Felix Mendelssohn
"Words are ambiguous and easily misunderstood, but music always says exactly the same thing" — from an 1842 letter to Marc-André Souchay.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAbraham Mendelssohn
A banker father, he was the first to recognize and champion his son's gift.
- FamilyFanny Mendelssohn
His elder sister and closest musical companion, who for all her brilliance remained an amateur, held back by the constraints of her era.
- TeacherCarl Friedrich Zelter
A conservative but steadfast composition teacher who instilled in him a sense of classical balance.
- InfluenceJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
The aged literary giant who cherished him as a boy, calling him 'a second Mozart.'
- FriendshipRobert Schumann
A colleague he grew close to in Leipzig, who sent him the manuscript of Schubert's forgotten symphony and so led to its premiere.
- FamilyCécile Jeanrenaud
The wife he married in 1837, with whom he had five children.
I. From Hamburg to Berlin · 1809–1816 (age 0–7)
(Birth) He was born in February 1809 into a Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Germany. His grandfather Moses Mendelssohn was renowned as the foremost Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, and his father Abraham, living in that afterglow, recognized his son's gift so early that he could later say of himself, "Once I was the son of a famous father; now I have become the father of a famous son." His mother Lea, fluent at the piano and in several foreign languages, was strict and methodical in raising her children. Two years after his birth, Mendelssohn moved with his family to Berlin to escape the Napoleonic occupation, and the city became his true home. (Sister) His sister Fanny, four years his elder, learned the piano side by side with him, and from childhood the two were each other's closest musical companions. Fanny possessed a gift for composition no less than her brother's — by some accounts, greater — yet in an age and a household that would not let a woman make music her profession, she had to remain an amateur. Their father once wrote to her, "Music may become his profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament." This unequal treatment never broke the bond between them, but it followed Mendelssohn like a shadow throughout his life. (Conversion) In 1816 the family converted to Lutheran Christianity and added Bartholdy to their surname. It was a practical choice for living in a society where antisemitism persisted, but Mendelssohn was never free of his Jewish lineage, and it would later cast a long shadow over his reputation.
II. The prodigy years · 1816–1829 (age 7–20)
(Teacher) He studied composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter. A musician of conservative temperament, Zelter prized formal completeness over showy virtuosity, and his teaching became the root of the classical sense of balance Mendelssohn kept all his life. In 1821 Zelter took his twelve-year-old pupil to Weimar to meet the aging Goethe. Marveling at the boy's improvisation, Goethe called him "a second Mozart," and their affection continued afterward through letters. (Prolific) From his early teens he wrote symphonies and string quartets one after another. The String Octet, completed in 1825 at sixteen, shows a mastery hard to credit to a youthful exercise and is still counted among his signature early works. The following year, at seventeen, he wrote an overture that turned into orchestral sound the impressions left by reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is said the musical ideas came to him right after a summer-night stroll in the garden of the family home in Berlin. (House concerts) The Mendelssohn family held concerts at home every Sunday, and his new works were often premiered there. The drawing room of a wealthy banking family was a safe stage where he was allowed to experiment and to fail. It was an entirely different starting line from Schubert's, who had to sell his works to scrape a living in poverty. (Revival) In 1829, the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn conducted Bach's St Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie. This performance, which brought back to the stage a work all but forgotten since Bach's death, is today regarded as the emblematic event of the Bach revival.
Premiered at a house concert when he was sixteen, this piece was a precocious masterpiece born on a stage his wealthy family provided.
- In the final fourth movement all eight strings entwine in a rapid fugue (a technique that stacks the theme in successive entries, like a round), so intricate it is hard to believe a sixteen-year-old wrote it.
- The third-movement scherzo is said to have been linked by Fanny to the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe's Faust, and the passages where the strings play with a light shiver (tremolo) feel like fairies flitting past.
- Performers always remark on how the eight voices are written to sound like a small orchestra — chamber music with the heft of a symphony.
