JUDITH CHERNAIK

Mendelssohn reconsidered

I. Richard Wagner
[K. Freigedank]: 'Das
Judenthum in der Musik",
in Neue Zeitschrift fr
Musik, 3 & 6 September
1850; English translation
by William Ashton Ellis,
in Richard Wagner: Prose
works (London, 1894), vol.3,
pp.93-94.

O OTHER MAJOR ROMANTIC ARTIST has Suffered the extreme highs

and lows of Mendelssohn's reputation, complicated by questions

that have almost nothing to do with the quality of his works. It is the
man himself who has attracted praise and dispraise, adoration and scorn.
Critics have argued about his place in German cultural history, his religious
and political beliefs, and his self-identification as a Jew, a Christian convert
or neither. International scholarly conferences still lie in the shadow of
Wagner's vitriolic essay Das Judenthum in der Musik, directed chiefly at
Mendelssohn, who had died three years before the piece appeared in Neue
Zeitschrift fr Musik. Writing anonymously as 'K. Freigedank' in NZfM.,
Wagner later published the piece under his own name. Reprinted several
times in his Gesammelte Schriften, its influence was to be incalculable.
Wagner begins by addressing a like-minded audience. Why, he asks, do
Germans feel an instinctive revulsion to Jews, to their physiognomy, their
speech (the 'babble' of Yiddish dialect) and their nature.^ His answer: since
the Jews have no homeland and no language of their own, they inevitably
remain aliens in any land they settle in, parasitic on the native culture,
regardless of whether they are 'common' or highly cultivated Jews. In
Wagner's diatribe Mendelssohn was associated with an unnamed 'famous
Jewish opera-composer' (Meyerbeer, who was still alive). Both were presented as prime examples of the tainted mongrel heritage of the Jews,
separated by their racial history from the Volk who are the only true source
of genuine art. Heine too was attacked with faint praise as the 'highly-gifted
poet-Jew' who exposed the aridity of the poetry of his time; he was 'the
conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern
civilisation'. But Mendelssohn was the key figure. Precisely because of his
genius, he served as proof of the incapacity of Jews to achieve the highest
creative rank: 'He has shown us that a Jew may possess the amplest store
of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture, the loftiest sense of
honour, without being able to call forth in us once that deep, that heartsearching effect which we expect from Art'.'
The combination of Wagner's antisemitism with the atrocities of the
Nazi regime inspired the thesis of a major 1963 biography by Eric Werner,
an Austrian Jewish refugee and the author of the Mendelssohn entry in Der
Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Using unpublished family correspondence in the New York Public Library, the Bodleian, the Library of Congress
and the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, Werner challenged earlier versions of
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Mendelssohn reconsidered

2. Eric Werner: Mendelssohn:

a new image of the composer
and his age, trans. Dika
Newlin (New York, 19(53),
pp.xi & xii. The text in the
revised German edition,
Mendelssohn: Leben und Werk
in neuer Sicht (Zurich, 1980),
differs slightly.

