècile took him to Switzerland. A friend visiting him there commented about how gray he looked, how he had aged. One day, he couldn't stand the idea of playing the piano; the next day, he thought he might write a new piano concerto. He sketched a good deal (like this water-color of Lucerne, see left) and eventually began to compose a string quartet. It is very dramatic and uncharacteristically emotional: he called it his “Requiem for Fanny.”

He went back to work, getting ready for the Berlin performance of Elijah but when he entered the family house and saw the room where Fanny had died – and his score still sitting on the piano's music-rack – he broke down again and decided he could not conduct, so the performance was canceled. He would probably cancel the Vienna performance, too.

He submitted his resignation to the Gewandhaus but returned to get ready for the Conservatory's new year but in early October, he was ill, though for no apparent reason. Later in the month, he had great spasms of pain – his symptoms that could have indicated a series of strokes except doctors then didn't understand them. A few days later, on November 4th, he died around 9:30 that night at the age of 38.

People in Leipzig had heard Mendelssohn was ill and they waited in a vigil outside the house by the hundreds. When they heard that he had died, they stormed the house. The children had been asleep but when Cècile went to bring them in to see their father, friends had to push the crowd out of the way so they could enter the room and forcibly bar the doors.

(The illustration, left, includes a sketch made of Mendelssohn's profile as he lay in repose after his death beside the actual death-mask made shortly afterward. It was a common habit to take death-masks - in later decades, people often took photographs of the body as it lay on the death-bed, something we may think gruesome or ghoulish today.)

After the funeral – where a chorus of 600 sang a Bach chorale and a chorus from Mendelssohn's St. Paul – a thousand people escorted the coffin by torchlight to the train-station. That night, all along the route, people had gathered to watch the train pass, many of them singing tributes. The train arrived in Berlin at 7am and Mendelssohn was buried in the cemetery next to Fanny.

Memorial concerts were performed all over Germany and in England. The Vienna performance of Elijah had not been canceled but now it was staged as a memorial to the composer. The music stands were all draped in black, the performers dressed entirely in mourning. The score rested on the raised podium that Mendelssohn would have used, a laurel wreath resting on top of it. The man who conducted the performance stood on a lower podium to lead the performance. Many in the audience wept throughout the performance.

Consolations arrived from Queen Victoria who had written in her diary that she was “horrified, astounded and distressed” by the news of his death. She reflected the attitude of many of his fans, both British and German.

One of the most popular musicians of the day had passed and the outpouring of grief and shock was felt across a continent.

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn in Leipzig

After his father's unexpected death at the age of 59, Mendelssohn returned to Leipzig to begin the next phase of his career. He had been named director of the major orchestra in the city which was one of the major cultural centers in the German-speaking lands.

In the mid-1700s, Bach had been music director of the major churches in Leipzig and taught the music students at St. Thomas Church but he and his music were quickly forgotten by most people. While Bach wasn't actually famous in the 1820s, Mendelssohn had conducted Bach's monumental St. Matthew Passion six years earlier which many describe as the beginning of a new awareness of Bach and his music. So how appropriate it was that Mendelssohn now found himself in the same city with a similar musical position that Bach had.

THE ORCHESTRA & ITS CONCERT HALL IN LEIPZIG

The orchestra is called the 'Gewandhaus' Orchestra – (geh-VONT-house). It was formed by some free-lance musicians in 1743 when Bach was still alive and gave its concerts in private homes – not of the nobility but of the wealthier merchants in the city and soon to the larger space of the “Three Swans Tavern.”

Bach was also responsible for public concerts when he was director of a society that gave concerts of non-church music in Zimmerman's Coffee House. Here, he and his sons performed keyboard concertos and secular works like his Orchestral Suites with a small orchestra. It may well be Bach's “Collegium musicum” as it was called (basically a “collection of musicians”) that turned into the orchestra Mendelssohn would conduct almost a hundred years later.

At any rate, the audiences outgrew the coffee-houses and the homes and the taverns. Eventually it was given one floor of the Cloth Merchants' Guild building (see above) – known as “the Gewandhaus” – which then served as Leipzig's main concert hall until the orchestra moved into a lavish new hall in 1885 (see left). The statue in front of the building is a monument to Mendelssohn that was added in 1892 but removed by the Nazis. The statue was reconstructed and placed in front of Bach's St. Thomas Church only recently.

