ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the usual narrative of Mendelssohn reception history and assesses the extent to which anti-Jewishness featured in and affected the reception of Mendelssohn's music in the five years immediately following his death in 1847. Much modern Mendelssohn scholarship tends to attribute the downturn in Mendelssohn's reputation following his death directly to Wagner's polemic. In Wagner's formulation, the musical world was dominated by Jews, but the unsavoury Jewish nature made their influence a destructive one. Wagner explicitly cites Mendelssohn the only composer identified by name in the essay as epitomizing these degenerate musical tendencies. Modern scholarship may thus seem justified in viewing Wagner's essay as the primary source of the anti-Semitic critique of Mendelssohn which brought about the sudden downturn in his reputation. The first writer to draw on anti-Jewish rhetoric in discussing Mendelssohn's music was the Hegelian critic Eduard Kruger who, during the 1840s, frequently criticized Mendelssohn's religious works.