Mendelssohn's life based on the selective letters and memoirs published by

descendants and friends.
'The idol of the Victorian parlour, adored by the German and English
bourgeoisie alike, the ever-virtuous, angelic, sentimental Mendelssohn
of our grandparents' day is a popular fiction,' he wrote. 'The inveterate,
ultra-conservative enemy of all Zukunftsmusik [...] on the one hand, and
the effeminate pietist and weakling on the other [...] these and other similar
portrayals of Mendelssohn vanish [...] when confronted with the totality of
the original sources.'
For the fictions and exaggerations of the past Werner substituted a 'New
Image': 'The insight into the entire correspondence of the Mendelssohn
family and its friends, granted to the author, enabled him to shed new light
on the fundamental dilemma of Mendelssohn [...] with respect to Judaism,
Jewry, Christianity, and German patriotism' and to illuminate 'the turbulence
of the composer's innermost thinking and feeling on these matters'.^
Werner analyses Mendelssohn's 'innermost thinking and feeling' in the
context of his family history. Felix's grandfather, the philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn, was known throughout Europe for his championing of religious tolerance and his complex attitude towards Jewish belief and Christian practice, for although he advocated Jewish assimilation, he refused
to convert from the faith of his fathers. The 14-year-old boy, already an
accomplished Talmudic scholar, had followed his rabbi from Dessau to
Berlin, where he discovered the joys of European literature and philosophy. After years of study and employment by a wealthy Jewish family
as tutor and bookkeeper, he married a young admirer of his writings,
Fromet Gugenheim, granddaughter of a Viennese court banker. Of their
six surviving children, two converted to Catholicism, while Felix's father
Abraham and his younger brother Nathan were baptised as Protestants.
Felix's mother, Lea Salomon, was the granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, a
horse merchant's son who became court banker to Frederick the Great. The
Itzigs were one of the most powerful and wealthy Jewish families in Berlin.
Despite the conversion of several family members, they were always known
as Jews. Their banking businesses were essential to all levels of wealth and
aristocracy, and the salons in Berlin and Vienna conducted by Lea's aunts
Sarah, Ccilie and Fanny attracted artists, intellectuals and writers of all
religious persuasions and none.
Mendelssohn shared his parents' ideals of hard work and civic obligation.
From early youth he was determined to serve not only his beloved art but
his country and his people (the Folk who so often despise their prophets),
and to use his phenomenal gifts to serve the larger world.
Mendelssohn's published letters reflect the strong family bonds. Every
aspect of Felix's experience was to be shared: his travels, his compositions

and performances, his encounters with persons of consequence. Only his

marriage to Ccile Jeanrenaud was kept discreetly apart; he announced the
engagement to his family, but his sisters did not meet his wife until several
months after the marriage.
Mendelssohn often said that he owed everything important in his life to
his father, whose philosophy of life shaped his own. Abraham's letter to
Felix's sister Fanny on her confirmation places individual conscience at the
heart of religious faith. He wrote to his daughter
Does God exist.i* What is God.^ Is He a part of ourselves, and does He continue to live
after the other part has ceased to be.' All this I do not know, and therefore I have never
taught you anything about it. But I know that there exists in me and in you and in all
human beings an everlasting inclination towards all that is good, true, and right, and a
conscience which warns and guides us when we go astray [...] I live in this faith, and this
is my religion.^

In an oft-reprinted letter to Felix, written when Abraham discovered that

the composer was advertised in his London concerts as 'Felix Mendelssohn',
Abraham explained his feelings about Jewish and Christian belief:
I had learned [...] that the truth is one and eternal; its forms, however, are many and
transitory; and so I raised you [...] free from any religious form, which I wished to leave
to your own convictions [...] I felt no inner calling to choose for you the Jewish, the
most obsolete, corrupt and pointless of them. So I raised you in the Christian, the purer,
accepted by most civilised people.''

3. Letter of July 1820,

in Sebastian Hensel:
The Mendelssohn family
(18291847) from letters
and journals, trans. Carl
Klingemann (London, 188182), vol.1, p.79.
4. Letter of 8 July 1829, in
Max F. Schneider: Mendelssohn oder Bartholdy? ^ur
Geschichte eines Familiennamens (Basel, 1962), p.2o.