- At the very opening of the first movement, the rising (ascending) melody traced by the first violin proclaims the vitality of the whole piece from the start.
Written at seventeen after a summer-night stroll in the garden of the family home in Berlin, it turned a boy's Shakespearean imagination directly into orchestral sound.
- The chords the woodwinds quietly lay down at the outset sound like a door opening onto the fairies' forest.
- The quick, light string passage that follows is widely heard as a picture of fairies tripping nimbly about.
- The low, coarse notes that suddenly burst out midway (a passage imitating a donkey's bray) point to the scene in Shakespeare's play where Bottom is transformed into a man with a donkey's head.
- That a seventeen-year-old handled an orchestra of this scale so deftly still astonishes performers and conductors today.
III. Travel and formation · 1829–1833 (age 20–24)
(Journey) Following Goethe's Italian journey, he set out on a long tour of Europe to broaden his youthful horizons. In 1829 he traveled through England and Scotland, and his visit to Fingal's Cave in the Hebrides became music on the spot, its first melody jotted down in a letter to Fanny. (London) English audiences welcomed him ardently. Over the rest of his life he crossed to England nearly ten times to conduct and perform, and Queen Victoria herself later came to cherish his music. This popularity became the foothold that made his name across all of Europe, beyond the German-speaking lands. (Rome) Traveling through Italy from 1830, he met Hector Berlioz in Rome. The two respected each other but were musically oil and water. Berlioz admired Mendelssohn's restrained classical balance yet found it somewhat stifling, while Mendelssohn was astonished by Berlioz's bold orchestral language yet felt it had lost all restraint. The light and vitality of Italy he absorbed on this journey would later be carried into a symphony. (Wealth) His banker father's fortune was what made all this travel possible. Mendelssohn was in a position rare for a composer of his era: he could travel and compose without worrying about making a living.
Impressions from his Scottish journey became an orchestral work just as he had sketched them in a letter to Fanny.
- The low, heaving melody traced by the cellos and violas in the opening seems to carry over the very waves off Fingal's Cave — Mendelssohn left this theme as a sketch in a letter to Fanny.
- The growing (crescendo) orchestra in the middle section depicts the moment a calm sea turns to storm.
- The short answering phrases traded between the clarinet and woodwinds sound like the echo of water striking the cave walls.
- The 'Fingal's Cave' of the title is a real basalt cave on Scotland's west coast; seeing a photograph of the scenery before listening makes the opening's impression far more vivid.
It holds the light and vitality he found in Rome and Naples, yet he was never satisfied with the piece and would not allow it to be published in his lifetime.
- In the opening of the first movement, the buoyant first theme, played by strings that seem to leap upward, gives the impression of Italian sunlight turned into music.
- The fourth and final movement borrows the rhythm of the saltarello, an Italian dance, and races breathlessly from beginning to end.
- Mendelssohn kept revising the piece even after its premiere and, never satisfied, refused to allow it to be published in his lifetime — the version performed today is the one he still considered 'unfinished.'
- Among conductors, the work's hidden difficulty is said to lie in keeping each voice's melodic line distinct even at a rapid tempo.
IV. Settling in Leipzig · 1833–1840 (age 24–31)
(Loss) Mendelssohn had been serving as music director in Düsseldorf since 1833 when, in 1835, his father Abraham died. The grief of losing the man who had been the first to recognize and champion his gifts ran deep. That same year he took up the post of conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. (Marriage) In 1837 he married Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French Protestant pastor in Frankfurt. They had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Felix, and Lili. By the accounts of contemporaries, their marriage was calm and affectionate, and amid his busy life of conducting and composing, Mendelssohn is said to have been a devoted father. (Schumann) In Leipzig he grew close to Robert Schumann. In 1839, when Schumann sent him the manuscript of Schubert's Great Symphony, which he had unearthed in Vienna, Mendelssohn gave its premiere at the Gewandhaus and introduced it to the world. He had brought to the stage a buried masterpiece by a composer more than a decade dead. (Reformer) From the podium he established the practice of programming classic masterworks alongside new pieces of the day, a practice that became the model for the subscription concert as we know it.
