affections stampede him into marriage. So before an engagement might be announced he accompanied his friend, the painter Schadow, on a month’s journey to the Dutch seaside resort, Scheveningen, there to take long walks on the beach, think things over and come to an understanding with himself. Only then did he settle definitely upon the step.

The marriage took place in Frankfort on March 28, 1837, and the couple went for a honeymoon to Freiburg and the Black Forest. The wedding trip was followed by a seemingly unending round of social obligations. Nevertheless, Mendelssohn found time for considerable work. Then a summons to England, to produce “St. Paul” at the Birmingham Festival (the oratorio had already been given in Liverpool and by the Sacred Harmonic Society in London). If only “St. Paul” had been the whole story! But Mendelssohn had enormous miscellaneous programs to conduct, he played the organ, he was soloist in his own D minor Piano Concerto. Back in Leipzig he settled with his wife in a house in Lurgenstein’s Garden, welcomed Fanny, who saw for the first time those “beautiful eyes” of Cécile, about which she had heard so much, and greeted the arrival of a son, named Carl Wolfgang Paul. The Gewandhaus concerts flourished as never before. Felix produced much Bach, Handel and Beethoven; also he had many of those typical German “prize-crowned” scores of sickening mediocrity to perform. Musical friends came and went—Schumann, Clara Wieck, Liszt, Berlioz, and a young Englishman, Sterndale Bennet, whom both Mendelssohn and Schumann praised to a degree which we, today, can scarcely grasp. Small wonder that, amidst all this unmerciful and never-ending ferment Felix occasionally became worried about his health. “I am again suffering from deafness in one ear, pains in my throat, headaches and so on”, he wrote to Hiller. Occasionally his friends made fun of his intense love of sleep. One can only regret that he did not yield to it more often!

We must pass over Mendelssohn’s unending labours in Leipzig, at a number of German festivals and in England (where his new “symphony-cantata”, the “Hymn of Praise”, was featured) to follow him once more to Berlin. In 1840 Frederick William IV had become King of Prussia. One of the pet cultural schemes of the monarch was an Academy of Arts, to be divided into classes of painting, sculpture, architecture and music. For the direction of the last department the king wanted none but Mendelssohn. Hence much correspondence passed between Mendelssohn and the bureaucrats concerning the royal scheme. Time had not softened his hostility toward officialdom, particularly of the Berlin brand. However, he bound himself for a year, took up residence on the Leipziger Strasse once more, submitted his scheme for the Musical Academy and received the title “Kapellmeister to the King of Prussia” along with a very tolerable salary. Frederick William wished, among other things, to revive certain antique Greek tragedies, beginning with Sophocles’ “Antigone”. The scheme led to exhaustive discussions between Mendelssohn and the poet, Tieck, touching the nature of the music to be written. In due course there followed “Oedipus at Colonos”. The kind of music needed was, as it will probably remain forever, a problem defying solution. What Mendelssohn finally wrote turned out, by and large, to be adequate Mendelssohnian commonplace.

Greek tragedy was not the only sort of dramatic entertainment projected by the King of Prussia. Racine’s “Athalie”, Shakespeare’s “Tempest” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” likewise took their place on the royal schedule. Nothing came of “The Tempest” so far as Mendelssohn was concerned. But he fashioned some excellent music for Racine’s play and enriched the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with an incidental score which may well be inseparably associated with the immortal fantasy to the end of time. There was, to be sure, no need for a new overture, Felix having written the most perfect conceivable one in his boyhood. But a dozen other numbers, long or short, were called for and, with the most consummate ease and soaring inspiration, Mendelssohn produced them. They are exquisitely delicate settings of Shakespeare’s elfin songs and choruses, a “funeral march” of extravagant grotesqueness, clownish dance music, a flashing Intermezzo, depicting the pursuit of the lovers through the wood, and other “background” pieces. The memorable concert numbers, however, are the incomparable Scherzo—perhaps the most priceless of all the famous scherzi the composer wrote; the romantic Nocturne, with its rapturous horn revery, and the triumphant Wedding March, a ringing processional which, in reality, belongs to all mankind rather than to Shakespeare’s stage lovers.

The royal scheme for the Academy was not advancing and presently the plans began to gather dust in official pigeon holes. Frederick William, seeing the turn things were taking, appointed his Kapellmeister the head of the music performed in the Dom. The Singakademie, conscience-stricken over its earlier treatment of the composer, now made him an honorary member. For all that, Mendelssohn was not fundamentally happier in Berlin than he had been previously. Fortunately he had not resigned his Gewandhaus post when he left Leipzig and it had again become more desirable to him than all the royal distinctions Berlin could confer. He had added greatly to his creative output during this period (for one thing he had rewritten the “Walpurgisnacht” and finished the “Scotch” Symphony) and now he was occupied with plans for a new music school in Leipzig—the famous Conservatory, first domiciled in the Gewandhaus. In January, 1843, its prospectus was issued. The faculty was to include men like the theorist Moritz Hauptmann, the violinist, Ferdinand David, the organist, Carl Becker and finally, as professors of composition and piano, Schumann and Mendelssohn. Felix was not really overjoyed at the prospect of pedagogical drudgery; yet to Hiller he wrote “I shall have to go ... three or four times a week and talk about 6-4 chords ... I am quite willing to do this for the love of the cause, because I believe it to be a good cause”.

Quite as peacefully as her husband, Leah Mendelssohn died shortly before Christmas, 1842. Felix grieved, if he was perhaps less stricken than by the passing of his father. Doubtless he felt once more that nothing remained but “to do his duty”—and these duties were unsparing and seemed to grow more numerous and complex as the years went by. One sometimes questions if, truly, the labors of a Bach, a Haydn and a Mozart were more ramified and unending than Mendelssohn’s—even if he had no need to toil in order to keep the wolf from the door!

As time passed the Mendelssohn craze in England grew steadily by what it fed on and it was only natural that Felix should find himself repeatedly in London. He alluded to his successes and to the intensity of his welcome by his British friends as “scandalous”, and declared himself completely stunned by it all. “I think I must have been applauded for ten minutes and, after the first concert, almost trampled upon!” The young Queen Victoria was quite as effusive as her subjects. She invited the composer to Buckingham Palace and was graciousness itself. He played her seven of his “Songs Without Words”, then the “Serenade”, then Fantasies on “Rule Brittania”, “Lützows Wilde Jagd” and “Gaudeamus Igitur”. It was by no means the only time British royalty was to show him favor. Up to the year of his death Victoria and Albert were to shower distinctions upon him, to treat him, as it were, like one of the family.

Doubtless this is as good an opportunity as another to particularize. On one memorable occasion the Queen sang