Felix Mendelssohn

German composer

• Born: February 3, 1809
• Birthplace: Hamburg (now in Germany)
• Died: November 4, 1847
• Place of death: Leipzig (now in Germany)

Mendelssohn was one of the great composers of the Romantic period. His music is noted for its exceptionally melodic qualities and its ability to capture a mood. It has been continually performed and studied from his time into the twenty-first century.

Early Life

Felix Mendelssohn (MEHN-dehls-zohn) was an unusually gifted and precocious child musically and was the most prominent member of an exceptionally talented family. He worked long and diligently, absorbed in his music, aware of his subtle talent and discernment in music. He loved taking walks in the woods and often wrote down the notes he heard the birds singing. His first musical influence was his mother, Leah, an expert pianist and vocalist. When Felix was only four years old, she gave him five-minute piano lessons, soon extended as the music capivated Felix’s imagination. At the age of eight, Felix began music lessons with Karl Friedrich Zelter, the director of Berlin’s Singakademie. Before long, the young musical genius was composing fugues, songs, operettas, violin and piano concerti, and piano quartets. He performed Sunday concerts in his home and even conducted a small orchestra.

Abraham Mendelssohn, Felix’s father, was a prominent German banker, and his fashionable home was one of the intellectual and musical centers of Berlin. The excitement of learning reigned in Felix’s “childhood castle,” a home bustling with activity, servants, and tutors. Rebecka sang, Paul played the violoncello, and the eldest child, Fanny, played the piano almost as well as Felix. The children wrote their own newspaper, called at first “The Garden Paper” and, later, “The Tea and Snow Times.” They made paper lanterns to decorate the trees in the garden for dances. Felix particularly loved the park, where he rode his horse. He played billiards and chess and practiced the piano, organ, and violin. He learned landscape drawing and calligraphy.

Felix, a gentle, cheerful, kindly person, was handsome, self-confident, and even-tempered. His hair was dark black and his eyes, dark brown. He dressed elegantly, was very sociable, and loved good meals and stimulating companionship. He was sharply critical of his own work, revising five or six times pieces that had already been performed successfully.

Life’s Work

In a sense, Mendelssohn began his life’s work before he was ten years old, inasmuch as he was already busily composing music by that age. It was, however, the composition of his early masterpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), at the age of seventeen that launched him into a serious career as a composer.

An early extended trip throughout Germany and Switzerland gave Mendelssohn a love of travel. He visited most of the beautiful, historical, cultural, and scenic places of Europe, carrying his sketchbook with him. His first visit to England and Scotland in 1829, at the age of twenty, began his lifelong attraction to English culture. The English were similarly enchanted with both Mendelssohn and his music. Even on this first visit he conducted the London Philharmonic.

Also in 1829, Mendelssohn helped to revive the singing of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, which he had studied for years. Beginning in 1827, Mendelssohn and his friends assembled a small, dependable choir that met one evening a week for practice of rarely heard works. They secured permission to present the work at the Berlin Singakademie. Mendelssohn shortened the work drastically. He omitted many of the arias and used only the introductory symphonies of others. He edited passages for greater brevity. The performance was a historic success. The chorus numbered 158 and the orchestra included many from the Royal Orchestra. The king was in the royal loge with members of his court. Twenty-year-old Mendelssohn conducted without a score, as he knew the music and lyrics from memory. The historical effect was a Bach revival in Europe.

Despite his many musical activities, Mendelssohn had a very active social life and was often invited by families with girls of marriageable age. He was wealthy, cultured, courteous, handsome, of good moral character, and had a promising future. Mendelssohn chose for his wife Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a leading Huguenot minister in Frankfurt, who had died in 1819. Mendelssohn became acquainted with Cécile on one of his extended musical engagements in Frankfurt and finally realized that he was in love with this beautiful, charming girl, nine years his junior. Cécile and Mendelssohn were married on March 28, 1837, in the Reformed French Church in Frankfurt. The ceremony was performed in French. A friend wrote special music for the wedding; Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream had yet to come into fashion.

The couple spent their honeymoon in the upper Rhine valley and in the Black Forest. It was a wondrous and creative time: Mendelssohn sketched the outlines of half a dozen works. Mendelssohn was a devoted and content husband and Cécile an ideal wife. She loved her domestic life and was an excellent and charming hostess and a cheerful companion to her husband. She was a pious and orthodox Protestant, as was Mendelssohn. The couple had five children, one of whom died at the age of nine.

