Mendelssohn: Th e Caged Spirit: A New Approach to the Composer
and His Family by Mary Allerton-North
(Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Prestige Press, 2008)

Mendelssohn: His Life and Music by Neil Wenborn
(London: Naxos Books, 2008)

R.J. STOVE lives in Melbourne, Australia, and the author of A Student’s Guide to Music History, published by ISI Books.

Amid the neo-Stalinist personality
cult of Darwin’s bicentennial jollifi-
cations, it is all too easy in 2009 to forget
various anniversaries of those individuals
who, by contrast, actually benefited
mankind. Such as Mendelssohn—Jakob
Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,
to be exact—who was born exactly two
centuries ago last February 3rd, and who
ranks as the greatest musical prodigy of all
time. Yes, greater than Mozart: for nothing
in Mozart’s early output is as quintessentially
awe-inspiring as the Octet and
the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture,
both written when Mendelssohn had
reached the ripe old age of sixteen. (This
observation, a musicological cliché, is no
less true for being a cliché.) No wonder
that when the pianist-composer Ignaz
Moscheles—himself no slouch—became
Mendelssohn’s teacher, he soon admitted
that he had no more instruction left
to supply. Where Moscheles led, fellow
professionals over the next hundred years
followed. Sibelius considered Mendelssohn
one of the two finest orchestrators
who ever lived; Ferruccio Busoni hailed
Mendelssohn’s “undisputed greatness”;
while Schumann called Mendelssohn
“the Mozart of the nineteenth century,
the most brilliant musician, who looks
most clearly through the contradictions
of the present, and who for the first time
reconciles them.” If the two Mendelssohn
biographies under review—both of
which were issued in 2008, as preludial
responses to the bicentenary—had managed
nothing else except to remind us of
Mendelssohn’s centrality to the art of his
epoch, they would still be most valuable.
In fact, both manage far more.

Both demonstrate, above all, how singularly
captious posterity has been in
branding Mendelssohn (who lived only
to the age of thirty-eight) as an underachiever
in adulthood: a real-life equivalent
of Tom Wolfe’s fictional protagonist,
“The Man Who Peaked Too Soon.” Neil
Wenborn, whose study is the shorter and
more approachable of the two, laments the
standard misrepresentation of Mendelssohn
“as a sort of Orson Welles of music,
living his creative life in reverse, the Octet
and the overture to A Midsummer Night’s
Dream his Citizen Kane, the ubiquitous
Songs Without Words his sherry advertisements.”
But this willful distortion of
Mendelssohn’s mature significance—a
distortion emerging from no more licit
motive than simple public unawareness
concerning most of his later works—is
merely one aspect of a wider belittlement:
namely, a pathological aversion toward all
things “Victorian” and a particular hostility
to any great artist who behaved like a
gentleman instead of like a scoundrel.

Typical of what passed for serious Mendelssohn
scholarship (before the efforts of
researchers like America’s R. Larry Todd
and Britain’s Peter Mercer-Taylor cleared
the air) were the efforts of the late George
R. Marek. Having earlier established his
scholarly credentials by producing the
world’s worst books on Puccini and Richard
Strauss, Marek maintained this lofty
standard by producing the world’s worst
book on Mendelssohn: Gentle Genius, an
object lesson in patronizing, sophomoric
disparagement. Insisting that Mendelssohn’s
oeuvre “smells of eau de Cologne,”
Marek went on:

Mendelssohn could have written
anything he chose and got away with
it, so unshakable was his reputation
. . . . His music was elevated far too
highly. Listeners perceived profound
meanings that were not there. Later,
however, he was toppled from his
high rock; his melodies, fluttering
nonchalantly in the breeze, were
harmless enough to be heard by the
senior class at St. Timothy’s Finishing
School, without upsetting the
emotional equilibrium of its pupils.

French music critic Emile Vuillermoz, in
an earlier generation, ineptly and ignorantly
maintained (in a passage that both
Wenborn and his rival Mary Allerton-
North cite with commendable impatience):
“Since contented nations and contented
men have no history, one should on
principle abandon the idea of writing a life
of Mendelssohn.” It is against such slovenly
contempt as Vuillermoz’s and Marek’s that
Wenborn and Allerton-North have set
their faces. Allerton-North has furnished,
with an industriousness demanding firm
applause, the Mendelssohnian’s bible:
almost 700 pages, many of them filled with
primary source material that will have
been unknown to most readers and even
to most Mendelssohn experts.

