Felix Mendelssohn
German musician and compose
Source:
Britannica
painting by
Wilhelm Hensel.
Felix Mendelssohn
German musician
and composer
Also known as:
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Written by
Quick Facts
In full: Jakob Ludwig Felix
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Born: February 3, 1809, Hamburg
[Germany]
Died: November 4, 1847, Leipzig (aged
38)
Notable Works: “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream” “Briefe über die Empfindungen” “Elijah, Op. 70” “Hymn of Praise”
“Italian Symphony” “Octet for Strings in E-Flat Major, Op. 20” “Scottish
Symphony” “Songs Without Words” “St. Paul” “String Octet in E Flat Major” “The
Hebrides, Op. 26” “Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64”
Movement / Style: Romanticism
Signature
Felix Mendelssohn (born February 3,
1809, Hamburg [Germany]—died November 4, 1847, Leipzig) was a German composer,
pianist, musical conductor, and teacher, one of the most-celebrated figures of
the early Romantic period. In his music, Mendelssohn largely observed Classical
models and practices while initiating key aspects of Romanticism—the artistic
movement that exalted feeling and the imagination above rigid forms and
traditions. Among his most famous works are Overture to A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1826), Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto (1844), two piano
concerti (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah (1846), and several pieces of
chamber music. He was a grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.
Early
life and works
Father's Mendelssohn
Felix was
born of Jewish parents, Abraham and Lea Salomon Mendelssohn, from whom he took
his first piano lessons. Though the Mendelssohn family was proud of their
ancestry, they considered it desirable in accordance with 19th-century liberal
ideas to mark their emancipation from the ghetto by adopting the Christian
faith. Accordingly, Felix, together with his brother and two sisters, was
baptized in 1816 as a Lutheran. In 1822, when his parents were also baptized,
the entire family adopted the surname Bartholdy, following the example of
Felix’s maternal uncle, who had chosen to adopt the name of a family farm.
In 1811,
during the French occupation of Hamburg, the family had moved to Berlin, where
Mendelssohn studied the piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl
Friedrich Zelter, who, as a composer and teacher, exerted an enormous influence
on his development. Other teachers gave the Mendelssohn children lessons in
literature and landscape painting, with the result that at an early age
Mendelssohn’s mind was widely cultivated. His personality was nourished by a
broad knowledge of the arts and was also stimulated by learning and
scholarship. He traveled with his sister to Paris, where he took further piano
lessons and where he appears to have become acquainted with the music of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mendelssohn
was an extemely precocious musical composer. He wrote numerous compositions
during his boyhood, among them 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra,
concerti, sonatas, and fugues. Most of these works were long preserved in
manuscript in the Prussian State Library in Berlin but are believed to have
been lost in World War II. He made his first public appearance in 1818—at age
nine—in Berlin.
In 1821
Mendelssohn was taken to Weimar to meet J.W. von Goethe, for whom he played
works of J.S. Bach and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet No. 3.
in B Minor (1825). A remarkable friendship developed between the aging poet and
the 12-year-old musician. In Paris in 1825 Luigi Cherubini discerned
Mendelssohn’s outstanding gifts. The next year he reached his full stature as a
composer with the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The atmospheric
effects and the fresh lyrical melodies in this work revealed the mind of an
original composer, while the animated orchestration looked forward to the
orchestral manner of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov.
Mendelssohn
also became active as a conductor. On March 11, 1829, at the Singakademie,
Berlin, he conducted the first performance since Bach’s death of the St.
Matthew Passion, thus inaugurating the Bach revival of the 19th century.
Meanwhile he had visited Switzerland and had met Carl Maria von Weber, whose
opera Der Freischütz, given in Berlin in 1821, encouraged him to develop a
national character in music. Mendelssohn’s great work of this period was the
String Octet in E Flat Major (1825), displaying not only technical mastery and
an almost unprecedented lightness of touch but great melodic and rhythmic
originality. Mendelssohn developed in this work the genre of the swift-moving
scherzo (a playful musical movement) that he would also use in the incidental
music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843).