V. Years of fruition · 1841–1846 (age 32–37)
(Conservatory) In 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory. He invited Schumann and a number of other colleagues to join the faculty, and with its systematic curriculum embracing both performance and theory, the school became a model for the conservatories later founded across Germany; it remains one of the centers of a German tradition of music education that endures to this day. (Concerto) In 1844 he completed his Violin Concerto in E minor. Over several years he corresponded with the soloist Ferdinand David, discussing everything from fingerings to the placement of the virtuoso passages, and the result was a work in which the soloist's brilliance and the orchestra's lyricism mesh seamlessly. It is still counted among the standard works of the violin concerto repertoire. (Oratorio) In 1846 he premiered his oratorio Elijah at the Birmingham Festival in England. Carrying on Handel's oratorio tradition while joining it to the dramatic orchestration of the Romantic era, the work was greeted with rapturous acclaim at its premiere, and the triumph secured his reputation in England more firmly than ever. (Overwork) Shuttling among Leipzig, Berlin, and London while juggling conducting, composing, and running the conservatory, he was in effect grinding himself down. The post entrusted to him by the Prussian court brought him nothing but bureaucratic friction and disappointment, and constant travel and unending deadlines slowly eroded his health. Those around him recalled watching him grow steadily more exhausted during these years.
Refined over several years with the soloist Ferdinand David, this is a mature masterpiece born of his settled life in Leipzig.
- Unlike the usual concerto, there is no long orchestral introduction: the solo violin enters the moment the piece begins, singing the theme straight away.
- What makes the piece special is that Mendelssohn wrote out the first-movement cadenza (the passage in which the soloist plays alone, without the orchestra, in a brilliant display) in the score rather than leaving it to improvisation.
- Between the first and second movements, a bassoon sustains a long low note that carries the music seamlessly into the next movement — one of the moments performers attend to most carefully.
- The singing, flowing melody of the slow second movement shows the tender, lyrical idiom so characteristic of Mendelssohn, in contrast to Beethoven's heroic concertos.
A large-scale work carrying on Handel's tradition, it captures the moment when his love for the English public, and his fame among them, reached its peak.
- The dramatic orchestral writing in the scene where Elijah prays for fire to descend from heaven brings the story from the Old Testament Book of Kings to the stage almost word for word.
- The chorus 'Then shall your light break forth' sings of the salvation that comes at the end of darkness and forms the climax of the entire oratorio.
- The orchestral writing of the storm scene carries on Handel's oratorio tradition while displaying the colorful orchestration characteristic of the Romantic era.
- The role of Elijah, sung by a bass (or baritone) soloist, is considered a test for singers, demanding that they convey the prophet's wrath, despair, and conviction alike.
VI. Loss and death · 1847 (age 38)
(Grievous news) In May 1847 his sister Fanny, his closest musical companion throughout his life, died after a sudden attack. Upon hearing the news, Mendelssohn is said to have collapsed unconscious on the spot. The loss of the person who, since childhood, had been the first to hear and judge each of his works shook him to the core. (String quartet) That summer, mourning Fanny, he wrote his String Quartet No. 6 in F minor. Utterly unlike his usual poised and balanced idiom, the piece is shrouded from start to finish in violently trembling strings and dark harmonies. It remains the most personal and impassioned of his works. (Death) In the months after losing his sister, his health collapsed rapidly. After suffering a series of strokes, he died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847, at the age of thirty-eight. Throngs of citizens followed the funeral procession, and Schumann, plunged in deep grief, wrote a tribute in his memory. After his death his music enjoyed for a time an unprecedented popularity, yet by the middle of the following century it had, in unexpected ways, fallen into shadow.
Written in mourning for his sister Fanny, this is the most turbulent and personal of all his works.
- The passages throughout the first movement in which the strings repeat notes in rapid trembling (tremolo) lay bare a violence and unease quite unlike the usual Mendelssohn.
