Module: Texts & Contexts – Mendelssohn (MUSI2721)
Module Tutor: Prof. Clive Brown
Question 1: What were the main features of Mendelssohn’s education and early development, and how did they affect his musical career?
There are very many factors associated with Mendelssohn’s early development which need to be taken into consideration. Possibly the most important aspect of his childhood is undeniably his religion, but other pertinent factors also include the status and wealth of his parents, which afforded him an extensive array of resources; the inestimable importance of his parents; their ideological views; the imposition of a strict educational regime under which Abraham and Lea placed all their offspring; (a reflection on the framework which Moses Mendelssohn also provided for his own children) the caring, nurturing, and almost maternal regard in which his elder sister Fanny held him; the other educational spheres in which he also excelled, such as art, literature, and Latin; the other acquaintances he met whilst travelling around Europe, such as Goethe; and lastly, the move to a new home in 1825 in which there was ample space to pursue leisure activities of a more physical nature.
The status and wealth of Felix’s parents cannot be truly understood without reference to contemporaneous accounts. A major factor which helps to explain the wealth of the Mendelssohn family is that of their activities as bankers. Of all Moses Mendelssohn’s children, Joseph was the eldest. Together with Abraham, he founded the banking house of Mendelssohn and Co. But more interestingly, Abraham’s wife, Lea Salomon, was the grand-daughter of another banker, Daniel Itzig, who was chief financier to the Prussian emperor Frederick the Great. As such, the emperor granted Daniel, his children, and his grand-children the status of German citizen. This was somewhat of a double-edged sword, as it meant that Felix and his siblings were not included. For the local authorities to recognise their status, there was only one solution, and that was to convert to Christianity.
So it was in 1816, at the age of seven, that Felix and his siblings were baptised, the parents Abraham and Lea following six years later. This procedure was one of convention rather than of a commitment on any of the children’s part to their new adopted faith. The conversion involved the addition of the name ‘Bartholdy’ after the children’s original surname. This was a change which Felix apparently detested and obstinately refused to use until his father heard about it second-hand many years later after hearing about a concert review from London where the original name of ‘Felix Mendelssohn’ had been used by the reviewer. When Abraham wrote to Felix on this matter, Felix’s reaction was one of mild surprise, as if the matter of the addendum to his surname had somehow slipped his mind. Even so, the Mendelssohn family still found themselves being discriminated against by certain xenophobic individuals: “With the wild yell of ‘Hep, hep!’, individuals were assaulted and followed in the streets … one royal prince jovially shouted ‘Hep, hep!’ after the boy Felix Mendelssohn in the street.”[1] This was unfortunately reminiscent of a growing anti-Semitic culture in the first half of nineteenth century
A friend of Felix’s, Eduard Devrient, recollects the enormous array of resources at his disposal:
“I had opportunity to notice the rich stores of learning and powerful influences that were brought to bear upon his education. […] The unceasing activity of Felix, which became a necessity of life with him, is no doubt to be ascribed to early habit.”[3]
Felix was indeed incredibly fortunate to have been born into a family associated with such levels of refinement, sophistication, and wealth. Not only was his father a wealthy banker, as aforementioned, but his grandfather Moses was an extremely distinguished philosopher, whose theological and sociocultural theories marked him out as one of the most prominent thinkers of the late eighteenth century.[4] As the next generation of a family so heavily imbued already with intellectual minds, Felix was given the best possible start to life in every sense; he had never been a party to poverty, unlike virtually all of his contemporaries. This was something they would become intensely jealous over later on. However, most of his rivals merely assumed that as he was born the son of a wealthy merchant banker, his life was one of general ease and facility, fecundity made all the more apparent by the ‘thinness’ of his compositional output, as some of his contemporaries saw it fit to describe Mendelssohn’s work. The overwhelming majority of the contemporaneous critiques discussed thus far show that Felix’s life was anything but easy. Felix was an extremely fortunate child in many respects, but he did not waste the opportunities presented to him and made sure to exploit them to their full potential, thereby making him somewhat markedly different to the usual outcome wealth has on children.
