Happy (Felix) 200th Birthday, Mendelssohn

January 11, 9:51 AMDC Art Travel ExaminerMarsha Dubrow

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Composer Felix Mendelssohn 

Composer Felix Mendelssohn's bicentennial birthday celebrations across the world began  January 11 with Washington, DC's "Mendelssohn on the Mall" concert series. 

The chamber music series opened with one of his best-known works, "Midsummer's Night Dream" Overture at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), site of most of the concerts.

On January 25, the second NGA concert included Mendelssohn's String Quartet Op. 12 which he'd dedicated to his love du jour, Betty Pistor -- only to learn later that she became engaged to another man. Mendelssohn wrote to a friend that it "would upset me if I hadn't already given up courting and girls...", according to a memoir by Betty's son, Ernst Rudorff. 

The NGA's February 1concert, with Leipzig pianist Ulrich Urban, featured a world premiere, Elizabeth R. Austin's "Puzzle Prelude" on Mendelssohn's "Vivace-Adagio". 

Baltimore-born Austin told me after the concert that she was "trying to do a link with the past. New music needs to be approached through our great composers. In a way, I play a little joke on the audience by taking direct quotes from the composers."

NGA Music Department head Stephen Ackert commented that the "Puzzle Preludes are fascinating for me as (musical) tapestry." 

The 13-concert series, lectures, and exhibit through February 22 will be held also at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the National Academy of Sciences. The Library of Congress will display the Mendelssohn family scrapbook, original manuscripts, letters, and portraits, beginning in February.

Mendelssohn, a child prodigy often compared to Mozart, is best known also for his "Wedding March", overture to "Midsummer's Night Dream", and for "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing", based on one of his contatas. Hark! He was Jewish.

Felix ("Happy") was born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg to Leah and Abraham Mendelssohn, and was a grandson of rabbi and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. To avoid virulent anti-Semitism, the Mendelssohns baptized their four children into the Lutheran faith and added the name "Bartholdy" which sounded less Jewish.

"Mendelssohn insisted, contrary to his father's wishes, on using the Mendelssohn name together with his new name Bartholdy, a clear signal of identification with his Jewish past and his resistance to the feeling of self-doubt, shame, confusion and embarrassment shared by many contemporary Jews," wrote conductor and Bard College President Leon Botstein in "Mendelssohn and His World" (Princeton University Press). Felix Mendelssohn struggled with his Jewish identity throughout his life, according to various biographies.

A few years after Mendelssohn's death, Richard Wagner condemned Mendelssohn and another composer Giocomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Liebmann Beer) in the anti-semitic tract "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewishness in Music"). Wagner published it under a pseudonym in 1850, and published an expanded version in 1868 under his own name. Wagner is better known as the composer of "The Ring Cycle" whose leitmotifs were later used by the Nazis, and much later by Francis Ford Coppolo in  "Apocalypse Now". Wagner is known also as composer of the other "Wedding March", the "Bridal Chorus" from his opera "Lohengrin".

Almost a century after Mendelssohn's death, the Nazis banned the study and performance of Mendelssohn's music as part of "degenerate music" or "entartete musik". 

Despite that, and his very short life -- he died at age 38 -- the artist is revered internationally as a prolific musical genius. "Mendelssohn is again beginning to be recognized as the sweet, pure, perfectly proportioned master he was," wrote "New York Times" music critic Harold Schonberg in "The Lives of the Great Composers". He noted, "...none but Mozart had been born with such gifts." 

Mendelssohn composed his first piece at age 11, and created most of his greatest works while in his teens. At 16, Mendelssohn composed Octet for Strings in E Flat Major, one of the first works of its kind. And he was only 17 when he composed the overture to "Midsummer's Night Dream" -- "far eclipsing Mozart -- or anyone else in musical history...at an equivalent age," Schonberg added. "But he never lived up to his creative promise", as most agree, despite works including his Violin Concerto in E Minor,  "Italian" and "Scotch" symphonies, "Hebrides" overture, and on and on.

Mendelssohn managed his prolific output even while being conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra for a dozen years, and founding the Leipzig Conservatory.

He was not the only talent in his family. His sister Fanny, who gave him his first piano lessons, also composed chamber music and songs, but her brother discouraged her from publishing.

Now that Felix Mendelssohn is being re-evaluated, especially during his bicentennial year, may Fanny become valued as well.