This building was destroyed during the Allied Bombing Raids near the end of World War II in 1944. The current, more modern hall wasn't opened until 1981. The orchestra still performs there and continues to record and tour around the world.

It is one of the oldest public orchestras in Europe.

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MENDELSSOHN GETS MARRIED

As Jane Austen opens her "Pride & Prejudice" (1811) with Mrs. Bennett's line about a single man with fortune automatically being in need of a wife, Mendelssohn may not have been as aware of this as his mother might have been.

Though Mendelssohn was busy in Leipzig, he still continued conducting and performing around Germany. He was on his way to Düsseldorf for the premiere of his new oratorio, St. Paul, when he stopped at Frankfurt to conduct an amateur choral society there. He was staying with the family of a local minister where he met Cècile Jeanrenaud (right), the daughter of a French Protestant preacher who was staying there. She had assumed he was some old organist and was surprised to find out he was so young... and handsome. He was 27, she was 19.

A few days later, he left for Düsseldorf but returned to Frankfurt on his way home. He had fallen in love with Cècile and on another visit that fall, proposed to her while they were out on a carriage ride. They were married in March of the following year.

While they were on their honeymoon, Mendelssohn composed a string quartet, a setting of Psalm 42 (for soloists, chorus & orchestra, about 25 minutes long) and his second piano concerto which he finished on August 5th and performed for the first time sixteen days later in England along with other performances of the oratorio, St. Paul. (Some honeymoon! But then you've probably figured out he was a workaholic.)

They settled into their new home in Leipzig. Out of this very happy marriage, they had three sons and two daughters.

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THE SCHUMANNS, LEIPZIG FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS

With the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Mendelssohn was busy conducting and performing, especially with two new friends of his, the composer Robert Schumann and his girlfriend, Clara Wieck, who would become one of the finest pianists of the century. The two were very much in love but Clara's father was taking Schumann to the law-courts to keep him from marrying his daughter.

Mendelssohn had a little trouble relating to Schumann (see left) who was better known as a music critic than a composer. He had two “imaginary personalities” which he used in both his writing and his music – a passionate, extroverted Florestan and the dreamy Eusebius (you-SEE-b'yus). Often he would write reviews under one name or the other, depending on the mood he wanted to get across. They also appear in some of his pieces both as characters and, less directly, as 'moods.' This may also be part of the Right Brain / Left Brain attitudes mentioned in an earlier post – but for Mendelssohn, these personalities made no sense. Schumann seemed very undirected and Mendelssohn thought an artist needed to control himself more than that.

Around this time, Mendelssohn received a letter from Richard Wagner, then 23. He had not yet written any of the operas he'd later become famous for. Wagner had a symphony he wanted Mendelssohn to conduct – Leipzig was his home town, after all – but Mendelssohn had already conducted it once, didn't like it and couldn't see performing it again, so he politely refused.

At that time, who would know Wagner would later become Mendelssohn's worst nightmare?

Meanwhile, Robert Schumann had gone to Vienna, visited with Franz Schubert's brother who gave him a box of old manuscripts left behind when Schubert died in 1828. In the box, Schumann found a manuscript for a huge symphony that had never been performed. He gave it Mendelssohn on New Year's Eve and it was given its first performance, ten years after the composer's death.

In a biography that begins to read more like an appointment book – composing this here, performing that there – Mendelssohn was 30 when he wrote his PIANO TRIO NO. 1 – we'll hear some excerpts from it with Odin Rathnam and members of the West Branch Music Festival on September 16th. (You can hear a classic performance of the 1st movement in this music-video post.)

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BERLIN CALLING

Meanwhile, Prussia had a new king. Friedrich Wilhelm IV (see left) had a more refined interest in music than his father had and he tried to lure Mendelssohn back to Berlin, the Prussian capital. His grand plan included a Royal Academy of the Arts with Mendelssohn as its director, far better than the old Sing-Academy could ever have been. He would be resident composer for the Royal Theater, writing “incidental music” for staged plays (the 19th Century equivalent of film scores). He would also conduct the music for the Royal Chapel and be busily engaged as a composer. In fact, he would basically become the Musical Director of the City of Berlin, a very powerful position.

