ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the feminization of Mendelssohn and his music resulted from a larger cultural discourse about masculinity and race that flourished after 1880. In the mid-nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy personified the Victorian gentleman; evidence of his 'manliness' was found in his class status, his success, his family relations, and his music. George Grove described the composer as 'one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined'. The gendered characteristics of Mendelssohn's biographical persona were also transformed by larger cultural forces in the period from 1880 to 1910, a period in which the values associated with masculinity underwent tremendous alterations. The linking of characteristics of gender and race in contemporary scientific thought on human development had as significant an influence on Mendelssohn biography as did the changes in masculine cultural milieux. Much modern scholarship adopts gendered language in treating Mendelssohn.