Abraham insisted that 'Mendelssohn', the name his own father had taken,
would 'forever belong to Judaism in its transitional period', and that 'Bartholdy', the name his brother-in-law Jacob had adopted on conversion and
which Abraham too had assumed, must be retained by Felix. The dutiful
son assured Abraham that the concert advertisements were an error, and
he wrote to Fanny, who also disliked the name 'Bartholdy', that it was a
trivial matter in which he would certainly oblige his father. He continued to
use 'Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy' as his professional name, thus pleasing
himself and satisfying his father in a typical compromise.
Most important for his life and work was his relationship with Fanny,
his gifted older sister. Many of his compositions originated in the Sunday
musicales which the children and friends put on in their large house and
garden. Fanny's letters show a side of Felix different from the cheerful,
happy youth described by his friends. He suffered from frequent headaches,
moodiness, temper and prickliness, which aroused her anxious concern.
She was his chief adviser and critic. He is often blamed for her reluctance
to publish her own compositions, but he fully appreciated her gifts and
ptiblished some of her songs (uncredited) with his own. These songs were
among the young Queen Victoria's favourites, as he delightedly reported
to Fanny. His advice that she avoid publication echoed their father's view
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Mendelssohn reconsidered
that her sphere must be the domestic one. Abraham later changed his mind,
and Fanny began to publish her works the year before she died, defying
her brother but pleading for his understanding, which was immediately
granted.
When Fanny married the artist Wilhelm Hensel, she wrote to her
brother:
Today is the third of October, and my wedding day; and my first pleasure on this day is to
write to you, and to tell you again what you have always known [...] Your picture is near
me, and you look at me with such loving eyes, I must weep [...] I have always known that
nothing can come between us, you can never be far from my thoughts, tomorrow and in
every moment of my life you are present to me, and I know I am not wronging Hensel
in saying this. That you too love me sustains my very being, and shall do so as long as I
live.'
A few months later Mendelssohn sent Fanny a new song, written to say

all that he could not say in words: 'You know me well and know what I am,
always [...] more cannot be said in a letter. That I am yours you know.'^
Marriage, the birth of children, long intervals of separation could not alter
what was for each of them the first and greatest bond.
Mendelssohn never recovered from Fanny's sudden death, though he
tried to restore his spirits in composition. His memorial to her is his F minor
string quartet op.8o, which expresses a depth of anguish new to his music.
He died six months after his sister, also of a stroke. Fanny had been 41; Felix
was only 38.
"OST BIOGRAPHERS recognise the late change in Mendelssohn's
work and its cause. But Werner locates Mendelssohn's troubled
.spirits much earlier in his hfe. His thesis is that tormenting
questions about his Jewish identity were central to Mendelssohn's character
and work.
Until Werner's book appeared, the only known reference by Mendelssohn to his Jewish identity was the remark reported long after the event
by his friend Eduard Devrient about their joint production of Bach's St
Matthew Passion: 'To think that it should be an actor {Komdiant) and a Jew
{Judenjunge) that gives back to the people the greatest of Christian works!'^
Devrient added that on other occasions Mendelssohn avoided all reference
to his Jewish descent.
Hence the interest in Werner's use of unpublished material. One striking
example: Mendelssohn's younger sister Rebecka wrote to Felix about a 'Mr
Dessauer' who had the nerve to present his sister to the family: *I am not
hostile to Jews, but this is a bit thick.' According to Werner, Mendelssohn
sharply rebuked his sister: 'What do you mean by saying that you are not
hostile to Jews? I hope this was just a joke; otherwise I would take you to task

M:

5. Letter of 3 October 1829 in

Eva Weissweiler, ed.: Fanny
und Felix Mendelssohn., 'Die
Musik willgarnicht rutschen
ohne Dich ': Brievechsel 1821
bis /^^^(Berlin, 1997), pp2426.
6. Letter to Fanny, 14
June 1830, in Briefwechsel.,
pp.i 1920.
7. Eduard Devrient: Meine
Erinnerungen a.i Felix
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und
seine Briefe an mich ([869),
trans. Natalia Macfarran
as My recollections of Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy and
his letters to me (London,

most seriously. It is really sweet of you that you do not despise your entire
family, isn't it? I expect from you a full explanation in your next letter.'
Also cited is a letter by Mendelssohn written from London, comparing
new Prussian legislation restricting the civil rights of Polish Jews to the
Jewish Civil Disabilities Act just passed by the House of Commons.
Werner's text of the letter reads: 'This morning they emancipated the Jews,
which makes me proud [...] The Times said that things are certainly better
for us in England.'*
According to Werner, antisemitic taunting of the composer resulted in
lifelong trauma. The most disturbing event was the Berlin Singakademie's
rejection of Mendelssohn as successor to his teacher Carl Zelter. Mendelssohn
had conducted the Singakademie in the St Matthew Passion; both he and
Fanny had long been members. But by a vote of 148 to 88 the Singakademie
chose Zelter's deputy as the new Director. According to Devrient, who was
present at private meetings, members objected that as the Singakademie was
a Christian institution which performed sacred music, 'it was an unheard
of thing to try and thrust a Judenjunge upon them for their conductor'.'
Mendelssohn's intense dislike of Berlin musical bureaucracy appears to date
from this incident.