As it was, perhaps a fair indication of the family wealth can be conveyed by a letter Felix wrote to an unidentified doctor in 1822, with regard to his studies. In the letter, he reveals how he has “composed two operettas; one for father’s and the other for mother’s birthday. […] We surprised father with it; […] it pleased him so much that he determined to give it on 3rd February, my birthday, with all the instruments.”[5]
Devrient, who met Felix’s acquaintance in 1822, recalls one such rehearsal of the second operetta:
When the little work had been tried through, his first thought was carefully to collect the parts and place them in order; this he did before he would take any notice of our admiring comments on the work. These he received pleasantly enough, but preferred to lead off the conversation to questions or explanations on the details of performance.[6]
It is rather ironic, to say the least, to note that for all the efforts of Mendelssohn’s parents to provide an open family environment in which the exchange of ideas concerning art, science, and literature could pervade, throughout his life Mendelssohn himself frequently appears reticent about discussion of his music. His parents genuinely attempted to provide a caring environment that fostered and nurtured the advancement of knowledge. Abraham, being the son of Moses, perhaps the most important philosopher of the late eighteenth century, was inevitably subjected to Moses’ various philosophical disquisitions, but the conservatism and culture-embracing ideology, in which Moses played such an integral part in propagating, never rubbed off on Abraham. This may have been because Moses died when Abraham was only nine years old, or it may have been due to Abraham being one of the younger children. Whatever the explanation, it is fair to say that Abraham had a more liberal outlook on life than his father, and this had a bearing on Mendelssohn’s upbringing. It seems that Mendelssohn inherited, in part at least, the work ethic and ideals so clearly found in his father’s ideology: “The conviction that our life is given us for work, for usefulness, and constant striving – this conviction Felix inherited from his father.”[7]
There is also the matter of Fanny’s influence on Felix. It is impossible to estimate the esteem in which he held her, being his elder sister; and for her part, she took it upon herself to take a great interest in Felix’s progress, watching over him in a maternal, quasi-parental manner. As his elder sister, he always attempted to emulate her piano playing throughout his childhood. Felix always made a point of writing to her, and she to him, if he was travelling with Zelter in Paris during 1825, for instance. A collection of her letters clearly displays this, along with her wish that he was back at home with her: “You are making us languish in vain today – release us tomorrow. I hope you’ll be back with us in a little over 2 weeks, and perhaps these are our last letters.”[8] Naturally, as they grew older, the relative frequency of her letters to him decreased as she fulfilled the roles not only of sister and daughter, but those of her career and being a mother and wife. If she been exposed to the same opportunities that Felix had had, she may or may not have capitalised on them. She, too, wrote a huge body of piano music, at least four hundred lieder, most of which remain unpublished to this day. In some circles she was regarded as having a performance technique even better than her younger brother.
Felix’s interest in music was fuelled, in part at least, by the extraordinary array of tools at his disposal. It is especially interesting to note how reports of his youthful mindset may have been translated across into his early compositions – experimentation seems to have been a key part of his first extant works, considering for example his Octet for Strings in E flat major, featuring a startling amount of inventiveness and originality, finished in October 1825 and incidentally inspired by Goethe’s poems, and also the exquisite instrumentation and setting of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.
Such close interest in the progressive educational attainments, musical or otherwise, of their children no doubt did much credit to Abraham and Lea as parents. The Mendelssohn household doubled as a leading venue in which the foremost intellectual minds of the day could come partake in conversation. This meant that they further enhanced the children’s teaching by exposing them to the absolute forefront of developments in the artistic, literary, and scientific realms. This is reflected in a comic-heroic poem Mendelssohn wrote called Paphlëis. It was written in hexameter verse, loosely based on his brother Paul, modelled on a work by Goethe, and perfectly illustrates the breadth and depth of culture that the Mendelssohn children enjoyed.
