Category:1809 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix (composer) DEU
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) was a German composer of Jewish descent.
Works
Oratorios
Biography
@2015 A paper by Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan (first delivered on February 14, 2015 at a panel at the University Musical Society)
Felix Mendelssohn was born on February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany. At that time the Mendelssohns had already become one of the most distinguished Jewish families in Germany. The founder of the Mendelssohn dynasty was Felix's grandfather: the philosopher and businessman Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786).
Of humble origins and destined by his father to become a rabbi, Moses Mendelssohn had other projects for himself. He educated himself in German thought and literature and followed his dream of full integration into German society. The first step was to change his last name, from Dessau to Mendelssohn. "My father -- wrote Moses's son Abraham in 1829 to his son Felix -- felt that the name Moses Ben Mendel Dessau would handicap him in gaining the needed access to those who had the better education at their disposal. Without any fear that his own father would take offense, my father assumed the name Mendelssohn. The change, though a small one, was decisive."
Moses became a successful businessman and a prominent philosopher, the friend of German intellectuals like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Kaspar Lavater.
Moses is often described as the "Jewish Luther", the father of Jewish Reformation. He translated the Hebrew Torah in German; proclaimed the superiority of Scripture over the tradition of the Talmud; looked with sympathy at the figure of Jesus, who in his opinion was a faithful Jew who never preached against the Torah. Moses envisioned a tolerant society in which the state has no right to interfere with the religion of its citizens and people of different faiths coexist under the common law. Lessing popularized Moses' ideals in his novel Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), the hero of which is undoubtedly Mendelssohn, and in which the parable of the three rings is the epitome of Moses' pragmatic position toward religious diversity.
Moses Mendelssohn married Fromet (Frumet) Guggenheim, a descendant of a prominent family, the great-granddaughter of banker Samuel Oppenheimer (1630-1703). The couple had 10 children, of whom six lived to adulthood. Felix was the son of Abraham Mendelssohn (1776-1835) and Lea Salomon, also the descendant of a prominent family, the granddaughter of Jewish banker Daniel Itzig (1723-1799). Abraham was educated according to the principles of Liberal Judaism and had a successful career of his own as a banker and philanthropist but lived always in the shadow of his famous father first and his famous son later. He used to joke with his friends, "Once I was the son of a famous father, now I am the father of a famous son." Before marrying, Both Abraham and Lea were members of the Berliner Singakademie, a musical institution founded in 1791 by composer and harpsichordist Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch to revive music of the past as well as to perform that of the present. Fasch had been a pupil of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach. The devotion to Bach would be a continuing feature of the Akademie and an important source of inspiration for Felix Mendelssohn.
Abraham and Lea married in 1804. Their four children -- Fanny (b.1805), Felix (b.1809), Rebecka (b.1811), and Paul (b.1812) -- were not raised according to the principles of Judaism (Felix and Paul were not circumcised). In 1810, the year after Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, Napoleon’s army marched through the city as he conquered large swaths of German territory. Under French civil law, Jews were officially emancipated and given equal rights for the first time in German history. However, not long after Napoleon was repelled in 1814, German nationalism blossomed, leading many principalities to revert to laws restricting Jewish citizenship. Fearing they could lose German citizenship, Abraham and Lea decided in 1816 to have their children baptized in the Lutheran faith. The surname Bartholdy was assumed at the moment of the conversion to signal an even deeper assimilation to German culture, as Moses had done by changing his surname into Mendelssohn.
A child-prodigy, Felix devoted his entire life to music, becoming one of the most popular composers of German Romanticism. His older sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, also was an accomplished musician and composer. Felix and Fanny shared the same musical education under the tutorship of Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1932) in Berlin. Zelter was a pupil of Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch and his successor as the director of the Berliner Singakademie. Zelter conveyed to his young pupils the love for the music of Bach, which was shared by their parents and relatives, especially by their great-aunt Sarah Itzig Levy (1761–1854), an accomplished pianist and pupil of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784), who also took a strong interest in the musical education of the two talented children. Zelter also introduced the children to the cultural life of Berlin and to his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
The two siblings, Fanny and Felix, always maintained a very close personal and professional relationship, even though the conventions of the age limited Fanny's public career. Her father wrote to her in 1820: "Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament". Under such limitations, Felix did his best to help his sister, even by publishing some of her music in his name. Only after her marriage with painter Wilhelm Hensel (1794-1861), who was very supportive of his wife's musical interests, Fanny could publish her music and offer public performances.
In his short but intense career (Felix died in 1847 at the age of 39) Felix wrote two major oratorios of biblical subject: Paulus (Paul) (1836) and Elias (Elijah) (1846). From the musical point of view they were both deeply influence by the experience of Bach revival that Felix had learned at the the Berliner Akademie. In 1824 Felix had received from his grandmother Bella Itzig the manuscript of Bach's St. Matthew Passion (by then all-but-forgotten). In 1829, Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance in Berlin of the oratorio. The success of this performance – the first since Bach's death in 1750 – was an important element in the revival of J. S. Bach's music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe.
If from the musical point of view Mendelssohn's oratorios are an important result of the Bach revival, more complicated is the issue of the choice of the topic. For his two biblical oratorios Mendelssohn picked up subjects never (or very seldom) before touched upon in the Christian tradition.