8. Werner: Mendelssohn,
pp.42-43 & 239. The text of
the letter of 23 July 23 was
revised slightly in the later
German edition.
9. Devrient: My recollections,
p. 150.
10. Werner: Mendelssohn,
p.283.

Werner also discovered evidence of Mendelssohn's Jewish identity in

his major works. He writes that after his father's death: 'Nothing was more
important to Felix now than the completion of StPaul[..] The figure of the
Apostle, who was born a Jew and, after his conversion, always remained a
friend of his people, must have struck a deep chord in Felix." Mendelssohn's
grand project, Werner argues, was to demonstrate in his oratorios the common links between Judaism and Christianity, thus serving as a bridge between his grandfather's enlightened humanism, his father's deism and his
own devout Christian belief.
Mendelssohn was an indefatigable correspondent, and the 19th-century
selections published by family and friends, representing only a small part
of the total, were edited according to the mores of the time. For this reason
alone, Werner's biography was welcomed by readers and scholars alike. The
New York Times predicted that the book would become a standard reference
work, and its findings were widely accepted. But 35 years after Werner's
book was first published, and ten years after his death, it became clear that
Werner's private agenda had led him to embroider the facts and to fabricate
much of the evidence so cogently presented.
In 1998 The Musical Quarterly published an essay by Jeffrey S. Sposato,
at that time a postgraduate student at Brandeis, who had examined Werner's
supposed sources and discovered that the passages Werner cited as evidence
of Mendelssohn's 'self-identification as a Jew' were nowhere to be found
- neither the rebuke to his sister Rebecka nor the key phrases about the
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Mendelssohn reconsidered

11. Jeffrey M. Sposato:

'Creative writing: the
[self-] identification of
Mendelssohn as Jew', in The
Musical Quarterly vol.82 no.i
(i998),pp.i9o-209. Sposato's
thesis is fully developed in
The pnce of assimilation:
Felix Mendelssohn and the
nineteenth-century anti-semitic
tradition (New York &
Oxford, 2006).
12. Leon Botstein:
'Mendelssohn and the Jews',
in The Musical Quarterly
vol.82 no.i (1998), PP.45-5Q.
See also Peter Ward Jones:
'Letter to the editor', in The
Musical Quarterly vol.83 "*^- '
('999)>PP-27-3o C'A little
experience [...] soon teaches
that nothing in Werner
should be taken on trust',
p.29); Michael P. Steinherg:
'Mendelssohn's music and
German-Jewish culture: an
intervention', in The Musical
Quarterly \o\.%-^ no.i (1999),
pp.3144; Leon Botstein:
'Mendelssohn, Werner and
the Jews: a final word', in
The Musical Quarterly vol.83
no.i, PP.4-50
13. Sposato: T^eprice of
assimilation., p. 161.

