Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in Hamburg on 3 February 1809. Grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and son of the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, he grew up in Berlin from 1811 in a wealthy, highly cultivated family. Like his elder sister Fanny, he received a complete education: ancient and modern languages, drawing, literature and above all music. He studied piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, who introduced him to Bach.

A child prodigy, from the age of eleven he composed string symphonies, concertos and little operas, performed at the concerts held every Sunday in the family home. In 1821, aged twelve, Zelter took him to Weimar to meet the seventy-two-year-old Goethe, who was won over and received him several times. At sixteen, in 1825, he composed his String Octet, a masterpiece of astonishing maturity. The following year, after reading Shakespeare with Fanny, he wrote the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, evoking the magical world of the elves.

In 1829, aged twenty, he conducted at the Berlin Singakademie Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, of which he had obtained a copy and which had not been performed since the composer’s death a century earlier. This concert launched the Bach revival. That same year he set off on a great journey: England, then Scotland, where a visit to Fingal’s Cave in the Hebrides inspired the overture The Hebrides, then Italy, Switzerland and France.

These travels also produced the “Scottish” Symphony and the sun-filled “Italian” Symphony (1833). He also composed Songs without Words for piano, short lyrical pieces published in eight books and much loved by amateur pianists. After a post as music director in Düsseldorf, he was appointed in 1835 conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which he made one of the finest in Europe. He was one of the first conductors to use a baton.

In 1837 he married Cécile Jeanrenaud, daughter of a French pastor in Frankfurt, with whom he had five children. In Leipzig he performed works by composers past and present: he premiered Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony, rediscovered by Schumann, and supported young musicians. In 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory, which became one of the most renowned in the world, and had Schumann and the violinist Ferdinand David teach there.

England adored him: he made about ten visits, played for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and conducted his works before enthusiastic crowds. In 1842 he completed his incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the famous Wedding March. In 1845 Ferdinand David premiered his Violin Concerto in E minor, one of the best-loved in the repertoire. In 1846 his oratorio Elijah was premiered triumphantly at the Birmingham Festival.

Mendelssohn was overworked by his many activities. On 14 May 1847 he learned of the sudden death of his sister Fanny, to whom he was very close. Devastated, he composed in her memory the String Quartet in F minor, of painful violence. He died in Leipzig on 4 November 1847, aged thirty-eight, like Fanny of a stroke. Later, under the Nazi regime, his music was banned because of his Jewish origins and his statue in Leipzig destroyed. He is now recognised as one of the great masters of Romanticism.