Dubious, Mendelssohn cautiously agreed to a one-year trial run. (Keep in mind, Karl Marx, the philosopher and future writer of the Communist Manifesto, described the king as “being able to talk as persuasively as a traveling salesman.”)

Mendelssohn wrote music for Sophocles' Antigone, an ancient Greek tragedy that the audience, having no familiarity with ancient Greek tragedy, found boring, all this talk about honor and noble character. People didn't want to “see ideas,” they wanted to watch action that told a story.

A performance of Mendelssohn's oratorio St. Paul was coolly received as well. He began work on another oratorio – this one, inspired by the story of Elijah.

But nothing came of the king's ideas for a school. Everyone agreed and talked about it but even a few years later, it was no closer to becoming reality.

Though Mendelssohn agreed to write music for a few more plays for the king, he returned to Leipzig convinced Berlin would never amount to anything. If the king's school couldn't get started there, he'd start one himself in Leipzig.

And so in 1842 he started working on what would become the Leipzig Conservatory, associated with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. It opened the next year.

(Several years after Mendelssohn's death, Richard Wagner brought up the idea of a major music school in Berlin to the king's attention and the king nodded and agreed whole-heartedly. But still nothing ever came of the idea.)

One of the king's projects Mendelssohn couldn't resist, though, was writing music for a performance of Shakespeare's play, “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” He had written the overture for it when he was 17 and now that he was 33, he had the chance to write music for the whole play. He added scene-setting music that would accompany the dances of the fairy sprites or set the mood for a night in the woods. There would be music to introduce different scenes, including the most famous piece Mendelssohn ever composed, the Wedding March.

The performance of the play and his music was a disaster. Intermissions were too long, people lost interest and became impatient with Shakespeare's play. But when the Wedding March started to play, everyone started paying attention. One nobleman told him “wonderful music you wrote – too bad you wasted it on such a silly play...” Mendelssohn just turned around and walked away.

The music he wrote for the wedding scene in Shakespeare's play is still one of the most frequently heard pieces at weddings ever since, though today it's heard less often. Still, people who know nothing about classical music will usually recognize its tune even they've only heard it on TV in movies - or in cartoons.

You can hear it here in this music-video post.

- Dr. Dick

The Mendelssohn Houses in Berlin

It took me forever to find this illustration of what seems to be the house where Felix Mendelssohn and his family lived when he was growing up in Berlin. Huge, isn't it?? This is a house, not a royal palace or government building or a university or a posh apartment complex!

But the German caption translates this as "The Mendelssohn House on Leipzig Street, Berlin." The official address of the house Abraham Mendelssohn purchased in 1825 was 3 Leipziger Strasse, Berlin. This is where the Sunday musicales took place and where the great minds of Berlin came to be entertained by music and conversation.

Behind the house were "several guest houses," as one source described it, plus a large park with sub-gardens where the family could walk and where Felix rode his horse.

This sketch (right) is labeled "Garden House in Leipzig Street where Mendelssohn's youthful works were [written]." It is officially undated and the artist is uncredited.

The caption's words aufgeführt wurden translate literally as "rose up" which doesn't sound good in English. However, it reminded me that Felix wrote to his sister Fanny that he was sitting in the garden reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream when he decided he would write a piece of music inspired by it. Maybe that's how this one "youthful work" rose up and became reality?

It gets very confusing because the house Mendelssohn lived in in the city of Leipzig is also called "The Mendelssohn House." The fact the Berlin house was located on Leipzig Street makes it even more confusing.

WARY OF WIKIPEDIA: A WARNING

I'm no fan of recommending Wikipedia as an on-line resource because it can be so inaccurate, but that's where I found this picture. Unfortunately, the person entering the data couldn't even translate a simple German caption correctly: he labeled it "The Mendelssohn House in Leipzig" when the German clearly says "in der Leipziger Strasse in Berlin" or "on Leipzig Street in Berlin." Well...

My question is - is the date 1900 correct? And why can't I find any information about when the house was demolished?

I knew, from several biographical sources, that his father Abraham bought a new, larger house on Leipzig Street in Berlin away from the busier part of the city and I knew that it no longer exists. But I've read nothing about when and why - was it torn down by the Nazis in the 1930s or was it bombed out during the Fall of Berlin in 1945? Was it demolished earlier in the century to make way for some other building? That often happens, too - ask anyone who's gone back to their old neighborhood and seen a familiar house or store replaced by a parking lot...