In the
spring of 1829 Mendelssohn made his first journey to England, conducting his
Symphony No. 1 in C Minor (1824) at the London Philharmonic Society. In the
summer he went to Scotland, of which he gave many poetic accounts in his
evocative letters. He went there “with a rake for folksongs, an ear for the
lovely, fragrant countryside, and a heart for the bare legs of the natives.” At
Abbotsford he met Sir Walter Scott. The literary, pictorial, and musical
elements of Mendelssohn’s imagination are often merged. Describing, in a letter
written from the Hebrides, the manner in which the waves break on the Scottish
coast, he noted down, in the form of a musical symbol, the opening bars of The
Hebrides (1830–32). Between 1830 and 1832 he traveled in Germany, Austria,
Italy, and Switzerland and in 1832 returned to London, where he conducted The
Hebrides and where he published the first book of the piano music he called
Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words), completed in Venice in 1830.
Mendelssohn, whose music in its day was held to be remarkable for its charm and
elegance, was gradually becoming the most popular of 19th-century composers in
England. His main reputation was made in England, which, in the course of his
short life, he visited no fewer than 10 times. At the time of these visits, the
character of his music was held to be predominantly Victorian, and indeed he
eventually became the favourite composer of Queen Victoria herself.
Mendelssohn’s
subtly ironic account of his meeting with the queen and the prince consort at
Buckingham Palace in 1843, to both of whom he was affectionately drawn, shows
him also to have been alive to both the pomp and the sham of the royal
establishment. His Symphony No. 3 in A Minor–Major, or Scottish Symphony, as it
is called, was dedicated to Queen Victoria. And he became endeared to the
English musical public in other ways. The fashion for playing the “Wedding
March” from his A Midsummer Night’s Dream at bridal processions originates from
a performance of this piece at the wedding of the Princess Royal after
Mendelssohn’s death, in 1858. In the meantime he had given the first
performances in London of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Emperor and G Major concerti.
He was among the first to play a concerto from memory in public—Mendelssohn’s
memory was prodigious—and he also became known for his organ works. Later the
popularity of his oratorio Elijah, first produced at Birmingham in 1846,
established Mendelssohn as a composer whose influence on English music equaled
that of George Frideric Handel. After his death this influence was sometimes
held to have had a stifling effect. Later generations of English composers,
enamoured of Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, or Igor Stravinsky, revolted
against the domination of Mendelssohn and condemned the sentimentality of his
lesser works. But there is no doubt that he had, nevertheless, succeeded in
arousing the native musical genius, at first by his performances and later in
the creative sphere, from a dormant state.
In the summer of 1825, the Mendelssohn
family moved into a mansion at 3 Leipzigerstraße on the outskirts of Berlin
(view of the house in 1900).
A number
of new experiences marked the grand tour that Mendelssohn had undertaken after
his first London visit. Lively details of this tour are found in his long
series of letters. On Goethe’s recommendation he had read Laurence Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey, and, inspired by this work, he recorded his impressions
with great verve. In Venice he was enchanted by the paintings of Titian and
Giorgione. The papal singers in Rome, however, were “almost all unmusical,” and
Gregorian music he found unintelligible. In Rome he describes a “haggard”
colony of German artists “with terrific beards.” Later, at Leipzig, where
Hector Berlioz and Mendelssohn exchanged batons, Berlioz offered an enormous
cudgel of lime tree covered with bark, whereas Mendelssohn playfully presented
his brazen contemporary with a delicate light stick of whalebone elegantly
encased in leather. The contrast between these two batons precisely reflects
the violently conflicting characters of the two composers.
In 1833
Mendelssohn was in London again to conduct his Italian Symphony (Symphony No. 4
in A Major–Minor), and in the same year he became music director of Düsseldorf,
where he introduced into the church services the masses of Beethoven and
Cherubini and the cantatas of Bach. At Düsseldorf, too, he began his first
oratorio, St. Paul. In 1835 he became conductor of the celebrated Gewandhaus
Orchestra at Leipzig, where he not only raised the standard of orchestral
playing but made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany. Frédéric Chopin and
Robert Schumann were among his friends at Leipzig, where, at his first concert
with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, he conducted his overture Meeresstille und
glückliche Fahrt (1828–32; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage).
