ABSTRACT
In his 1998 article 'Mendelssohn and the Jews', Leon Botstein holds that in this work Felix Mendelssohn 'clearly expresses admiration for the predicament of the Jews and their loyalty to their traditions'. This chapter investigates Hanslick's autobiographical motivation in the writing of his reviews of Mendelssohn's works, particularly Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Mendelssohn's posthumously emphasised Jewish identity provided a public platform on which Hanslick could defend his hidden Jewish heritage. The comparison of Brahms's Rinaldo and Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht is not an unlikely one. One possible reading of Hanslick's condemnation of the censorship of Goethe's text is to view it as a result of his liberal tendencies. Central to Sposato's conclusion is evidence regarding a letter from Goethe to Mendelssohn of September 1831 declaring the poem's symbolic intent. In Sposato is typical of what Notley refers to as the blend of anti-Semitism and revitalised Catholicism central to the cultural politics of Luegerian Vienna.
