R. Larry Todd

I grew up with the idea that Mendelssohn was a lightweight composer of safe, Protestant, middle-class, Victorian music, who could safely be ignored apart from a few concert hall crowd-pleasers like Fingal’s Cave and the incidental music for A midsummer night’s dream .
Wrong, of course, as I realised a few years ago when I read about Robert and Clara Schumann and came to see what a key part Mendelssohn had played in the musical life of their time, and even more so when I spent a week at a chamber music festival dedicated to the Schumanns and Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.

Professor Todd delivers what his title suggests, a fairly detailed biography of Felix with at least a brief analysis of every bit of music he wrote, plus the parallel story of his sister’s life and work and an extensive introduction to the Mendelssohn family background: Felix’s grandfather Moses, the enlightenment philosopher and friend of Lessing; his great-grandfather on the other side, Daniel Itzig, the banker who helped Frederick the Great pay for his military campaigns; and his many aunts and uncles with connections to all parts of German culture (and beyond: an uncle by marriage was Jakob Bartholdy whose Roman house was decorated with the famous Nazarene frescos).

There were moments when I was almost glad that Fanny and Felix died so cruelly early. Imagine how long this book might have been had they lived into their seventies… But it is all good stuff, a sober summing up of the evidence without any fanciful speculation and a solid focus on the music, although Todd does point out where others have developed theories about things like Felix’s alleged search for reconciliation with Judaism (unlikely on the face of it, given how committed he was to Lutheran Protestantism) or his possible affair with the singer Jenny Lind.

The core of Todd’s picture of Mendelssohn is with his interest in older music, especially that of J S Bach. Todd makes a good case for him as the founder of the view of Bach as the cornerstone of German musical history, and development of the idea of a canon— Bach and Handel in the baroque, Haydn and Mozart in the classical period, and Beethoven and Weber as founders of romanticism. Of course, Mendelssohn was also the founder of the first modern musical higher education establishment, the Leipzig Conservatoire.

We don’t get too much on ‘Fanny vs. Felix’ — there’s just the basic outline of how first their father and then Felix himself discouraged Fanny from publishing her compositions or performing outside the family circle, behaviour that would somehow be considered inappropriate to her social position (but was fine for Felix’s friend and colleague Clara Wieck/Schumann, who was a notch further down the social scale). Some of Fanny’s early songs were published under her brother’s name. When she eventually did publish some works on her own initiative in the last year of her life, Felix seems to have taken a few deep breaths before writing to express his support.

I listened to quite a bit of Mendelssohn as I was reading this book, but it still left me with a substantial listening list to get on with. Starting with a proper go at the two big oratorios…… (más)