THE MENDELSSOHNS' HOUSE IN BERLIN

Anyway, today I was tooling around Google looking for any illustrations about Leipzig associated with Mendelssohn.

I had seen several photos of the house he lived in after he moved to Leipzig in 1835. But then I found this photograph (above) taken of the Berlin Mendelssohn House in 1900. If this is true, then this is the house Abraham Mendelssohn moved into in 1825, the year Felix Mendelssohn composed his Octet for Strings!

The family had continued living in the house and they continued to work in the family banking business until the 1930s. These were descendants of the youngest child, Paul Mendelssohn who went into their father's banking business. There were also descendants of Felix Mendelssohn's uncles who managed the company until 1938.

In 1888, a 2nd cousin of the composer (grandson of his Uncle Joseph) was "elevated" to the nobility, meaning they could add the 'von' to their name. And so a grandson of the composer became Otto von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the oldest son of Felix's brother Paul became Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in 1896.

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THERE ARE TWO MENDELSSOHN HOUSES IN BERLIN

Here is a tourist travelogue video posted on YouTube - in German - about the Mendelssohn House - this one is the Bank Building and the house where other members of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family lived and worked. It was built by one of Felix's uncles. It is located at 51 Jäger Strasse about two blocks from Leipzig Street but perhaps in a different neighborhood from where Abraham Mendelssohn's house was located on 3 Leipzig Strasse.

At 0:14-0:27 you can see images of the Mendelssohn & Co. Bank with a sequence of the interior
of the house - a staircase - beginning at 0:40 with a shot of the building's main entrance (see photo). Felix Mendelssohn is mentioned but I think as a visitor to the house of his uncle and cousins. At 1:53-1:58, during an aerial view of this section of "the heart of" Berlin, they highlight The Mendelssohn House - in this case, this is where the bank building still stands.

This is a recent photograph of the doorway of the building that used to house the Mendelssohn Bank which was built in 1820 which can be seen at 0:41 for a couple of seconds before you go through the front door into the staircase leading up to the family's living quarters.
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This is a photograph that had been labeled "Mendelssohn House Berlin" but must refer to the banking house: it looks like a modern boardroom.

More photographs about the Leipzig House will be posted in a separate post.

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn the Traveler

By the time he was 20, Mendelssohn had finished studying at the university in Berlin and conducted the first public performances of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion in probably a hundred years. From there, he decided to start traveling – what college grads in those days called “The Grand Tour.” When he was a child, Mendelssohn traveled with his family to Paris, to Switzerland and various places around Germany, but now – on his own – he decided to go to England.

MENDELSSOHN IN ENGLAND

It took 11 days to cross the North Sea from Hamburg to London and he practically crawled down the gang-plank when he arrived, he was so sick. Between the frequent storms and the stretches of calm weather, a ship powered only by sails wasn't going to go very fast: a steam-ship may have crossed the Atlantic in 1818 but that doesn't mean they replaced sailing ships immediately.

Mendelssohn conducted concerts with great success, including his Overture to Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream” and the first symphony he'd composed for full orchestra. It's not the first symphony he wrote since he'd composed 13 smaller symphonies for string orchestra by the time he was 14; and it can't be called his first “mature” symphony because he was 15 when he wrote it. There was one slight change: he made an orchestral version of the Scherzo of the String Octet and replaced the original third movement of this symphony with it. He also played Beethoven's last piano concerto, the “Emperor” Concerto, written the year Mendelssohn was born.

There was a benefit concert where Mendelssohn was the star attraction and he brought together many great singers and pianists who were in London to perform on the program. The audience was enthusiastic throughout the concert which lasted a total of four hours.

After this, he traveled north and visited business associates of his father's who had a country estate in Scotland. He walked through Edinburgh and made notes about places associated with Mary Queen of Scots. It was a stormy day when he saw Fingal's Cave on an island off Scotland's rugged Atlantic Coast – he wrote home about seeing it, scribbling down a few measures of music which next year became the opening of an orchestral work he first called “The Lonely Island.”
By the time he had completed it, he called it “The Hebrides Overture” or “Fingal's Cave” (even today, it's still known by either of these names). You can see a video of a visit to Fingal's Cave and hear the music Mendelssohn composed inspired by his visit there.

