ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one musical composition and one issue. The composition is Mendelssohn's choral symphony or "symphony-cantata" Lobgesang, first performed under the composer's direction at a concert celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the Gutenberg printing press, in Leipzig on June 25, 1840. The problematic relations between musical form and ethical/cultural reform provide thematic focus. The royal advisors who originally instigated the Prussian government's invitation to Mendelssohn in 1840, Alexander von Humboldt and Christian Bunsen, both envisioned the young composer in a dual public role. By 1840 Mendelssohn had already passed through one major phase in his project of revisionist renewal and synthesis of the "German" traditions of secular/classical and sacred/baroque musical composition. Mendelssohns choral finale is thus, like Beethovens, the culmination of the musical narrative, the end point of the quest inaugurated by the trombones' first declarations.