Jewish Civil Disabilities Act. Rather than writing 'which makes me proud',
Mendelssohn had written 'which amuses me', the Act 'is 'noble and good'
but not 'for us*." Accounts of Mendelssohn's traumatic experiences of
antisemitism were unverified hearsay; his rejection as conductor by the
Singakademie, however disagreeable, was soon set aside.
The editor of The Musical (Quarterly^ Leon Botstein, welcomed Sposato's
disclosures as the first shot in a debate which followed in due course, with
contributions from Botstein, Michael Steinberg, and the Bodleian music
librarian Peter Ward Jones. Jones confirmed Sposato's findings from the
Mendelssohn letters at the Bodleian; and both Botstein and Steinberg accepted
that Werner's book was seriously flawed. They sought an explanation for
his scholarly offences in the history of Mendelssohn's reception, from
Wagner's antisemitic rantings to the Nazi ban on Mendelssohn's music,
and in Werner's own history as a refugee from Nazism. Botstein agreed
with Werner's thesis: 'Mendelssohn's greatness as a composer must begin
with an acknowledgment of his Utopian Protestant project rooted in the
Judaism of his grandfather that was centered on enlightenment, harmony,
and the transcendence of nationalism and religious differences.' He adds:
'Mendelssohn knew throughout his life that he was a Jew; he acknowledged
this fact, struggled with, and paid homage to it with both tacit and overt
poignancy in his music, his personal life, and his ideas."^ Steinberg, agreeing
with Botstein, suggested that Werner had evidently 'mistranscribed' and
'mistranslated' certain passages, or perhaps, in an age before photocopiers,
had relied on his memory. Steinberg argues that the errors or fabrications
do not invalidate Werner's general analysis of the man and his music.
But unless we accord the privileges of fiction to a biography which claims
to be based on original research, it is evident that Werner's private agenda
radically subverts his material. The 'fundamental dilemma' which Werner
believed central to Mendelssohn's work appears not to have presented itself
as a dilemma to Mendelssohn himself. His thinking and feeling on these
troubling matters, far from being turbulent, was clear and consistent. As
a reformer, at times a self-styled radical, he shared his grandfather's enlightenment views; he respected his father's more secular humanism and his
practical advice. But he chose to go his own way. He maintained a sincere
but undogmatic faith in a Creator who permits his children freedom of
conscience in all human matters. He hated the zealous nationalism rampant
in Cermany, despising it as narrow, provincial, unenlightened. But that
he had a 'utopian Protestant project' to be realised in his music is pure
speculation.
Yet claims and counterclaims persist. Sposato meticulously unpicks the
fabrications in Werner's 'New Image' of Mendelssohn with exemplary
scholarship. But his own thesis errs in the opposite direction. He argues that

14. R. Larry Todd, in his

magisterial Mendelssohn:
a life in music (New York
& Oxford, 2003), accepts
(with reservations) Werner's
general thesis, that his search
for identity was the critical
issue affecting Mendelssohn's
life. cf. Todd's Preface,
p.xxviii, and his summary of
the issues raised by Sposato,
Botstein and Steirierg in
his discussion of Elijah,
PP-55I-57-

far from identifying in his oratorios with his Jewish heritage, Mendelssohn
was at pains to identify himself as a Christian, distancing himself from his
Jewish origins by portraying the biblical Jews in 'anti-Semitic stereotj^es',
representing them 'as adhering to a religion based on sometimes barbaric
ritual; and as a people incapable of true faith'. Sposato acknowledges that
it is unhistorical to detect antisemitism in the Old or New Testament,
Mendelssohn's sources. But he claims that Mendelssohn deliberately chose
to present the Israelites 'in a negative light' in the libretto for St Paul, as
well as a text of 'Moses' which Mendelssohn put together for his friend
AB Marx. Sposato detects a change of heart in Elijah: 'Unlike Moses and
Paulus, Elias contains little of the blatant antisemitic content that could have
helped Mendelssohn distance himself from his Jewish roots. Elias instead
represents Mendelssohn's first real attempt to find a method of publicly
declaring the depth of his Christian faith without having simultaneously to
sully the Jewish image."'
But there is. no evidence that Mendelssohn felt a compelling need to
declare his Christian faith, to distance himself from his Jewish roots, or to
provide a bridge between his Jewish heritage and Christian belief. There are
no references to these projects in his letters, no indication that his motives
were other than musical and literary. The only 'evidence ' is the absence of
evidence not that that has ever stopped critics from proposing interesting
and ingenious theories. There continues to be a pervasive assumption
that given his grandfather's fame and his close relationship to his father,
Mendelssohn must have found his Jewish heritage profoundly troubling,
central to his thinking and to his work.'"*
What is not in dispute is that antisemitism was rife in Germany at the time
and afterwards. The 'Hep-Hep' riots swept through German cities in 1819,
copy-cat orgies of destruction in which drunken university students taunted
Jews and sacked their shops. It is possible, according to a much later account
(generously elaborated by Werner), that as a boy of ten Mendelssohn was
caught up in one of these incidents. The vote for Zelter's successor at the
Berlin Singakademie was humiliating for Mendelssohn; and Devrient was
no doubt correct in accusing some members of antisemitism.
It is also true that Wagner's attack on Jews in general and Mendelssohn
in particular fell on fertile ground. Although he thought of himself above
all as a musician, 'a fiery musical enthusiast', as his friend Ignaz Moscheles
described him, Mendelssohn was always identified by others as a Jew. His
appearance was often described as Semitic or 'oriental'. Queen Victoria
described him in her unpublished journal as 'short, dark, & Jewish looking'.
Schumann, although he idolised Mendelssohn, complained to Clara about
his friend that 'Jews remain Jews [...] the stones we have helped gather
for their Temple of Glory they occasionally throw at us'. Zelter, who was
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Mendelssohn reconsidered