He also jotted down some ideas that would eventually become a symphony inspired by his Scottish trip. He started working on it the following year, but for some reason it took him 11 years before he was satisfied with it.

While there, he also met the great author, Sir Walter Scott (see left), whose novels Mendelssohn and his sister had read (in English). By this time, Scott was old and in the midst of moving into a new house, too impatient to be bothered by a young fan – it had taken days to find him and in the end, Mendelssohn had only a half hour of superficial conversation with him, nothing like his visits to Goethe had been.

Sir Walter Scott was the first British writer to achieve an international reputation during his lifetime. He's most famous for his novels Ivanhoe and The Lady of the Lake. Beethoven and Schubert read his books – Schubert set some of his words (his famous song “Ave Maria” is originally written to a poem of Scott's) – and both wanted to meet him but never had the chance.

When Mendelssohn returned to London, in a hurry to leave for home, he was involved in a carriage accident. The carriage tipped over, he fell to the street and his knee was badly injured. As a result he had to spend several weeks in bed and missed getting home in time for his sister Fanny's wedding. He was supposed to compose some music for it so in addition to getting everything else ready for the wedding, the bride-to-be ended up composing her own music and playing it herself!

Mendelssohn at least made it home in time for his parents' 25th Wedding Anniversary and gave them a little operetta as a present: “The Return from Foreign Lands” was performed at a Sunday musicale and was well received by the family, but Mendelssohn wasn't satisfied and never did anything with it after that one performance.

OFF TO ITALY

In the meantime, he was offered a teaching job at the University of Berlin which he turned down. Tired of Berlin, Mendelssohn decided to continue traveling and left home in May for Italy. On the way, he stopped to visit Goethe – it turned out to be the last time (you can read more about his visits to Goethe when he was a child in this earlier post).

He stayed in Munich for a while and met a young pianist. He fell in love with her playing if not with her – even the king was joking they should get married – and this inspired him to write a piano concerto of his own.

From Munich, he went to Salzburg (the City of Mozart) and Vienna before arriving in Venice in October. When he stopped in Florence, Italy, he painted this water-color (see, right) of the cathedral which he sent home with a letter.

While he was in Rome, the Pope died and Mendelssohn witnessed the papal funeral and conclave of cardinals gathering to elect the Pope's successor.

This was were he met Hector Berlioz, the composer of the Symphonie fantastique among other works. In other posts, I've described him as the wildest of the wild new generation of composers, almost the exact opposite of Mendelssohn. Where Mendelssohn was neatly dressed and elegant and enjoyed conversation at cocktail parties in peoples' homes, Berlioz was wild and casually (often sloppily) dressed, preferred sitting in dives with rowdy friends drinking wine and smoking cigars.

Berlioz (seen here in a caricature drawn while he was in Rome) wrote that Mendelssohn was an admirable fellow, a genius, “a confirmed Lutheran” who played Beethoven piano sonatas splendidly but who did not understand Berlioz' music at all.

Mendelssohn wrote to his father that the instrumentation of Berlioz' new symphony was “so terribly dirty” you felt like “washing your hands after handling one of his scores.” He described the Symphonie fantastique: “An artist goes to a ball” – he left out the bit about the opium overdose – “then goes to the devil when all the instruments have a hang-over and vomit music. And yet he is a very pleasant man and speaks well and has fine ideas and you can't help liking him.”

In the late Spring of 1830, he went to Milan where he met Karl Mozart, one of Mozart's sons who was an Austrian diplomat there. Mendelssohn played Mozart's music for him. Friends of Karl's began a conversation about Shakespeare plays – the tragedies were okay but the comedies were stupid, especially that fairy play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and they all agreed that Mendelssohn shouldn't waste his time reading it. He wrote home that he “kept quiet like a coward,” unable to tell them when he was 17 he'd written an overture to the play – ironically, ten years later, he would write more music for a production of the play, too, including the famous “Wedding March.”

WORKING HIS WAY HOME BY WAY OF SWITZERLAND, PARIS & ENGLAND (again)

In Switzerland, he took long walks in the valleys and climbed some mountains. In his letters home, he described how some English tourists complained about the lack of fireplaces where they were staying and that their travel-agent “never mentioned they have mountains here!” There was a German tourist who looked at the surrounding landscape as if he were going to buy it, then shook his head and walked away as if he'd decided it was too expensive.

