‘Wordless Judaism, Like the Songs of Mendelssohn'? Hanslick, Mendelssohn and Cultural Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna

This chapter indicates that the Christian religion was first preached by men who had been Jews until they converted; every man in the early ages of the Church by whose power, or zeal, or genius, the Christian faith was propagated, was a Jew. The sea-change in the perception of Mendelssohn's identity cannot be entirely attributed to 'scientific' racial theories or philo-Semitic attempts to claim him as Jewish. It assesses the impact of Wagner's 'Judaism in Music' on musical Britain, both in 1850 and in 1869. Wagner concluded that Mendelssohn's attempts to contribute to Europe's artistic traditions in an original or profound way were stymied by the fact that he was not, racially, a European at all. To Wagner, Mendelssohn was simply a Jew. The disdain for Mendelssohn's music that made its presence felt in late-Victorian England took place against broader political and social circumstances that were increasingly disadvantageous to Jews.