ABSTRACT
Since 1869, Eduard Devrient’s engaging account of the 1829 revival of the St. Matthew Passion has remained a durable strand in Mendelssohn biographies. Here, in the actor’s memoirs, 1 we find the story of how the maternal grandmother, Bella Salomon, had a copy of the Passion prepared in 1823 as a Christmas present for the fourteen-year-old Felix; how, several years later, after studying with a small circle of friends and ruminating over Bach’s “bristly pieces” (then usually dismissed as the arid calculations of a “musical arithmetician”), Felix was roused one morning in January 1829 by Devrient and persuaded to mount a performance; how the two then set out to win the grudging support of Zelter, indomitable director of the Singakademie and Mendelssohn’s former composition teacher; and how Felix and Eduard, attired in a Passionsuniform of blue coats, white waist-coats, black neckties and trousers, and yellow leather gloves, made their rounds to secure soloists from the Berlin Royal Opera. An aspiring baritone who longed to sing the part of Christ, Devrient realized his desire just weeks later, on March 11, when before a celebrity-filled Singakademie audience that included Prussian royalty, the philosopher Hegel, poet Heinrich Heine, theologian Schleiermacher, salonière Rahel von Varnhagen, composer Spontini (and possibly the violinist Paganini), Mendelssohn conducted the Passion—virtually unknown in German realms since its original Leipzig performances of 1727, 1729, and 1736. For Devrient, Mendelssohn’s reclamation of the Passion dramatically brought into public view the “cult of Bach,” that nineteenth-century expression of historicism that today we still generally recognize as the primary impetus for the modern Bach revival.