Marriage
and maturity of Felix Mendelssohn
Cecile Mendelssohn
In
1835
Mendelssohn was overcome by the death of his father, Abraham, whose dearest
wish had been that his son should complete the St. Paul. He accordingly plunged
into this work with renewed determination and the following year conducted it
at Düsseldorf. The same year at Frankfurt he met Cécile Jeanrenaud, the
daughter of a French Protestant clergyman. Though she was 10 years younger than
himself, that is to say, no more than 16, they became engaged and were married
on March 28, 1837. His sister Fanny, the member of his family who remained
closest to him, wrote of her sister-in-law: “She is amiable, childlike, fresh,
bright and even-tempered, and I consider Felix most fortunate for, though
inexpressibly fond of him, she does not spoil him, but when he is capricious,
treats him with an equanimity which will in course of time most probably cure
his fits of irritability altogether.” This was magnanimous praise on the part
of Fanny, to whom Mendelssohn was drawn by musical as well as emotional ties.
Fanny was not only a composer in her own right—she had herself written some of
the Songs Without Words attributed to her brother—but she seems to have
exercised, by her sisterly companionship, a powerful influence on the
development of his inner musical nature.
Felix
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64An excerpt from Felix
Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, played here with piano
accompaniment (“piano reduction”).
Works
written over the following years include the Variations sérieuses (1841), for
piano, the Lobgesang (1840; Hymn of Praise), Psalm CXIV, the Piano Concerto No.
2 in D Minor (1837), and chamber works. In 1838 Mendelssohn began the Violin
Concerto in E Minor–Major. Though he normally worked rapidly, throwing off
works with the same facility as one writes a letter, this final expression of
his lyrical genius compelled his arduous attention over the next six years. In
the 20th century the Violin Concerto was still admired for its warmth of melody
and for its vivacity, and it was also the work of Mendelssohn’s that, for
nostalgic listeners, enshrined the elegant musical language of the 19th
century. Nor was its popularity diminished by the later, more turgid, and often
more dramatic violin concerti of Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, and Alban Berg.
It is true that many of Mendelssohn’s works are cameos, delightful portraits or
descriptive pieces, held to lack the characteristic Romantic depth. But
occasionally, as in the Violin Concerto and certain of the chamber works, these
predominantly lyrical qualities, so charming, naive, and fresh, themselves end
by conveying a sense of the deeper Romantic wonder.
In 1843
Mendelssohn founded at Leipzig the conservatory of music where, together with
Schumann, he taught composition. Visits to London and Birmingham followed,
entailing an increasing number of engagements. These would hardly have affected
his normal health; he had always lived on this feverish level. But at Frankfurt
in May 1847 he was greatly saddened by the death of Fanny. It is at any rate
likely that for a person of Mendelssohn’s sensibility, living at such
intensity, the death of this close relative, to whom he was so completely
bound, would undermine his whole being. In fact, after the death of his sister,
his energies deserted him, and, following the rupture of a blood vessel, he soon died.
Legacy
Though
the music
of Mendelssohn, stylish and elegant, does not fill the entire musical scene, as
it was inclined to do in Victorian times, it has elements that unite this
versatile 19th-century composer to the principal artistic figures of his time.
In the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, with its hilarious grunting of an ass on
the bassoon and the evocative effect of Oberon’s horn, Mendelssohn becomes a partner
in Shakespeare’s fairyland kingdom. The blurred impressionist effects in The
Hebrides foreshadow the later developments of the painter J.M.W. Turner. Wagner
understood Mendelssohn’s inventive powers as an orchestrator, as is shown in
his own opera The Flying Dutchman, and, later, the French composers of the 20th
century learned much from his grace and perfection of style.
The appeal of Mendelssohn’s work has not
dwindled in the 21st century. It is true
that Elijah is not so frequently performed as it once was and some of his
fluent piano works are now overshadowed by the more-enduring works of Beethoven
and Schumann. But the great pictorial works of Mendelssohn, the Scottish and
Italian symphonies, repeatedly yield new vistas, and the Songs Without Words
retain their graceful beauty. Mendelssohn was one of the first of the great
19th-century Romantic composers, and in this sense he remains even today a
figure to be rediscovered.
Aquarell Mendelssohn 1847
Edward
LockspeiserThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
With
affection,
Ruben
