MENDELSSOHN
and
Certain Masterworks

Written for and dedicated to
the
RADIO MEMBERS
of
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK

Copyright 1947 by
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK
113 West 57th Street
New York 19, N. Y.

Mendelssohn.
Sketch by Carl Mueller, 1842.

FOREWORD

In the compass of the present pamphlet it is impossible to give more than a cursory survey of Mendelssohn’s happy but extraordinarily crowded life. He was only slightly less prolific a composer than such masters as Bach, Mozart or Schubert, even if he did not reach the altitude of their supreme heights. But irrespective of the quality of much of his output, the sheer mass of it is astounding, the more so when we consider the extent of his travels and the unceasing continuity of his professional and social activities, which immensely exceeded anything of the kind in the career of Schubert or Bach. In these few pages it has not been feasible to mention more than a handful of his more familiar compositions which happen, incidentally, to rank among his best. The reader will find here neither a detailed record of Mendelssohn’s endless comings and goings nor any originality of approach or appraisal in the necessarily casual comments on a few works. If the booklet encourages him to listen with perhaps a fresh interest to certain long familiar scores, now that a full century has passed since the composer’s death, its object will have been achieved.

H. F. P.

Mendelssohn and Certain Masterworks

By
HERBERT F. PEYSER

In 1729—the year of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”—a humble Jew of Dessau on the Elbe, Mendel by name, became the father of a boy whom he called Moses. Mendel was something of a scholar as the times went, but desperately poor. He kept body and soul together by running a small Hebrew day-school and transcribing the Pentateuch. His infant son might know the pangs of hunger but he should have the boon of a sound education. The training was begun almost before the child could walk. Mendel would rout him out of bed at three or four on winter mornings, fortify him with a cup of tea and carry him, wrapped in a shawl, to a public seminary where he was put in charge of the learned Rabbi David Frankel.

Moses showed himself an extraordinarily gifted pupil. For one thing, he was consumed by a restless spirit of inquiry. He set about making an exhaustive study of the Scriptures, read voraciously, acquired languages with uncanny facility and, before he was ten, composed Hebrew verses. Nothing influenced him so deeply as Maimonides’ “The Guide of the Perplexed”. But the intensity of his intellectual occupation was such that he fell prey to a nervous malady which deformed his spine for life. He bore his ailment with the patience of Job and was never heard to complain. “If Maimonides weakened my body”, he had a habit of saying, “has he not made ample atonement by invigorating my soul with his sublime instructions?”

According to a traditional Jewish manner of forming a surname Moses called himself “Son of Mendel”—in German, “Mendels Sohn”—albeit he long alluded to himself as “Moses Dessauer”. When Rabbi Frankel transferred his activities to Berlin his disciple, though only fourteen, followed him on foot. Hunger, sickness, deprivations, bitter antagonisms, far from breaking the youth’s spirit, deepened his perceptions and broadened his vision. He wrote and studied with fanatic zeal and in the fullness of time developed into one of the greatest scholars and philosophers of the age. The poet Lessing was one of his intimates. His work, “Phaedon, or the Immortality of the Soul”, gained such currency that it was translated into every language of Europe.

Moses Mendelssohn endured without a murmur the numberless hardships and disabilities to which the German Jews of the period of Frederick the Great and his tyrannical father were subjected. One of the most preposterous of these regulations obliged every Jew when he married to buy a certain amount of chinaware from the royal porcelain factory in Berlin, whether he needed it or not. Not even the choice of articles was left to him, so long as the factory manager decided the place was overstocked. In this way Moses Mendelssohn when in 1762 he took to wife Fromet, daughter of Abraham Gugenheim, of Hamburg, acquired twenty life-sized china apes which had been found unsaleable. Much later the apes became valued family heirlooms.

The domestic happiness and tranquility he had never known in his youth were at last to be the philosopher’s portion. Moses and Fromet had a considerable family, though only six of the children—three sons and three daughters—survived to maturity. Moses himself died in Berlin at 57. Longevity, as it proved, was not to be a trait of the Mendelssohns.

Of the three sons the second, Abraham, was destined to play a role in musical history. True, he was not himself a trained musician although he had very sensitive artistic instincts; and he labored under a mild sense of inferiority, which used to find expression in his whimsical phrase: “Formerly I was the son of my father, now I am the father of my son”. In any case he had not to endure anything like the paternal struggles and poverty. Of his boyhood not much is known. But in his twenties he was sent to Paris and worked for a time as cashier in the bank of M. Fould. When he returned to Germany he entered a banking business founded in Berlin and Hamburg by his brother, Joseph. It was possibly on his trip home that he met his future wife, Leah Salomon. If marriages are made in heaven this match assuredly could boast a celestial origin! Leah Salomon was an wholly unusual woman. She came of a Berlin family of wealth and position, she was exquisitely sensitive and cultured and, although she strictly limited her singing and playing to the home circle, was a musician of gifts quite out of the ordinary. Moreover, she drew, was an accomplished linguist (she even read Homer in Greek, though only in the privacy of her boudoir, lest anyone suspect her of “immodesty”), and dressed with studied simplicity. Among Leah’s elaborate virtues was her tireless devotion to her mother. She kept house for her and granted her a substantial income.

Small wonder that such a union was blessed with exceptional offspring. Of the four children of Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn, Fanny Cäcilie, Jakob Ludwig Felix and Rebecka saw the light at Hamburg, in the order named. The youngest, Paul, came not long after the family had removed to Berlin. It may not be inappropriate to call briefly into the picture at this point Leah’s brother, Jacob Salomon Bartholdy, if for no other reason than to account for a surname which formed an adjunct to part of the Mendelssohn family, including the composer. Salomon, a distinguished art critic who spent his later years in Rome as Prussian consul-general, had embraced Protestantism (despite a traditional curse launched by his mother) and adopted the name “Bartholdy” after “the former proprietor of a garden belonging to the family”—a garden which subsequently passed