ABSTRACT
When Robert Schumann lauded Mendelssohn in 1840 as the “Mozart of the nineteenth century,” 1 he acknowledged Mendelssohn as an enormously gifted musician who, having developed as a child prodigy, was blessed with a remarkable facility at composition. Five years before, Schumann had marveled at the arrival in Leipzig of “Meritis,” as he dubbed Mendelssohn, to take up the leadership of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Here was the composer of the Octet and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture (completed in Mendelssohn’s sixteenth and seventeenth years), firmly established at the forefront of European music, who in 1836 would release the oratorio St. Paul, for Schumann a decisive antidote to the philistinism then infecting the arts. After Mendelssohn’s death in 1847 at the age of thirty-eight, Schumann prepared Materialien for a projected memoir of his friend, a sketchlike, aphoristic chronicle of their relationship. The tone of Schumann’s jottings again suggests undiminished awe at Mendelssohn’s versatility and fluency as a composer: “his life a consummate artwork,” Schumann observed, and, with regard to the creative process, “his handwriting also an image of his harmonious inner self." 2
