|
Jakob Ludwig
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, born and generally known as Felix Mendelssohn
(February 3, 1809 – November 4, 1847) was a German composer, pianist and conductor
of the early Romantic period. He was born to a notable Jewish family, being the
grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His work includes symphonies,
concerti, oratorios, piano and chamber music. After a long period of relative
denigration due to changing musical tastes and anti-Semitism in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, his creative originality is now being recognized and
re-evaluated, and he is now among the most popular composers of the Romantic
era.
 Life
Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, the son of a banker, Abraham Mendelssohn (who
later changed his surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and who was himself the son of
the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), and of Lea Salomon, a member of
the Itzig family and the sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy.
Felix grew up in an environment of intense intellectual ferment. The greatest minds
of Germany were frequent visitors to his family's home in Berlin, including Wilhelm
von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt. His sister Rebecka married the great
German mathematician Lejeune Dirichlet.
Abraham sought to renounce the Jewish religion; his children were first brought up
without religious education, and were baptised as Lutherans in 1816 (at which time
Felix took the additional names Jakob Ludwig). (Abraham and his wife were not
themselves baptised until 1822). The name Bartholdy was assumed at the suggestion
of Lea's brother, Jakob, who had purchased a property of this name and adopted it
as his own surname. Abraham was later to explain this decision in a letter to Felix
as a means of showing a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses:
"There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish
Confucius". Although Felix continued to sign his letters as 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'
in obedience to his father's injunctions, he seems not to have objected to the use
of 'Mendelssohn' alone.
The family moved to Berlin in 1812. Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn sought to give
Felix, his brother Paul, and sisters Fanny and Rebecka, the best education
possible. His sister Fanny Mendelssohn (later Fanny Hensel), became a well-known
pianist and amateur composer; originally Abraham had thought that she, rather than
her brother, might be the more musical. However, at that time, it was not
considered proper (by either Abraham or Felix) for a woman to have a career in
music, so Fanny remained an amateur musician. Six of her early songs were later
published (with her consent) under Felix's name.
Mendelssohn is often regarded as the greatest musical child prodigy after Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart. He began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six, and
at seven was tutored by Marie Bigot in Paris. From 1817 he studied composition with
Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin. He probably made his first public concert
appearance at the age of nine, when he participated in a chamber music concert. He
was also a prolific composer as a child, and wrote his first published work, a
piano quartet, by the time he was thirteen. Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his
friend and correspondent, the elderly Goethe. He later took lessons from the
composer and piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles who however confessed in his diaries
that he had little to teach him. Moscheles became a close colleague and lifelong
friend.
Besides music, Mendelssohn's education included art, literature, languages, and
philosophy. He was a skilled artist in pencil and watercolour, he could speak
(besides his native German) English, Italian, and Latin, and he had an interest in
classical literature.
As an adolescent, his works were often performed at home with a private orchestra
for the associates of his wealthy parents amongst the intellectual elite of Berlin.
Mendelssohn wrote 12 string symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14. These works
were ignored for over a century, but are now recorded and heard occasionally in
concerts. In 1824, still aged only 15, he wrote his first symphony for full
orchestra (in C minor, Op. 11). At the age of 16 he wrote his String Octet in E
Flat Major, the first work which showed the full power of his genius. The Octet and
his overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he wrote a year
later, are the best known of his early works. (He wrote incidental music for the
play 16 years later in 1842, including the famous Wedding March.) 1827 saw the
premiere—and sole performance in his lifetime—of his opera, Die Hochzeit des
Camacho. The failure of this production left him disinclined to venture into the
genre again; he later toyed for a while in the 1840s with a libretto by Eugene
Scribe based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, but rejected it as unsuitable.
From 1826 to 1829, Mendelssohn studied at the University of Berlin, where he
attended lectures on aesthetics by Hegel, on history by Eduard Gans and on
geography by Carl Ritter.
In 1829 Mendelssohn paid his first visit to Britain, where Moscheles, already
settled in London, introduced him to influential musical circles. He had a great
success, conducting his First Symphony and playing in public and private concerts.
In the summer he visited Edinburgh and became a friend of the composer John
Thomson. On subsequent visits he met with Queen Victoria and her musical husband
Prince Albert, both of whom were great admirers of his music. In the course of ten
visits to Britain during his life he won a strong following, and the country
inspired two of his most famous works, the overture Fingal's Cave (also known as
the Hebrides Overture) and the Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3). His oratorio
Elijah was premiered in Birmingham at the Triennial Music Festival on 26 August
1846.
On the death of Zelter, Mendelssohn had some hopes of becoming the conductor of the
Berlin Singakademie with which he had revived Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew
Passion (see below). However he was defeated for the post by Karl Rungenhagen. This
may have been because of Mendelssohn's youth, and fear of possible innovations; it
was also suspected by some (and possibly by Mendelssohn himself) to be on account
of his Jewish origins.
Nonetheless, in 1835 he was appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus
Orchestra. This appointment was extremely important for him; he felt himself to be
a German and wished to play a leading part in his country's musical life. In its
way it was a redress for his disappointment over the Singakademie appointment.
Despite efforts by the king of Prussia to lure him to Berlin, Mendelssohn
concentrated on developing the musical life of Leipzig and in 1843 he founded the
Leipzig Conservatory, where he successfully persuaded Ignaz Moscheles and Robert
Schumann to join him.
Mendelssohn's personal life was conventional. His marriage to Cécile Jeanrenaud in
March of 1837 was very happy and the couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul,
Felix, and Lilli. Mendelssohn was an accomplished painter in watercolours, and his
enormous correspondence shows that he could also be a witty writer in German and
English—sometimes accompanied by humorous sketches and cartoons in the text.