Back in Munich in September, he gave the premiere of his newly finished piano concerto. This piece would become so popular, everybody wanted to play it. A few years later, in Paris, his friend Berlioz joked that so many people had played that concerto on this one piano, the piano could now play it by itself.

(Incidentally, Stuart Malina, conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, will be playing this concerto with the orchestra in February's concert.)

On the coach-ride from Munich to Paris, he thought about writing an opera for the King of Bavaria: maybe Shakespeare's “The Tempest.” He never did.

Meanwhile, early in 1830, there had just been another revolution in Paris, not as far-reaching or as tragic as the old one in 1789. Life was very different now than it had been when Mendelssohn had visited there only six years earlier. Among the great names who dominated the cultural scene – like the German composer Meyerbeer and the Italian violinist Paganini – were two young pianists: Franz Liszt (then 19 - see left) ) and Frederic Chopin (then 21). As a result of Paganini's influence, Liszt had closed himself off from the world and practiced the piano sometimes 14 hours a day. Mendelssohn had heard him play six years before and thought he had “more fingers than brains,” but now thought he was developing into a great talent. Like Berlioz, Liszt wrote music that was beyond Mendelssohn's appreciation – too wild, too modern – but Liszt sat down and played through Mendelssohn's new concerto at sight, never having seen it before, and played it so beautifully, Mendelssohn thought it was a miracle, one of the best performances it ever received.

Paris was not so crazy about Mendelssohn's music. A lot of the great musicians and poets he met rubbed him the wrong way. He also heard the news that Goethe had just died at the age of 82.

He was glad to be back in London in time for his 23rd birthday. But he received news that his friend Eduard Rietz had died at the age of 29. Rietz was his violin teacher and the violinist he'd written the Octet for as a birthday present. In memory of his friend, he wrote a nostalgic and gentle slow movement which he added to the String Quintet he'd written with his teacher in mind back when he was 17.

Otherwise, he had great success conducting several concerts in London and played his own new concerto and one by Beethoven to rave reviews. He even gave an organ recital at St. Paul's cathedral and the huge church was filled with listeners.

While he was there, he also got the news that his old teacher Zelter had died, too. Three close friends had died while he was away – it was June before he left to return to Berlin. It had been two years since he left home.

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RETURNING HOME (FOR A WHILE)

With all the success he'd experienced in his life so far and already famous at 23, he was surprised when he was turned down as Music Director of the old Singing Academy which Zelter had run for the last 33 years. It may have been because the Academy's board figured he would not stay put in Berlin for very long; his friends and family suspected it may have been because he had been born a Jew. Things in Berlin had not improved much since the days of his grandfather. The school hired the old director's assistant – a case of loyalty – but he turned out to be such a mediocre director, the school declined rapidly over the next 18 years.

London had asked him for a new symphony, so he completed the one he'd started in Rome, inspired by his travels in Italy. He stopped on the way to London and conducted some concerts in Düsseldorf where they asked him to come back and direct the Choral Festival there.

In England, his “Italian” Symphony was a huge success - you can hear the opening of the 1st movement here - but Mendelssohn was unhappy with it and decided to revise it. Even though he performed it many times during his life, it was still unpublished when he died.

During his trips to England, he'd heard several oratorios by George Frederic Handel. When he went back to Düsseldorf, he conducted the first Handel performances Germany ever heard of the “Messiah” with its famous Hallelujah Chorus. Over the next few years there, he conducted several other oratorios and operas and orchestral concerts, all of which were well received, though some students demonstrated in front of the concert hall, carrying signs that said “Christian Music for Christian Musicians,” a reference again to Mendelssohn's Jewish heritage. They had to be escorted away by the police.

(See illustration, left, of the concert hall in Düsseldorf between 1830 and 1864. Robert Schumann would conduct concerts in this same hall about a decade later with much less success.)

It was there Mendelssohn first performed his new oratorio – inspired by the music of Handel and Bach – based on the biblical story of St. Paul. Perhaps he was thinking about this anti-Semitic attitude when he chose a story about a man, a Jew persecuting the early Christians, who was converted in a blinding flash from Heaven “on the road to Damascus” and who later became one of the great figures of the early Christian church.

