ABSTRACT
The popular view that the revolutions of 1848 produced few far-reaching and lasting changes in European society has been widely accepted by musicology, usually, one supposes, quite unconsciously. A look at the Mendelssohn reception in Germany at this time and at the many currents that contributed to it may act as a partial corrective to the conventional wisdom. In 1974, there appeared a volume bearing the title Das Problem Mendelssohn and containing the proceedings of a symposium held in Berlin in November 1972. The nineteenth-century view of "domestic music" is one of those largely ignored attitudes of the past that comes into play in questions of Mendelssohn's reputation. Anti-Semitism affected the Mendelssohn reception in the twentieth century, and it did so in the nineteenth as well. Mendelssohn's concert overtures occupied a relatively honorable position in part because they were viewed as worthy forerunners of more modern developments, particularly of the symphonic poems of Liszt.