It was at the age of six that Felix began several types of music lessons from someone outside his family. Previously he had been given a few lessons with Fanny, his elder sister, from Lea – and so he started instruction in piano lessons with Ludwic Berger. The year after this, he began piano lessons with Marie Bigot and violin lessons with Pierre Baillot, both in
It was not long after Mendelssohn began music tuition that he made his performing debut at the age of nine. This meant that the pressure was always on for him to follow up his success. Early indicative accounts place his piano-playing highest of all; the young Felix was, of course, a gifted violinist and organ player as well, and would later be involved in conducting, but his chief instrument above all was always the piano. Again, concert reviews of his compositions, and his performances of existing repertoire, vary extremely widely. On the one hand we have accounts of his improvisation from Joachim[9] in which Mendelssohn expressed a desire for adherence to the given score. On the other hand his interpretation of this belief seems wanting when considering Bach’s Chaconne for Solo Violin.[10]
Mendelssohn began his lessons in musical theory from Zelter the year after studying with Bigot and Henning. It was Zelter in particular who made a lasting impression on the young boy, as a prominent musician and the director of the famous ‘Singakademie’, for not only was Felix was to join the chorus of the Singakademie as an alto a few years later, but Zelter ultimately gave Felix free reign to rehearse with the Singakademie musicians, which helped in no small part to re-launch Bach’s seminal works in the eyes of his own native people. Furthermore, it was also Zelter who first took the young Felix to see Goethe, the great German writer, in
By all accounts, Goethe seemed most impressed with Felix and his intentions, and Felix was similarly impressed with the authority and austerity of the old man, some 60 years his senior. Indeed, Felix returned in 1825 to visit him again, during which Goethe heard Felix’s piano quartet in B minor. Goethe was so flattering about this composition that Felix dedicated it to him more or less instantaneously.
Some correspondence from Zelter to Goethe, and likewise, has survived, in which the two talk about the precocious youngster. This is an extract of a letter from Zelter to Goethe: “I have a young pupil, now at work upon his third comic Opera, to whom I should like to give a serious subject. The boy’s talent is sound, his work flows spontaneously, and he is industrious from love of the thing.”[11]
But unknown to Mendelssohn at the time, Zelter had doubts about his capabilities. This is clearly demonstrated in Zelter’s explicitly racist remark: “It would really be eppes Rores [something rare] if the son of a Jew turned out an artist…”[12] Mendelssohn eventually did get to know about Zelter’s remarks in the 1830s, and was naturally deeply offended by this, particularly as in Zelter he saw his beloved educator, devoted to the same craft as he.
During the same year of his return to Paris, Mendelssohn also paid a visit to another teacher of his, Luigi Cherubini. Cherubini, too, heard the piano quartet, and afterwards endorsed Felix for a career in composition; these were his actual remarks, as recorded by Zelter when he wrote to Goethe in May of 1825: “Ce garcon est riche; il fera bien; il fait meme déjà bien, mais il dépense trop de son argent, il met trop d’étoffe dans son habit. Je lui parlerai, alors il fera bien.”[13] A working translation of this is: “This boy is rich; he will do well; he does well enough already, but he spends too much of his own money, he puts too much fabric in his dress. I will speak to him, then he will do well.” Mendelssohn, not unnaturally, took the encouragement and endorsements of his teachers under his belt and decided on music as his vocation after studying at Berlin University from 1826-1829.
It is worth pointing out at this stage that the profusion of documents pertaining to Mendelssohn’s life have to be treated with care, as it is always difficult to separate truth from subjective opinion. Much of what we know – from Moscheles,
Contemporary accounts of Mendelssohn’s personality and his sensitive personal nature are wide-ranging in their scope. For instance, Mendelssohn could only relax behaviourally when surrounded by those closest to him – his family and most cherished friends. Yet they also knew the flip side of his personality.[14]
Crucially, all these high-profile teachers appear to have had their own individualistic musical traits rub off onto Felix. For instance, when considering the works of Marie Bigot, one can see that her compositional style was that of the early Classical period while maintaining an early Romantic idiom.[15] Furthermore, Zelter was one in a long line of pupils descending directly from J.S. Bach, which meant that some particularly Baroque elements inherent in Zelter’s style found their way into Mendelssohn’s compositions. This can be seen by considering the score of one of his earlier works, Psalm 45,[16] in which a fugato texture is evident. Mendelssohn had a long-standing relationship with the Bach revival – shortly after he left Berlin University he returned to the Singakademie to conduct the St. Matthew Passion.