immensely proud of the young prodigy, wrote about him to Goethe: *He is
indeed the son of a Jew, but no Jew. His father with remarkable self-denial
did not have his sons circumcised and educated them properly. It would
really be eppes [Rores] (mock-Yiddish for 'something rare') if a Judensohne
were to become an artist."^
Abraham Mendelssohn did everything possible to assure his children a
life free from the constraints imposed on Jews by the prevailing culture.
It was Abraham, not Felix, who thought long and hard about his Jewish
origins and family allegiances. He reached the conclusion that conversion
suited the family's practical and philosophical needs, and offered the best
future for his children.
Both parents provided a cosmopolitan education for all four children,
with private lessons in classic and foreign languages and literature. Felix
was sent on his early years of European travel with instructions to choose
freely where to make his career. He knew that the hothouse world of the
Parisian salons could never be his proper realm, and he felt that Chopin was
a victim of that refined and frivolous life. He was enraptured by Italian art
and scenery but never considered making Italy his home. He felt at home in
England, where he was feted as the first composer of the day. But it was as a
German that he proposed to make his mark. He wrote to Zelter:
This time when I arrived back in Germany after all of the beauties I had savoured in Italy
and Switzerland, after all of the wonderful things that 1 experienced - and especially while
en route through Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and down the Rhine to Dusseldorf that was really the high point of my trip. For there I knew that I was a German and wanted
to live in Germany, as long as I could [...] There I was at home.'
15. Queen Victoria:
unpublished journal entry
of tjune 1842, reprinted in
Roger Nichols: Mendelssohn
remembered (X-'^^on, 1997),
p.139; Gerd Nauhaus, ed.:
The marriage diaries ofRobert
& Clara Schumann, trans.
Peter Ostwald (London,
1994), p.31; Carl Friedrich
Zelter: Letter of 26 October
1821, in Max F. Hecker,
ed.: Briefvechselfischen
Goethe und Zelter tyc)c}~Sj2
(Frankfurt, 1987), vol.2,
p.139.
16. Mendelssohn to Carl
Friedrich Zelter, Letter
of 15 February 1832
(English translation in
Rudolph Elvers, ed.: Felix
Mendelssohn: a life in letters,
trans. Craig Tomlinson
(London, 198), p.171.

