Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, the second of four children of the banker Abraham Mendelssohn and his wife Lea, born Salomon ^[1]. His grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a central figure of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany, and the family carried both intellectual prestige and considerable wealth. In 1811, during the French occupation of Hamburg, the Mendelssohns moved to Berlin, where the children grew up in a household filled with books, music and visiting scholars ^[1].

The question of religious identity shaped the family's public life. In 1816 Abraham had his children baptized as Lutherans, and the parents later converted as well, adding the surname Bartholdy to signal the change ^[2]. Felix used the double name Mendelssohn Bartholdy for the rest of his life, though the world has largely remembered him by the shorter form. For anyone asking who was Felix Mendelssohn, the answer begins with this dual inheritance: a Jewish family heritage and a Protestant upbringing, both of which left marks on his music.

His education was unusually thorough. Felix and his gifted elder sister Fanny studied piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Berlin Singakademie ^[1]. Zelter grounded the boy in the counterpoint of Bach and the forms of Haydn and Mozart, a training that gave Mendelssohn's later Romanticism its distinctive discipline. The family's Sunday concerts at home gave the young composer a private orchestra on which to test his string symphonies, twelve of which he wrote between the ages of twelve and fourteen ^[2].

Few composers have matured as early. In 1825, at sixteen, Mendelssohn completed the Octet for strings in E flat major, a work of such assurance that many historians treat it as the finest music ever written by a composer of that age ^[3]. A year later he produced the concert overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, capturing Shakespeare's fairy world in shimmering scherzo textures that became a signature of his style ^[1]. Zelter had introduced him to Goethe in Weimar in 1821, and the elderly poet received the boy warmly on several visits, a connection Mendelssohn treasured ^[2].

The event that made him a public figure came on March 11, 1829, when the twenty year old conducted the Berlin Singakademie in Bach's St Matthew Passion, the first performance of the work since the composer's death in 1750 ^[3]. The concert was a sensation, repeated twice by demand, and it is generally credited with launching the nineteenth century revival of Bach's choral music. Mendelssohn later remarked on the irony that a young man of Jewish origin had restored this monument of Lutheran music to the public ^[2].

Travel completed his formation. Between 1829 and 1832 he toured Britain, Scotland, Italy and France, gathering impressions that fed directly into his work. A visit to Fingal's Cave in the Hebrides inspired the overture known as The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave), while journeys to Edinburgh and Rome eventually produced the Scottish and Italian symphonies ^[4]. London audiences embraced him from his first appearance in 1829, beginning a relationship with Britain that lasted his whole life; he crossed the Channel ten times in all ^[3].

Any account of Felix Mendelssohn achievements must place Leipzig at the center. Appointed conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835, he raised its playing to a standard admired across Europe, expanded the repertoire to include historical works alongside new music, and helped define the conductor as an interpretive artist rather than a mere time beater ^[1]. He programmed Schubert's Great C major Symphony in its 1839 premiere after Robert Schumann recovered the manuscript in Vienna, one of many services he performed for other composers ^[3].

His own catalogue from these years includes some of the most durable music of the century. The Italian Symphony (1833), the oratorio St Paul (1836), the Piano Trio in D minor (1839) and the Lobgesang symphony cantata (1840) all date from this period, alongside the ongoing series of Songs Without Words for piano that carried his name into countless middle class parlors ^[4]. In 1842 he completed the Scottish Symphony and dedicated it to Queen Victoria, who with Prince Albert received him at Buckingham Palace as a personal friend ^[3].

Two late works crown the list. The Violin Concerto in E minor, finished in 1844 for his concertmaster Ferdinand David, remains one of the most performed concertos in the repertoire, admired for its lyrical opening and the seamless linking of its movements ^[1]. The oratorio Elijah, premiered at the Birmingham Festival in August 1846 with the composer conducting, was received with an enthusiasm rarely recorded in concert history and became a fixture of British choral life for over a century ^[5].

In 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory, recruiting Schumann, David and the theorist Moritz Hauptmann to its faculty. The school became a model for music education in Europe and the United States, and it still operates today as the University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig ^[1].

In March 1837 Mendelssohn married Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French Reformed clergyman from Frankfurt. The marriage was by all accounts a contented one and produced five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Lili and Felix ^[2]. Unlike many of his Romantic contemporaries, Mendelssohn led an orderly domestic life, and his surviving letters show a man of wit, wide reading and considerable skill as a watercolor painter ^[4].

The deepest bond of his life was with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a composer of substance whose talents the family confined largely to the private sphere. Brother and sister exchanged musical opinions constantly, and several of Fanny's songs were published under Felix's name in his early collections ^[2]. Their closeness makes the events of 1847 all the more devastating.

Mendelssohn worked at a pace that alarmed those around him. He composed, conducted, performed as pianist and organist, administered the Gewandhaus and the Conservatory, and answered an enormous correspondence, often complaining of exhaustion in his letters ^[3]. Friends noted his headaches and irritability in his final years, symptoms that biographers have connected to the strokes that ran in his family ^[5].

The triumph of Elijah in Birmingham in 1846 marked the peak of his public career, and he returned to England in the spring of 1847 to conduct further performances in London, where Queen Victoria attended ^[5]. He came home drained. On May 14, 1847, Fanny died suddenly of a stroke in Berlin while rehearsing one of his cantatas, and the news broke something in him. Witnesses reported that he collapsed with a cry when he heard ^[2].

He withdrew to Interlaken in Switzerland with his family that summer, painting watercolors and composing the String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80, a work of raw grief unlike anything else in his output ^[4]. Visitors found him aged and subdued. Back in Leipzig in September, he suffered a series of strokes beginning in October and died on November 4, 1847, at the age of thirty eight, the same illness that had killed his sister, both parents and his grandfather ^[1].

The funeral procession in Leipzig drew enormous crowds, with memorial concerts following in cities across Germany and Britain. He was buried beside Fanny in the Trinity Cemetery in Berlin ^[2].

Mendelssohn's posthumous reputation has traveled a strange road. Adored in Victorian Britain, where Elijah rivaled Handel's Messiah in popularity, he was attacked after his death by Richard Wagner, whose 1850 essay on Jewishness in music disparaged him on antisemitic grounds ^[3]. The Nazi regime later banned his music, removed his statue from outside the Leipzig Gewandhaus and attempted to erase his name from German musical history ^[5]. Scholarship since 1945 has steadily rebuilt his standing, and works once dismissed as merely pleasant are now studied for their formal ingenuity.

His practical legacy is everywhere in modern musical life. The Bach revival he ignited in 1829 reshaped the concert repertoire, the Leipzig Conservatory set the pattern for professional music schools, and his Gewandhaus tenure helped establish the historical, mixed program that orchestras still play ^[1]. The Wedding March from his A Midsummer Night's Dream music, chosen by Queen Victoria's daughter for her 1858 wedding, remains among the most recognized melodies in the world ^[3].

Among Felix Mendelssohn facts that surprise newcomers, perhaps the most telling is the sheer range packed into a short life: five mature symphonies, two great oratorios, concertos, chamber music, organ sonatas, and hundreds of songs and piano pieces, all before an age at which many composers are only beginning ^[4]. Any Felix Mendelssohn biography ends with the same reflection his contemporaries voiced: that music lost decades of work it can only imagine.