Throughout Felix’s childhood, his parents always kept him busy with some task or other, (as accounts of his mother’s never-ceasing quest for work will ascertain[17]) but they took care not to neglect his all-round welfare either. The family moved home in 1825, when Felix was in his sixteenth year, to Leipziger Straße 3 – this was a substantially bigger home, and enabled the children to enjoy all kinds of physical activities such as swimming, athletics, and horse-riding.[18]
Furthermore, his parents, Abraham and Lea, are of inestimable importance to the childhood development of the young Felix, particularly the work ethic and ideals so clearly found in his father’s ideology: “The conviction that our life is given us for work, for usefulness, and constant striving – this conviction Felix inherited from his father.”[19] Throughout his childhood, Mendelssohn always aimed to emulate his older sister as far as performing skills were concerned.
Assimilation into German culture is a theme with which the Mendelssohn family, like many other Jewish families, could readily identify with, for as Felix’s grandfather Moses observed, somewhat to his distaste, “they [the Jewish economic and intellectual elite] increasingly adopt the language and clothing of their Christian environment.”[20] Moses was of the steadfast opinion that all the major religions of the world essentially believed in variants of the same ultimate deity, and so what was therefore needed was mutual understanding and appreciation of the religion of others. He believed that it was not right, certainly for a society in which he participated at any rate, to have some members of a particular religion conform to the beliefs and ideologies of another merely because the other, in this case Christianity, was so dominant.
This multiplicity of factors in Mendelssohn’s upbringing no doubt placed him on a very solid footing for his future career, but we should consider that there is an innate part to genius that can never be taught, and which no person can impress on another. Admittedly a large part of his musical development is due to the outstanding quality of his teachers, (and in some cases, their generosity – for instance, Zelter giving permission to Mendelssohn to use the Singakademie players for his own musical purposes must have been a great boon to the young composer) but the levels of creativity and uniqueness that his compositions are so heavily imbued with are his trademarks. His work “imparted a poetic elegance which has caused it to be regarded as superficial because of its lack of impassioned features.”[21]
In conclusion, there are very many aspects of Mendelssohn’s early development, each of which has made a positive contribution to his already knowledgeable mind. The breadth and depth of his early instrumental and theoretical studies, in which he was taught by those who themselves learned from the great masters such as Beethoven and J.S. Bach, can only have enhanced his already musically rigorous mind. Exposure to these Baroque models of composition has been reflected in Mendelssohn’s creative output. His lifelong affinity with the idiom culminated in the Sebastian Bach revival.
Other factors such as his domestic situation, in which a dual framework is evident, will have added to his sense of security and stability. This ‘dual framework’ consists of the caring and nurturing household of which the young boy was a part, and also of the educational regime designed to advance his studies outside of music. As a distinguished household living in Berlin, the Mendelssohns frequently played host to some of the most foremost minds of the day, as regards the separate spheres of art, science, and literature, each equally represented. Whether intentional or not, these soirees would have provided the Mendelssohn children with the ideal educational backdrop.
The wealth of his father enabled Mendelssohn to have access to the finest teaching and opportunities from a very early age, not the least of which was travels to Paris with Zelter in 1821, at which point in Goethe he met a lifelong friend, with whom he shared a mutually enriching friendship. Wealth was the primary motive for denigration in the eyes of most of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries during his later life, as virtually all of them had experienced poverty at some stage, usually in their childhoods. Their argument was based along the lines that Mendelssohn had lead such an easy, cosseted life, and could not possibly write a true depiction of tragedy or anything in art reflecting life, or the deepest chords of the heart.