Some see in the choice of these subject the price Mendelssohn had to pay to assimilation, more explicitly in "Paul" where Mendelssohn would have identified himself with the figure of the convert from Judaism to Christianity, more covertly but no less clearly in Eljiah where the ancient prophet is depicted like an Old Testament Christ. (Jeffrey Sposato in his award-winning book “The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition,” Oxford University Press, 2005).
At the most, we might see a certain development of though between the two oratorios: in Paul Felix, still under the influence of his father, manifested a much stronger disdain for Jews. “In ‘St. Paul’ you really see the pinnacle of [Mendelssohn’s] trying to distance himself from Judaism,” said Sposato. In "Elijah", instead, written after the death of his father, Felix is less concerned about that and is willing to rediscover his Jewish roots. “It’s almost as if Mendelssohn said, ‘I want to write a Christian oratorio, but I don’t want to denigrate Jews in the process.’” (Sposato).
But there is something is this interpretation that does not persuade.
It is difficult to talk of a decisive change of perspective from Paul to Eijah when for the composition of the two librettos, Felix Mendelssohn worked with the same group of trusted friends--Julius Schubring (author of the German text of Paul), Karl Klingemann (author of the English version of Paul, and of the German text of Elijah), and William Bartholomew (author of the English version of Elijah).
Paul and Elijah are undoubtedly two "Christian" oratorios, and yet they both present striking "Jewish" features. Both librettos show the same narrative style, and a combination of elements from both Testaments. The "Paul" oratorio actually shies away from the theological doctrines Jews find most difficult to accept, being built more on the narrative of the Acts than on some of the most controversial and polemical passages in the letters of Paul. "Elijah" is, after all, a story based on a flesh-and-blood Jewish prophet and assiduously avoids the anti-Semitic tropes that most Christian works based on Old Testament stories once embraced. The narrative is strictly based on passages from the Hebrew Bible, and does not confine Elijah to the eschaton and the end of time as customary in the New Testament and later Christian tradition.
The relation of Felix Mendelssohn with his Jewish identity is certainly complex and yet surprisingly consistent in his life.
It must be taken into consideration that not all members of the Mendelssohn family and descendants of Moses Mendelssohn converted. The Mendelssohns remained a mixed family with scores of Jewish relatives and strong ties with Jewish culture. Felix was both conscious and proud of his Jewish ancestry and relatives, and notably of his connection with his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn--even wrote some of his first works based on Moses Mendelssohn’s biblical translations and promoted the publication of the works of his grandfather. In a letter to his younger sister Rebecka, Mendelssohn rebukes her complaint about an unpleasant Jewish relative: "What do you mean by saying you are not hostile to Jews? I hope this was a joke [...] It is really sweet of you that you do not despise your family, isn't it?".
Certainly Felix Mendelssohn did nothing to hide his Jewish roots. No less stubborn that his famous grandfather, even as a child Felix resisted the will of his father, he never dropped the name Mendelssohn, only reluctantly adding the surname Bartholdy, a surname that as Fanny wrote to him in 1829, we both "dislike."
And when Felix first arrived in England, where “Elijah” premiered and where the composer was embraced perhaps even more than in Germany, newspapers openly introduced him as the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn. There is no evidence he objected.
The fact is that Mendelssohn did not see any contradiction between his Jewish pride and his Christian faith. He was "both comfortable acknowledging his Jewish roots ... and embracing his Lutheran faith" ( (maybe a lesson from his grandfather's interpretation of Jesus). “In Mendelssohn’s view,” as Leon Botstein the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra wrote in an essay responding to Sposato, “Judaism was not rejected, hidden, or denied, but transfigured and modernized by Protestantism.” In other words, Mendelssohn understood his Christianity not as a rejection of Judaism but as a form of Reformed Judaism.
His contemporaries understood it well. In spite of his conversion, Mendelssohn was loved in circles of Liberal Judaism. Jewish pianist and composer Charles Salaman adapted "He that Shall Endure to the End" from Elijah as a setting for Psalm 93 (Adonai Malakh), sung on most Friday nights at the sabbath-eve service of the London Spanish & Portuguese Jewish community.
On the other hand, the conversion to Christianity did not spare Mendelssohn for being a target of antisemitic attacks. Richard Wagner’s notorious essay “Jewishness in Music,” published in 1850 (just a few years after the performance of the Elijah), singled out Mendelssohn, writing that anyone of Jewish ancestry could never truly compose authentic German music. Wagner's anti-semitic remarks led to a long demise of Mendelssohn in German culture.
- "Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy has shown us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and the tenderest sense of honor—yet without all these pre-eminences helping him, were it but one single time, to call forth in us that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from Art ... Whereas Beethoven, the last in the chain of our true music-heroes, strove with highest longing, and wonder-working faculty, for the clearest, certainest Expression of an unsayable Content through a sharp-cut, plastic shaping of his tone-pictures: Mendelssohn, on the contrary, reduces these achievements to vague, fantastic shadow-forms, midst whose indefinite shimmer our freakish fancy is indeed aroused, but our inner, purely-human yearning for distinct artistic sight is hardly touched with even the merest hope of a fulfilment." (Wagner, Jewishness in Music, 1850).
Today's performance of Mendelssohn's Eljiah is an opportunity to rediscover the beauty of Mendelssohn's music as well as to appreciate his attempt at finding a synthesis between his two identities, Jewish and Christian, that Felix both cherished with equal enthusiasm and a great deal of tolerance.
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