In 1833, Mendelssohn wrote the Italian Symphony and his oratorio on the life of the Apostle Paul. In 1835, he became conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and continued in that post for the rest of his life. Mendelssohn loved the Psalms and set many of them to music. In 1840, he finished Hymn of Praise (Second Symphony), with its delicate melodic contrasts so characteristic of Mendelssohn. The choral movement is mostly from Scripture, “Let everything that hath life and breath praise the Lord!” Mendelssohn also wrote the melody for “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” and his Reformation Symphony (Fifth Symphony) expands on Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” In 1846, Mendelssohn completed and directed his oratorio Elijah to enthusiastic response. He soon began the opera Lorelei and his oratorio on the life of Christ, Christus , but he was unable to complete either. In May of 1847, his sister Fanny suddenly died. Mendelssohn lived only six months longer and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 4, 1847, at the age of thirty-eight.

Significance

Felix Mendelssohn excelled in Romantic musical scene painting. His two most important symphonies are geographically identified: the Italian and the Scottish , which was dedicated to Queen Victoria, whom he met during his concert tours of England. The Italian pictures the spirited and sunny, vibrant south, and the Scottish has its own peculiar northern beauty. His works The Hebrides (1830-1832) and Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (1828-1832; calm sea and prosperous voyage) continue to influence musical seascapes. The listener can almost hear the sounds of the sea. Mendelssohn in fact listened to the waves and the gulls and ships and the water rushing into Fingal’s Cave and recorded the sounds he heard in musical transcription, just as he had recorded the songs of birds in the gardens of his boyhood home.

It was no doubt an advantage to Mendelssohn to be born into a family of wealth so that he could concentrate unreservedly on his art. He worked exceptionally hard, however, and was motivated by a sense of duty and a desire to excel. He was Jewish by birth but had been baptized into the Christian faith. His philosophy of life, morals, and music all reflected a sincere orthodox faith. Mendelssohn agreed with Bach’s philosophy of sacred music, that music should “form an integral part of our service instead of becoming a mere concert which more or less evokes a devotional mood.”

How is music different from verbal communication? When someone asked Mendelssohn the meanings of some of his songs in “Songs Without Words,” he responded:

genuine music… fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.… Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling which is not expressed… by the same words.

Mendelssohn’s music continues to evoke strong feelings.

Bibliography

Blunt, Wilfrid. On Wings of Song: A Biography of Felix Mendelssohn. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974. A particularly interesting biography because of the many illustrations, anecdotes, and quotations from primary sources. An excellent introduction for the general reader. Includes cultural and scenic descriptions by Mendelssohn himself during his early nineteenth century travels in Switzerland, Germany, and Scotland.

Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. An account of Mendelssohn’s life and work, featuring previously unpublished sketches by the composer. Brown argues that Mendelssohn was not a musical lightweight, but an innovative, cerebral composer who influenced twentieth century music.

David, Hans T., and Arthur Mendel, eds. The Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945. Valuable for a study of Mendelssohn because of the chapter on Mendelssohn’s revival of the Saint Matthew Passion. Part of the eleven-page account is Edward Devrient’s first-person account of the revival.

Kupferberg, Herbert. The Mendelssohns: Three Generations of Genius. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Places Mendelssohn in historical context by giving a one-hundred-page biographical sketch of his father, Abraham Mendelssohn, and his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn. Kupferberg also gives brief sketches of the lives of many others in the Mendelssohn family and shows them to be, men and women, a remarkable clan. The last chapter follows the Mendelssohns into the twentieth century. Includes a genealogical chart.

Marek, George R. Gentle Genius: The Story of Felix Mendelssohn. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1971. A very interesting biography. The lengthy quotations from the Mendelssohn correspondence and the many pictures enhance the book’s value. Some of Mendelssohn’s charming landscape drawings are also reproduced. “A Mendelssohn Calendar” is included.

Mendelssohn, Felix. Letters. Edited by G. Sheldon-Goth. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945. A fascinating collection of personal letters. Indispensable in giving insights into the personality, character, and thinking of Mendelssohn.

Mercer-Taylor, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays analyzing Mendelssohn’s life and music. Includes discussions of Mendelssohn and German art music; Mendelssohn and Judaism; Mendelssohn’s symphonies, chamber music, keyboard works, and other compositions; and the reception for Mendelssohn’s music.

Nichols, Roger. Mendelssohn Remembered. London: Faber & Faber, 1997. Popular biography, containing excerpts from Mendelssohn’s letters and journals, contemporary reviews, and recorded conversations with family, friends, and acquaintances.

Todd, R. Larry. Mendelssohn: A Life in Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Comprehensive biography. Todd analyzes Mendelssohn’s compositions and rejects the common view that he only composed sentimental pieces.

Werner, Eric. Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age. Translated by Dika Newlin. London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. A long and complete biography of Mendelssohn. Includes detailed technical and artistic discussions of all Mendelssohn’s major works, including musical scores as examples.