Mendelssohn the Prodigy

We know Mendelssohn in many ways. There is Mendelssohn the restorer of J. S. Bach, who in 1829 at age twenty recovered the St. Matthew Passion from its lingering, centennial obscurity, and gave forceful impetus to the modern Bach Revival we take for granted today. There is Mendelssohn the conductor of the Gewandhaus and the Philharmonic, and of spectacular civic musical festivals on the Continent and in England. He was among the first to wield a baton, which, according to his early biographer Lampadius, emitted the “electric fire” of the composer’s personality, ¹ and he was indeed among the first to realize the role of the modern conductor as an artist who interprets orchestral scores in highly individual ways. There is Mendelssohn the pianist, a formidable virtuoso scarcely less celebrated in his time than Liszt, and the fabricator of legendary improvisations on multiple themes woven dexterously together, an art now largely lost. There is Mendelssohn the organist, unexcelled in the nineteenth century, and again a promoter of Bach, not only in England, where Mendelssohn found few instruments with pedal boards sufficient to accommodate the Thomascantor’s demands, but also in Leipzig, where Mendelssohn reintroduced the St. Anne Fugue and Passacaglia at the Thomaskirche in 1840, and fashioned a tour de force fugal improvisation into which he insinuated the Bach motive, an effort Robert Schumann deemed publishable as a consummate art work. ² There is Mendelssohn the string player, accomplished enough to take up a violin or viola part in his Octet, but a perfectionist not unwilling to ask Ferdinand David, his concertmaster at the Gewandhaus, how to improve the cadenza of the Violin Concerto in E minor. There is Mendelssohn the music editor and scholar, who, like a musicological sleuth, sought out neglected sixteenth-century motets of Palestrina and Lassus, examined autographs of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and edited Handel and Bach according to criteria approaching our modern notion of the Urtext. There is Mendelssohn the teacher, who offered the talented Lied composer Josephine Lang lessons in counterpoint and was the principal in founding the Leipzig Conservatory, a venerable institution whose later matriculants included Arthur Sullivan, Edvard Grieg, and Frederick Delius. And, finally, of course, there is Mendelssohn the composer, whose music is usually thought to test the tension between contrasting classic and romantic poles, to acknowledge freely the authority of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, but also to define a singular style of romanticism, sometimes distinguished by nuance and understatement, and often enveloped by elfin fancies.