Berlin, home of his beloved family, he found antipathetic, partly because of his rejection by the Singakademie, but primarily because of
Prussian conservatism and bureaucracy. He wanted a free hand, which his
first appointment at Dusseldorf seemed to offer, despite variable musical
standards. When he was invited to conduct the Gewandhaus concerts in
Leipzig, a thriving centre not only of music but of the book trade, he was
immediately tempted. His years there as Music Director were probably the
most satisfying of his professional life. His contract permitted him to travel
frequently to England and to conduct the Lower Rhine Festival, alternating
between Dusseldorf and Cologne. These were ideal circumstances, enabling
Mendelssohn to schedule works by Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven,
and to perform his own new works and works by his contemporaries. His
dream of founding a music conservatory could only have been realised
in Leipzig. A proposal from King Frederick William IV of Prussia to do
something similar in Berlin came to nothing.
Was he, in fact, profoundly religious? The theologian Julius Schubring,
whom Mendelssohn consulted about his oratorio texts, thought so:

17- Julius Schubring:

'Reminiscences of Felix
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy',
reprinted in Mendebsokn and
his world, ed. R. Larry Todd
(Princeton, 1991), p-227-

'Mendelssohn's character had a deep feeling of religion for its basis. That
this wanted the specific church colouring is a fact on which we disputed a
great deal'.'^ One dispute concerned the libretto for St Paul. Mendelssohn
rejected Paulinian doctrine of justification by faith, as urged by Schubring,
preferring his own choice of biblical text: 'We all believe in one God'
which was consistent with Abraham's belief in 'one truth with many forms'.
Mendelssohn's letters include frequent asides like 'God willing', or 'thanks
be to God', hardly suggesting a profound or troubled faith but rather a
conventional belief, free from dogma, in a beneficent God or Providence.
For Mendelssohn, it was music that was sacred. It was the highest form
of human endeavour, a celebration of human life and the natural world as
an expression and embodiment of the divine. All periods of music provided
material for a modern, progressive composer determined to reform the art
for his age and to reinstate its greatest works in concert halls and festivals.
For his literary sources, too, Mendelssohn chose the greatest works, the
secular writings of Shakespeare and Goethe as well as the Bible, regarded
not as the word of God but as a repository of wisdom and profound poetry.
He was not fond of folk music, but he loved the Lutheran chorales which
are such a central element in Bach's music. He opposed the separation of
church music from secular music; he insisted that the first performance of
Bach's St Matthew Passion should be not in a church but a concert hall. He
argued against the banning of music from church services; he composed
for Catholic as well as Lutheran services, and he was prepared to compose
settings of psalms for the Hamburg synagogue. There is nothing in his
letters about the content of religious worship; in London he was more
interested in playing the organ in St Paul's than in attending services.
It is tempting to read the texts of St Paul and Elijah as a reflection of
Mendelssohn's views about religion. Certainly he would not have chosen
texts which he found unsympathetic. But his first and greatest literary influence was Goethe, whose Die erste Walpurgisnacht, set by Mendelssohn,
laments the defeat of the heathen Druids by the persecuting Christians.
It was the persecution of the weak by the strong that Mendelssohn found
hateful. He dramatised the violent passions of the oppressor and the suffering and endurance of the victim with equal sensitivity, whether he was
setting Goethe's ballad or biblical texts.
Taking Handel's oratorios as his model, Mendelssohn insisted that he
wanted to present the prophets as living human beings. When his friend
Devrient objected to the chorales in St Paul as anachronistic, Mendelssohn
suggested that they provided resting points in the drama. But Wachet
auf, which opens the Overture, provides the central metaphor for Paul's
conversion, his blindness, his three days' sleep, and his awakening; it is
essentially dramatic. Elijah used chorales more sparingly. But the devotional
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Mendelssohn reconsidered

18. Letter of 2 November

1838 to Julius Schubring,
in Briefwechsel fischen
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
undJulius Schubring
(Leipzig [892), p.135;
English translation in
Letters of Felix MendelssohnBartholdy, 1822i84y., edd.
Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy
& Dr Carl Mendelssohn
Bartholdy, trans. Lady
Wallace (Berlin, 1864), p.io.
19. Charles Rosen:
The romantic generation
(London, 1995), chapter 10,
'Mendelssohn and the
invention of religious
kitsch', pp.569-98.