One phenomenon that Allerton-North
and Wenborn stress is the unenviable position
of Felix’s father, Abraham Mendelssohn,
himself the son of philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn. “Once I was merely the son
of my father, now I am merely the father of
my son,” Abraham ruefully admitted after
Felix’s breathtaking skills became manifest.
(Since the popular image of Abraham
is that of an unbending and sanctimonious
patriarch, it is a relief to discover
his devotion to the eminently humane vice
of smuggling, in order to defy Napoleon’s
Continental blockade.) No parent of a
child prodigy ever goes unpunished. If
he publicizes his offspring, as did Leopold
Mozart, he is denounced for exploitation;
if he does the opposite, as did Abraham,
he can expect similarly sharp rebukes for
apparent indifference to family honor.
Moscheles, though not seeking to blame
anyone, marveled in his diary at the caution
that marked Felix’s parents: “They
are anxious about Felix’s future, and to
know whether his gift will prove sufficient
to lead to a noble and truly great career.
Will he not, like so many other brilliant
children, suddenly collapse? I asserted my
conscientious conviction that Felix would
ultimately become a great master . . . but
again and again I had to insist on my opinion,
before they believed me.”

Of course, Moscheles was right, and
Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn wrong—
as became increasingly evident in Felix’s
adolescence. There seemed to be literally
no compositional difficulty that the young
Mendelssohn could not surmount, as even
those listeners most hostile to pure exalted
craftsmanship unavoidably—however
reluctantly—admit. (What he carried out
can be appreciated with particular thoroughness
via Wenborn’s volume, the publisher
of which has helpfully supplied two
free CDs containing extracts from many
of the items discussed. Other imprints,
please copy.) The one severe musical disappointment
Mendelssohn experienced
was his failure to write a successful opera,
but this failure had nothing to do with any
lack of enthusiasm or diligence. Altogether
he considered no fewer than fifty possible
subjects for operatic treatment, and many
of his other inspirations indicate how keen
a dramatic sense he commanded. His late
oratorio Elijah, despite its concert-hall
origins, has been—as Allerton-North
notes—given occasionally on stage to good
effect, one such performance occurring
as recently as the 1950s. If granted better
health, he would doubtless have finished
his projected opera Die Lorelei, which survives
only in the form of perpetually tantalizing
fragments.

The problem with being a world-beater is
that all non-world-beaters are apt to inspire
vexation: not least when one is inculcated,
as Mendelssohn had been almost from
birth, with an often overpowering sense of
responsibility. This sense he combined with
a passionate allegiance to what he regarded
as Germany’s civilizing role. In the Europe
of our own day, where even the mildest
acknowledgment of national boundaries is
apt to involve being hauled before Eurocrats
for “hate speech,” Mendelssohn’s defi-
ant pride in his Teutonic ethos will make
for peculiar reading. “Never,” he told his
father after visiting Stuttgart, Heidelberg,
Frankfurt, and DÜsseldorf, “did I feel so
clearly that I am a German at heart and
must always remain one.”

Like most dutiful men of stupendous
artistic endowment, Mendelssohn had
rather more toleration for honest incompetence
than for clever tawdriness, but not
much toleration for either. His French and
Italian journeys amounted to little more
than a chronicle of successive, and trenchantly
expressed, musical abhorrences.
He described Rossini as “the great Maestro
Windbag.” Berlioz’s instrumentation
he found “so disgustingly filthy that one
needs a wash after merely handling one
of his scores.” Liszt’s pianism he summed
up as possessing “many fingers, but little
brains.” He condemned the operas (smashhits
at the time) of Giacomo Meyerbeer as
“frigid and heartless.” (Sooner than run
the risk of being mistaken for Meyerbeer
while in Paris, Mendelssohn had his hair
cut short.) Another once-venerated composer,
Luigi Cherubini, appeared to Mendelssohn
nothing more than a volcano that
“occasionally spews forth, but is covered
with ashes and stones.” These verdicts he
confined to intimates; but he sometimes
displayed a terrifying temper in public
also, and it is painful to contemplate how
much energy he needed to waste on the
ego-stroking busywork of musical administration—
for which he had little, if any,
natural aptitude—when he should have
been creating more masterpieces.