Mendelssohn suffered from bad health in the final years of his life, probably
aggravated by nervous problems and overwork, and he was greatly distressed by the
death of his sister Fanny in May 1847. Felix Mendelssohn died later that same year
after a series of strokes, on November 4, 1847, in Leipzig. His funeral was held at
the Paulinerkirche and he is buried in the Trinity Cemetery in
Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Revival of
Bach's and Schubert's music
Mendelssohn's own works show his study of Baroque and early classical music. His
fugues and chorales especially reflect a tonal clarity and use of counterpoint
reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach, by whom he was deeply influenced. His
great-aunt, Sarah Levy (née Itzig) was a pupil of Bach's son, Wilhelm Friedemann
Bach, and had supported the widow of another son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. She had
collected a number of Bach manuscripts. J.S. Bach's music, which had fallen into
relative obscurity by the turn of the 19th century, was also deeply respected by
Mendelssohn's teacher Zelter. In 1829, with the backing of Zelter and the
assistance of a friend, the actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn arranged and
conducted a performance in Berlin of Bach's St Matthew Passion. The orchestra and
choir were provided by the Berlin Singakademie of which Zelter was the principal
conductor. The success of this performance (the first since Bach's death in 1750)
was an important element in the revival of J.S. Bach's music in Germany and,
eventually, throughout Europe. It earned Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age
of twenty. It also led to one of the very few references which Mendelssohn ever
made to his origins: 'To think that it took an actor and a Jew-boy (Judensohn) to
revive the greatest Christian music for the world' (cited by Devrient in his
memoirs of the composer).
Mendelssohn also revived interest in the work of Franz Schubert. Schumann
discovered the manuscript of Schubert's Ninth Symphony and sent it to Mendelssohn
who promptly premiered it in Leipzig on 21 March 1839, more than a decade after the
composer's death.
Contemporaries
Throughout
his life Mendelssohn was wary of the more radical musical developments
undertaken by some of his contemporaries. He was generally on friendly, if
somewhat cool, terms with the likes of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and
Giacomo Meyerbeer, but in his letters expresses his frank disapproval of their
works.
In particular, he seems to have regarded Paris and its music with the greatest of
suspicion and an almost Puritanical distaste. Attempts made during his visit there
to interest him in Saint-Simonianism ended in embarrassing scenes. He thought the
Paris style of opera vulgar, and the works of Meyerbeer insincere. When Ferdinand
Hiller suggested in conversation to Felix that he looked rather like Meyerbeer
(they were distant cousins, both descendants of Rabbi Moses Isserlis), Mendelssohn
was so upset that he immediately went to get a haircut to differentiate himself. It
is significant that the only musician with whom he was a close personal friend,
Moscheles, was of an older generation and equally conservative in outlook.
Moscheles preserved this outlook at the Leipzig Conservatory until his own death in
1870.
Reputation
This conservative strain in Mendelssohn, which set him apart from some of his more
flamboyant contemporaries, bred a similar condescension on their part toward his
music. His success, his popularity and his Jewish origins, irked Richard Wagner
sufficiently to damn Mendelssohn with faint praise, three years after his death, in
an anti-Jewish pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik. This was the start of a
movement to denigrate Mendelssohn's achievements which lasted almost a century, the
remnants of which can still be discerned today amongst some writers. The Nazi
regime was to cite Mendelssohn's Jewish origin in banning his works and destroying
memorial statues. Such avowedly anti-Semitic political opposition to Mendelssohn
should of course be differentiated from expressions of artistic or aesthetic
disdain for Mendelssohn's music such as those found in Charles Rosen's essay, who
disparages Mendelssohn's style for "religious kitsch".; but these opinions may also
reflect a continuation of the aesthetic contempt of Wagner and his musical
followers.
In England, Mendelssohn's reputation remained high for a long time; the adulatory
(and today scarcely readable) novel Charles Auchester by the teenaged Sarah
Sheppard, published in 1851, which features Mendelssohn as the "Chevalier
Seraphael", remained in print for nearly eighty years. Queen Victoria demonstrated
her enthusiasm by requesting, when The Crystal Palace was being re-built in 1854,
that it include a statue of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn's Wedding March from A
Midsummer Night's Dream was first played as a piece of ceremonial music at the
wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter, The Princess Victoria, The Princess Royal, to
Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1858 and it is still popular today at marriage
ceremonies. His sacred choral music, particularly the smaller-scale works, remain
enduringly popular in the choral tradition of the Church of England. However many
critics, including Bernard Shaw, began to condemn Mendelssohn's music for its
association with Victorian cultural insularity.
Over the last fifty years a new appreciation of Mendelssohn's work has developed,
which takes into account not only the popular 'war horses', such as the E minor
Violin Concerto and the Italian Symphony, but has been able to remove the Victorian
varnish from the oratorio Elijah, and has explored the frequently intense and
dramatic world of the chamber works. Virtually all of Mendelssohn's published works
are now available on CD.
Recent critical evaluations of Mendelssohn's work have stressed the subtlety of his
compositional technique. For example, the Hebrides Overture has been interpreted as
presenting a musical equivalent to the aesthetic subject in the paintings of Caspar
David Friedrich. The first lyrical theme, in this interpretation, represents the
person apprehending the landscape described by the music behind this theme.
Similarly, the use of french horns in the opening movement of the Italian Symphony
may represent a German presence in an Italian scene: Mendelssohn himself on
tour.
The hymn tune "Mendelssohn"—an adaptation by William Hayman Cummings of a melody
from Mendelssohn's cantata Festgesang—is the standard tune for Charles Wesley's
popular hymn Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. This extract from an originally secular
1840s composition, which Mendelssohn felt unsuited to sacred music, is thus
ubiquitous at Christmas.
Source : Some of the information on this
page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
|
Felix
Mendelssohn - Reflector - Biography
