ABSTRACT
It is a curiously little-known fact that Mendelssohn was a painter. The adolescent prodigy who created the Octet and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture at the ages of sixteen and seventeen, the mature composer who stood at the forefront of German music during the 1830s and 1840s, the virtuoso pianist, conductor, and organist, the violinist and violist, the polyglot who read and translated Greek and Latin with ease, who wrote letters in German, French, and English in a prose style that rivaled that of Berlioz, was also a painter—and no mere dabbler. Already during elementary school, young Felix manifested an aptitude for drawing, and his mother, Lea, rejoiced when the father, Abraham, decided to continue their son’s education with private tutors, among them the respected Berlin landscape painter Professor Johann Gottlob Samuel Rösel. As early as July 1818—Felix was nine—Lea observed to a cousin that “beyond his musical talents he also possesses many for drawing, which for lack of time during school he can practice only a little.” 1 Lessons with Rösel probably began in 1822, and during that summer, while on holiday in Germany and Switzerland, Mendelssohn produced a portfolio of pencil drawings. For his fifteenth birthday, less than two years later, Rösel in turn offered his pupil a volume of Swiss landscapes in sepia wash, headed by the motto, “Doppeltes Leben ist’s; in der Erinnerung leben.” 2 [“It is a doubled life—to live by reminiscing.”] Rösel’s art of reminiscence would be explored by the composer in hundreds of drawings and watercolors executed throughout his short life, today preserved primarily in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, a meticulous record of the natural landscapes and sites he encountered during his extensive travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, England, and Scotland. Generally, Mendelssohn’s working method was first to sketch the outlines of his subject in situ, and then to elaborate its details at a later point, away from the site. 3