element in both works, transformed and dramatised, functions not as piety

but as an expression of universal human emotions, common to the Israelites
and to the newly converted, Gentiles and Jews.
No doubt there is autobiographical relevance in Mendelssohn*s choice of
subjects. When he was first contemplating an oratorio on the Old Testament
prophet Elijah, he wrote to Schubring: *I conceived of Elijah as a genuine
prophet through and through, such as we could use again in our own day
strong, zealous, and also stern, and wrathful, and gloomy, in opposition
to the rabble of the court and the rabble of the people [Hofgesindel und
Volksgesindel], and almost in opposition to the whole world*.'^ This hardly
indicates a project to unite Jewish and Christian belief. Nor is it a reflection
of a comfortable Biedermeier confidence in the status quo, a key part of
the charge of 'religious kitsch' levelled by Charles Rosen in The romantic
generation.*^ On the contrary, Mendelssohn, like Schumann, saw his own
time as an age of philistinism, in which the true artist would inevitably feel
embattled.
St Paul and Elijah are the major works which established Mendelssohn's
fame throughout Europe and America; they are the works on which he
lavished most care, the works closest to his heart. But there is no evidence that
they constitute a 'project', a reflection of his grandfather's Enlightenment
philosophy, his father's rationalism, or his own religious belief. They
represent Mendelssohn's hfelong ambition to extend in his own personal
idiom the combined legacy of Bach and Handel. Charles Rosen's charge
is that Mendelssohn sentimentalised and softened that legacy, making it
comfortable for audiences, designing his oratorios to conform both in
musical and religious terms to prevailing norms. But both Bach and Handel
worked to prevailing norms: Bach provided music for the liturgical calendar,
Handel sought to satisfy patrons and audiences. We agree now that they
transcended their times. I would argue that, in his own way, Mendelssohn
transcended his.
In an age of faith audiences might well have heard each oratorio as
confirmation of their own prevailing belief - Lutheran in North Germany,
Catholic in Bavaria, Austria and the Rhineland, Anglican in England. Elijah
has been performed as if composed with special meaning for Jewish audiences, most movingly in a Berlin synagogue in 1937, on the eve of the
Second World War.
But for Mendelssohn, the heart of the drama is the anguish of the ancient
prophet crying in the wilderness, persecuted by the established authorities
of state and church, the anointed kings of Israel and the elders and scribes,
stoned by the fickle people, who are in thrall to corrupt rulers and priests.
It is a story repeated in each generation, in every society. If there was an
element of autobiography, it lies in Mendelssohn's aversion to state, court

and civic bureaucracy, especially in Berlin, and his distrust of the mob,
expressed in letters of the mid-i84OS when revolution seemed imminent.
Like Schumann, Mendelssohn was passionately committed to the reform
of music in his time. He engaged in constant battle with the philistines
ruling the musical establishments and popular taste. He worked tirelessly
to restore the works of the great masters to a central place in performance.
But to see himself as the hero of his oratorio would have been out of
character. No more did he identify with Antigone, when commissioned to
write incidental music for a performance of the play by the King of Prussia,
though he would undoubtedly have sympathised with the great classical
heroine. His battles with authority were disheartening, but surmountable.
He suffered from headaches and nervous malaise but as far as we know he
never experienced a vision, a direct and personal summons from above. His
art was his God, for whom he struggled to achieve the best work of which
he was capable. After Fanny's death it was in composition that he sought
release, not in religion.
Where does his work stand in the history of romantic music.'^ Mendelssohn
himself was not interested in theory or criticism, and he disdained labels.
His works represent a continuous personal engagement with the masters
he loved, which takes place at the highest level of understanding, driven
always by his own creative freedom to reshape his sources.
He is a transitional figure, standing between classicism and romanticism,
incorporating and reinterpreting the Baroque for his own time - a transitional
figure with his own unique and expressive language, his own signature. It
is in his immensely varied and wide-ranging works that that language and
signature must be discovered, free from the preconceptions, the dismissive
labels and the wishful thinking that have dogged Mendelssohn studies for
the past century.

THE MUSICAL TIMES

Spring 2013

55

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