SETTLING IN LEIPZIG: A NEW HOME

He was then offered a job conducting the orchestra in Leipzig, one of the great German cities in what was then the Kingdom of Saxony. It had been the home of Bach for most of his career. Mendelssohn would conduct the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (geh-VONT-house) - there's more information about the hall & the orchestra in another post (see illustration, right, which includes the Mendelssohn Monument, placed in front of the building in 1892).

Shortly after Mendelssohn settled there, his father died suddenly, apparently of a stroke. His sister Fanny was worried about Felix because “you know how he worshiped Father.” They had become much closer in the last couple of years after they'd had a big argument: his father wanted him to drop the name Mendelssohn completely and just be Felix Bartholdy, not Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as the name had been changed to after his conversion, back when he was 7 years old. But the composer was proud of his grandfather's name and wouldn't drop it. He always signed his name (see signature, left) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

Back in Leipzig after his father's funeral, Mendelssohn began a new part of his career. He was no longer the traveler: Leipzig became his new home.

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn, the Person

People might assume, because their parents were wealthy, the Mendelssohn children had it easy.

THE FAMILY SCHEDULE: HOME SCHOOLING in the EARLY 1800s

They were awakened at 5am.

They were taught at home with private tutors but music was just a fraction of the curriculum. In addition to German (their own language) they also were taught Latin, Greek, mathematics, a lot of European history, geography, aesthetics (Felix's teacher was the great philosopher Hegel), political philosophy, German and foreign literature and also drawing and water-coloring. They also learned to speak fluent French and English. Later, Felix also learned Italian.

On Sundays, they could sleep in till 6.

They would go for long hikes and ice-skated or rowed on the near-by river. They were excellent swimmers. As a child, Felix loved to ride a horse. Even when he was 24 and living away from home, he wrote to his father asking for permission to buy a horse (permission granted).

The garden was often the scene of out-door parties, the trees hung with paper-lanterns the children had made. The children even published their own in-house newspaper.

In addition, there were many music lessons. The younger daughter Rebecka sang and the younger son Paul played the cello. For both Felix and his older sister Fanny, there were piano lessons and composition lessons. Felix also studied the violin and the viola.

Very frequently they were among the performers for the family's Sunday afternoon musicales. So they had to rehearse, as well.

Around this schedule, Felix somehow found time to compose a great deal of music.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FAMILY

The house became an intellectual center in Berlin: many of the greatest minds in the city or visiting artists and professors would come to their musicales which included more than just music-making. Lea Mendelssohn was a very fine hostess and the food was first-rate. The Mendelssohns loved English customs, so great amounts of tea were consumed. And of course, with all these eloquent guests and great minds the conversation was especially lively.

Like the Kennedy Family, the children of the Mendelssohn Family knew they represented a leading Berlin family and therefore German culture. They were taught to speak well and to listen well. The girls were supposed to combine charm with knowledge. The boys were supposed to be able to do more than 'hold' a conversation.

Mendelssohn read a lot – for instance, Homer (in German) and Plato (in Greek). He read most of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, then all the rage, and Shakespeare (who was not all the rage) in both English and German. He also owned a copy of The Decameron, a 14th-Century collection of often bawdy love-stories (it was a gift from his mother-in-law). He read the novels of Charles Dickens and his library included large collections of the works by his mentor Goethe and his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn.

Like many people in Berlin in the 1820s, the family was not outwardly religious – they did not attend temple before the children were converted to Christianity and they didn't really attend church on a regular basis afterward. That doesn't mean they didn't have a sense of faith. In fact, in one letter, Felix complained about people who were overly pious: he couldn't see himself that way.

TIME & MANNERS SHAPE THE PERSONALITY

He found England much to his liking. The British attitude of the “stiff upper lip” suited him as well as its manners and sense of reserve. Mendelssohn could be described as gentle, happy, charming, polite – above all, polite. One biographer described him as “a polite man who wrote polite music.”

Beethoven may have raged against the inhumanity of the Napoleonic Wars or the old-fashioned nobility or having his breakfast served late. Beethoven may have written music that “stormed the heavens” and opened new worlds to mortal men. None of this was Mendelssohn's style.