Factors external to Mendelssohn’s initial control, such as his religion, have rendered him open to prejudice from individuals with an anti-Hebraic stance. It is questionable whether this prejudice would still be directed at him had he been conferred the status of civilian as his father had, but nevertheless this open and blatant form of racism may well have played its part in determining some of the more steely characteristics of his personality. His baptism, therefore, would have come as something of a welcome relief to him, but even then it did not shield him from his detractors, who still perceived him to be the same Jewish individual.
His father in particular was of inestimable importance to the young Felix as he developed; certain dogmas that Abraham had will have been passed down to him, such as his standpoints on ethics, morality, and the need for work.
Because of the protected atmosphere in which Mendelssohn spent his childhood, he developed a sensitive personal nature which rendered him unable to accept too much in the way of criticism, or, for example, unable to read the reviews of his own concerts. Some of this had rubbed off on his closest friends, who put their friendship with the prodigious man aside to objectively analyse his behaviour. This can be seen in anecdotal sources such as Devrient’s Recollections. This is not to say that Mendelssohn was distrustful of absolutely everybody, for he retained at all times the capacity to be an extraordinarily charming young man; however, he could be wary at times of even his closest allies. Mendelssohn was, as we know, particularly reticent when asked to discuss the meaning of his music by writers and journalists, as it was his staunch belief that the music should always speak for itself rather than having its meaning enhanced by way of further explanations.
The encouragement and endorsements that Mendelssohn received from Goethe and Cherubini will, as a gifted young composer still in his late teenaged years, have given him considerable pleasure and will have influenced his mindset when deciding on what to pursue for a career after he left Berlin University at the age of 20.
Word Count: 3,710
Bibliography
Citron, Marcia J. (ed., trans.) The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn (New York, Pendragon Press, 1987)
Coleridge, A.D. (trans.) Goethe’s Letters to Zelter, with Extracts From Those of Zelter to Goethe (London, George Bell and Sons, 1887)
Cooper, John Michael. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Guide to Research (
Devrient, Eduard, in Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
Devrient, Eduard, in Nichols, Roger. Mendelssohn Remembered (London, Faber and Faber, 1997)
Joachim, Joseph, in Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
Johnson, Calvert (ed.) Marie Bigot: Historical Women Composers for Piano. Date of authorship unknown. (Accessed 10 December 2003),
<http://www.vivacepress.com/1803.html>
Kennedy, Michael. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996)
Librett, Jeffrey S. The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: From Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, F., trans. by Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
Moss, Charles K. Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847), April 2003. (Accessed
Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August. Denkwürdigkeiten und vermischte Schriften, IX (Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1859)
Appendix 1
Attached is a photocopy of a score from the chorus of Psalm 45. This ‘Octavo’ edition was published by Novello and Co.,
[1] Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August. Denkwürdigkeiten und vermischte Schriften, IX (Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1859), pp. 614f
[2]
[3] Devrient, Eduard, in Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
[4] Moss, Charles K. Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847), April 2003. (Accessed
[5] Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, F., trans. by Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
[6] Devrient, Eduard, in Nichols, Roger. Mendelssohn Remembered (London, Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 4
[7] Devrient, Eduard, in Nichols, Roger. Mendelssohn Remembered (London, Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 5
[8] Citron, Marcia J. (ed., trans.) The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn (New York, Pendragon Press, 1987), p. 15
[9] Joachim, Joseph, in Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
[10] Cooper, John Michael, loc. cit.
[11] Coleridge, A.D. (trans.) Goethe’s Letters to Zelter, with Extracts From Those of Zelter to Goethe (London, George Bell and Sons, 1887), p. 203
[12] Ibid., pp. 206f
[13] Ibid., p. 245
[14] Devrient, Eduard, in Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
[15] Johnson, Calvert (ed.) Marie Bigot: Historical Women Composers for Piano. Date of authorship unknown. (Accessed
[16] See appendix 1.
[17] Devrient, Eduard, in Brown, Clive. A Portrait of Mendelssohn (
[18] Cooper, John Michael. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Guide to Research (
[19] Devrient, Eduard, in Nichols, Roger. Mendelssohn Remembered (London, Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 5
[20] Librett, Jeffrey S. The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: From Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (
[21] Kennedy, Michael. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 471f
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