Inevitably Mendelssohn antagonized
some who, unlike the indulgent Rossini et
al., paid him back in kind. Wagner, only
four years Mendelssohn’s junior, came to
know him quite well, and at first revered
him (“I am proud to belong to the nation
that produced you”); but one of Mendelssohn’s
few failures as a conductor occurred
in 1846, when he directed—and seems to
have made a hash of—Wagner’s Tannhäuser
overture. Composers as thin-skinned and
self-regarding as Wagner never overlook
substandard renditions of their pieces, and
Wagner recoiled against Mendelssohn, singling
him out for contumely in his notorious
pamphlet Judaism in Music, which
characteristically sought to promote personal
grievances as a grand metaphysical
dogma. “There are few parallels,” writes
Wenborn, “for the ugly line of historical
causation that runs directly from Wagner’s
Über das Judentum in 1850 to Mendelssohn’s
extirpation from the German canon by
Hitler’s aesthetic commissars in the 1930s.”
Well, yes and no; mostly no. Wagner published
his pamphlet under a pseudonym;
extremely few of even his well-wishers,
when he revealed his identity, regarded
the pamphlet as anything except a fatuous
indiscretion; Wagner advocated Jewish
assimilation (albeit of an unpleasantly
forceful kind) rather than Jewish extermination,
which was one obvious difference
between his outlook and Nazism; and
to the end of his days Wagner took more
enjoyment in Mendelssohn’s actual music
than his principles would have allowed
him to concede. In Parsifal he alluded to
one of the most haunting ideas in Mendelssohn’s
Reformation Symphony—an idea
that Mendelssohn himself derived from a
long-forgotten eighteenth-century composer,
Johann Naumann—while in Das
Rheingold‘s opening measures Wagner
echoed, perhaps unconsciously, the string
figurations of Mendelssohn’s concert overture
The Fair Melusine.

Mendelssohn had been baptized in his
seventh year (his acquisition of the extra
surname Bartholdy dates from this event).
His correspondence includes the very
occasional Yiddish phrase, such as eppes
rares, which means “something rare.” But
too much recent commentary on Mendelssohn’s
Jewish roots springs from an
anachronistic attempt to impose on him
late-twentieth-century notions of identity
politics and ethnic victimhood. Mendelssohn
zealously practiced Lutheranism
throughout his teens and his adult life.
Over-zealously for the fastidious taste of
Heinrich Heine, who complained: “I feel
malice towards the man. Because he pretends
[sic] towards Christianity, I cannot
forgive him.” Allerton-North goes on to
quote from Heine a lavatorial reference to
Jesus that is best omitted here. Mendelssohn
would have found utterly insufferable
(had he lived long enough to learn of it,
which he did not) the sheer presumption of
Heine’s deathbed boast: “Dieu me pardonnera.
C’est son métier.“

Far more infl uential than either Heine’s
sniping or Wagner’s diatribe—at least in
the English-speaking world—were Bernard
Shaw’s obsessive scoffs in the 1880s
and 1890s at what he called Mendelssohn’s
“kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality,
and his despicable oratoriomongering.”
Like so much of Shaw, this
assessment arose less from conviction than
from a rather juvenile desire to voice the
most shocking idea he could think of; and
since Shaw never lost his youthful flair for
couching preposterous idiocies in unforgettable
prose, his censures were eagerly
echoed by authors of far less talent.

The result has been that Mendelssohn, for
all his amazing versatility, is now remembered
by a tiny handful of his works, themselves
not always representative. His Hark,
The Herald Angels Sing and the Midsummer
Night’s Dream Wedding March constitute,
as Wenborn puts it, “the soundtrack to the
happiest moments of millions of lives”; all
competent violinists take up, sooner or
later, his Violin Concerto, just as all competent
chamber-music groups take up his
Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor; his six sonatas
are cherished additions to the organ’s
very limited early-nineteenth-century
repertoire; Elijah and, to a lesser extent,
Saint Paul still figure on choral societies’
programs; but much of the rest is silence.
In particular, pitifully few modern pianists
bother with Mendelssohn’s numerous solos
for the instrument. It could be argued that
these works’ fundamental intimacy makes
them better suited to a salon seating dozens
than to a Carnegie-Hall-type auditorium
seating hundreds or thousands, but
this sounds much more like an alibi than
a reason. The truth is that with a Mendelssohn
(as with a Haydn) piano solo, the
“wow” factor hardly exists. Such music is
at once too difficult to attract the average
fumbling amateur and too easy to attract
the average jaded barnstormer. Liszt’s contributions
to the piano literature have a
certain panache ensuring that even under
the stupidest executant’s fingers, they will
make their impact. Mendelssohn’s must
be played perfectly or not at all; and even
(or especially) a perfect account will never
provoke cheering from the gallery, which
cheering, after all, is the average virtuoso
pianist’s sole raison d’être.

For neglecting such material, and the
hundreds of other Mendelssohn creations
now mostly gathering dust on library
shelves, there is now no excuse: Allerton-
North and Wenborn, in their differing
ways, will permit none. It would defy a
reincarnated Heine himself to read either
biography and not have his comprehension
of Mendelssohn’s spirit enriched, his
musical appetite whetted, his admiration
for the composer’s fundamental decency
enlarged. Both authors deserve our thanks
for the understanding they reveal of the
man whom New Yorker journalist Alex
Ross recently, and rightly, called “the
youngest master.”