Many people think classical composers are a rather serious bunch, writing all this serious music. Mendelssohn had a sense of humor and loved lively conversation. He loved listening to and telling jokes, though compared to the off-beat and often dirty humor of Mozart or Beethoven, Mendelssohn's jokes would all be G-rated.

Unlike Franz Liszt and many other musicians of the era, Mendelssohn was not a ladies' man. He loved his wife and was very much at home in a domestic setting.

He was also a workaholic which no doubt contributed to his early death. He worked hard as a composer, a conductor, a pianist, even an organist as well as music director and music teacher who in his spare time organized music festivals and founded music schools.

He loved to travel. He made ten trips to England, mostly concert tours but they all included time to see the country, not just perform. He climbed Swiss mountains and took long hikes in the German countryside.

Luckily for him, he could fall asleep quickly and take a cat-nap on a couch in the middle of a party if he needed to.

Everything he did seemed effortless.

ALL THIS BUT STILL FULL OF DOUBT

But for some reason, he was often full of doubt about his own talent. He frequently revised his music. Sometimes it was written quickly, other times it took a long time to take shape. He worked hard and was suspicious of composers (or any creative artist) who “waited for the Divine Spark” of trance-like inspiration. He also was suspicious of a lot of technical talk about music: the important thing was not how it was composed but that it was composed well.

Not surprisingly, his manuscripts are very clean, usually free of corrections. But still, when he “finished” his Italian Symphony in 1833, he set it aside to revise it. That didn't keep him from playing it – it was a very popular work in his lifetime – but when he died 15 years later, he still hadn't published it.

He'd begun working on the “Scottish” Symphony when he was 22, not long after his trip to Scotland – he already had ideas for it written down while he was there – but he didn't actually “finish” it until he was 33.

The numbering of his works is very confusing. He never published the Reformation Symphony either, though it actually was the second of the mature symphonies he composed. It ended up becoming No. 5, making it look like it should be a late work. The second string quartet he composed was sent to the publisher before the first one.

Music publishers used a catalog system of “Opus Numbers” - opus is the Latin word for “work” - and we usually think of it as a chronological list: a composer finishes a piece, sends it to the publishers and then writes the next piece. That isn't always the case. A string quintet Mendelssohn published as his Op. 18 looks like it should've been written before the Octet, Op. 20 – but it was really written a year after the Octet.

Many people have different opinions about Mendelssohn's music. Just the other day, a friend on Facebook told me “If you can't recognize who wrote it, it must be Mendelssohn.” Meaning, I guess, that if it didn't sound like anybody else, it must be him!

Another friend told me recently that he didn't think much of his first two symphonies but figured that's because they were early works “and he hadn't found his voice yet.” I pointed out that that 2nd Symphony was written when he was 31 but two of his most famous pieces which my friend agreed definitely sounded like “mature Mendelssohn” were written when he was still in his mid-teens!

A LITTLE OF THIS, A LITTLE OF THAT

In a post about “classical vs. romantic,” I mentioned that Mendelssohn was a little of each, not one or the other. He preferred “classical” clarity and design but enjoyed “romantic” story-telling and pleasure (not so much the over-the-top emotionalism of someone like his friend Hector Berlioz whose “Symphonie fantastique” tells the story of a man having a bad experience on opium, imagining he's killed his girl-friend and then goes to Hell for her murder - oh, and he wrote this work to impress the woman he loved...).

Mendelssohn's music is primarily happy music – the finale of his Violin Concerto (written when he was 35) is just as exuberant as the opening of his Italian Symphony (begun when he was 22) or the whole Octet (composed when he was 16). (Check out the music videos, here.) When he wrote more emotional, sad or tender music, some people called it “sentimental” or “maudlin” - never tragic.

In another post - about Math, Science & Philosophy - I wrote about one of his teachers, the philosopher Hegel who is remembered today primarily for his “Hegelian Dialectic.” You take a statement or idea – call it a thesis – and then you take the opposite of that statement or idea – call it an antithesis (anti-thesis) – then take the best parts of both of them to create a kind of compromise – call it a synthesis.

Perhaps Mendelssohn himself was a living example of this: two parts classical (thesis) + one part romantic (antithesis) = Felix Mendelssohn (synthesis).

Dr. Dick