- The piece was written within weeks of Fanny's death, and Mendelssohn himself is said to have regarded it as a requiem for his sister.
- The dark, heavy melody of the slow movement stands in sharp contrast to his other chamber music, and performers call it his 'most personal' work.
- The tension never slackens, driving on through the final movement — which is what makes this the most turbulent string quartet he wrote.
Lesser-known stories
The 1829 performance that revived Bach's St. Matthew Passion is often described as a 'complete restoration,' but in reality it was quite different. Mendelssohn cut substantial portions of the original, dropped or reordered several arias, and arranged the work to suit the tastes of the audience of his day. What he brought back to life was not Bach as he was, but a Bach reshaped for the Romantic nineteenth century. His posthumous reputation was shaken in unexpected ways. In 1850 Richard Wagner, at first under a pseudonym, published an essay titled Judaism in Music, mounting an antisemitic attack aimed at Mendelssohn. The essay was later used in Nazi Germany to ban Mendelssohn's music from public performance and broadcast, and as a result, for a time in the mid-twentieth century, his music was performed relatively little compared with the stature he had enjoyed in his lifetime. He was also a gifted watercolorist. Wherever he traveled he carried a sketchbook and drew landscapes in fine detail, and the watercolors he made on his travels through Switzerland and Italy survive to this day. It is a side of him little known, overshadowed by his fame as a musician. He is counted among the first conductors to systematically establish the practice of leading an orchestra with a baton. Until then, conductors often played along with violin in hand or directed with hand gestures alone; the style of conducting he demonstrated at the Gewandhaus became the model for modern conducting practice.
Terminology notes 📚🔎
Overture
Seogok (序曲) means a piece (曲) placed first in order (序). Originally it was an independent orchestral piece played before the start of an opera or a play, but in Mendelssohn's time many were also composed as standalone concert works rather than for any particular drama. Like the short background music played before a school recital, it prepares the audience's mind before the main performance begins. Outside music, the English word overture is also used to mean 'a proposal, an attempt' — as when the first signal of a wish to open negotiations is called a 'peace overture.'
Oratorio
The oratorio takes its name from the Italian oratorio, meaning a prayer hall. The name arose from the custom of telling Bible stories in song at religious prayer gatherings. It is a large-scale vocal work on biblical or religious subjects; like opera it uses soloists·chorus·orchestra, but it differs in being performed in concert form, without stage acting, costumes, or scenery. Picture a school choral recital where the whole class stands before the microphones without costumes — music with a story, but no acting.
Cadenza
Cadenza comes from an Italian word meaning 'a falling, an ending,' and originally referred to a point where the music briefly comes to rest. It is the passage in a concerto where the orchestra falls silent and the soloist alone displays brilliant virtuosity to the full. Originally it was filled with improvisation, but in his Violin Concerto Mendelssohn wrote this passage directly into the score so that the performer would not improvise it. Like the stretch of a relay where the last runner circles the track alone, it is a moment when the others pause and watch.
Tremolo
Tremolo comes from an Italian word meaning 'trembling.' It is a technique of repeating a single note very rapidly to produce a quivering sound. On string instruments, it is played by moving the bow back and forth in short, quick strokes. It is often used in frightening or tense scenes — think of the feeling when you are so nervous your hands shake.
Concerto
Hyeopjugok (協奏曲) means a piece (曲) played (奏) together (協). The Latin root of its English name, concerto, also carries the sense of 'to contend,' so the name captures the character of soloist and orchestra trading passages as if in competition. It is a work in which one (or a few) soloists and an orchestra alternate, playing back and forth. The soloist shows off brilliant skill and the orchestra takes it up and answers, much like one class representative trading songs back and forth with the rest of the class.
Saltarello
The saltarello takes its name from the Italian saltare, 'to jump,' and means a dance that bounces along as if leaping. A very fast, lively dance that originated around Naples in Italy, its triple-time rhythm repeats with a springing bounce. Like the starting signal of a race at a school field day, an urgent, vigorous rhythm keeps surging forward.