primarily. This early spate of symphonies, concertos, songs, piano and organ pieces, chamber music and what not furnished matter for regular family musicales. The Mendelssohns had for some time been in the habit of holding miscellaneous concerts on alternate Sunday mornings in the big dining room of the house on the Neue Promenade. In these the young people participated and invariably some work or other by Felix made up a part of the program. Felix and Fanny usually played piano, Rebecka sang, Paul played cello. Felix also conducted and had at first to be placed on a stool so that his small figure could be seen. Little operas and operettas varied the programs, the boy being the author of four of them. These “operas” were not given in costume or with any attempt at dramatic, action. The characters were duly assigned and sung, but the dialogue was read and the chorus sat grouped around a table. The listeners offered their opinions freely, Zelter (who never missed one of these events) commending or criticising, as the case might be.

On Felix’s fifteenth birthday, Zelter suddenly rose and, “in masonic phraseology”, promoted his pupil from the grade of “apprentice” to that of “assistant”, adding that he welcomed him to this new rank “in the name of Mozart, of Haydn and of old Bach”. This last name was significant. For a little earlier the boy had received as a Christmas present a score of the “St. Matthew Passion” transcribed by Zelter’s express permission from a manuscript preserved in the Singakademie. Henceforth the “assistant” was to immerse himself in this music and it was the exhaustive study of the treasurous score which resulted a few years later in the historic revival of the work an exact century after its first production under Bach’s own direction.

The summer of 1824 Felix for the first time saw the sea. His father took him and Rebecka to Dobberan, on the Baltic, a bathing resort in the neighborhood of Rostock. Here he received those first marine impressions which in due course were to shape themselves musically in the “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” and “Fingal’s Cave” Overtures. For the moment, the scope of this inspiration was less ambitious. He wrote for the military band at the local casino an overture for wind instruments (“Harmoniemusik”), which stands in his output as Op. 24. It is sweetly romantic music, with a dulcet andante con moto introduction that has a kind of family resemblance to the softer phraseology of Weber, a spirited, vivacious allegro forming the main body of the piece.

But the “Harmoniemusik” Overture was only an incident of the creative activity marking the year 1824. The chief composition of the time was the Symphony in C minor, which ranks as Mendelssohn’s First. Actually, it is his thirteenth in order of writing, though for conventional purposes the preceding twelve (for strings) may pass for juvenile efforts. We may as well record here that, irrespective of the dates of the composition, the official order of Mendelssohn’s symphonies is as follows: The Symphony-Cantata in B flat (the so-called “Hymn of Praise”, dated 1840) stands as No. 2, the A minor (“Scotch”), written between 1830 and 1842, as No. 3, the A major (“Italian”), composed in 1833, as No. 4, and the “occasional” one in D minor, known as the “Reformation Symphony” (1830-32), as No. 5.

The Mendelssohn family was outgrowing the old home on the Neue Promenade and late in the summer of 1825 Abraham bought that house on Leipziger Strasse which was henceforth to be inalienably associated with the composer. If it had its drawbacks in winter the spacious edifice with its superb garden (once a part of the Tiergarten) was ideal at all other seasons. The so-called “Garden House” was one of its most attractive features and became the scene of those unforgettable Sunday concerts where a number of new-minted masterpieces were first brought to a hearing. The young people published a household newspaper, in summer called the “Garden Times”, in winter the “Tea and Snow Times”. Pen, ink and paper were conveniently placed and every guest was encouraged to write whatever occurred to him and deposit it in a box, the contributions being duly printed in the little sheet. These guests included the cream of the intellectual, social and artistic life of Europe who chanced to be in Berlin. It was a point of honor to be invited to the Mendelssohn residence.

To this period belongs Felix’s operatic effort “Die Hochzeit des Camacho” (“Camacho’s Wedding”). The text, by Karl Klingemann, a Hanoverian diplomat who played a not inconsiderable role in Mendelssohn’s life, was based on an episode from “Don Quixote”. The story has to do with the mock suicide of the student, Basilio, to rescue his beloved from the wealthy Camacho. Possibly the little work would never have been written but for the ambitions of Leah Mendelssohn to see her son take his place among the successful opera composers of the day. Having embarked upon the scheme Felix went about it with his usual zeal. But the piece was played exactly once, and in a small playhouse, not at the big opera. Although there were many calls for the composer he seems to have sensed a defeat and left the theatre early. It was not long before he lost interest in the work altogether.

However, better things were at hand to obliterate the memory of the check suffered by “Camacho’s Wedding”. For we are now on the threshold of the composer’s first mature masterworks. It must be understood that there was really no relation between Mendelssohn’s years and the extraordinary creations of his adolescence. In point of fact, his creative mastery at the age of sixteen and seventeen is maturity arrived at before its time. That preternatural development, as remarkable in its way as Mozart’s, is the true answer to the problem why the later creations of Mendelssohn show relatively so little advance over the early ones. We can hardly believe, for instance, that the F sharp minor Capriccio for piano or the Octet could have been finer if written twenty years after they were. How many not familiar with the respective dates of composition could gather from the music itself that the incidental pieces fashioned for the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” by royal command came fully seventeen years after the immortal Overture? The whole might have been created at one sitting, so undiscoverable is any sign of cleavage.

The Octet for strings, finished in the autumn of 1825 represents, perhaps, the finest thing Mendelssohn had written up to that point. It is a masterpiece of glistening tone painting, exquisite in its mercurial grace and color, imaginative delicacy and elfin lightness. The unity of the whole is a marvel. But the pearl of the work is the Scherzo in G minor, a page as airy and filamentous as Mendelssohn—whose scherzos are, perhaps, his most matchless achievements—was ever to write. Not even the most fairylike passages in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” excel it.

Before passing on to the last-named, however, we must not fail to signalize the “Trumpet” Overture, composed about the same time (which Abraham Mendelssohn liked so much that he said he should like to hear it on his deathbed); the Quintet, Op. 18, the Sonata, Op. 6, the songs of Op. 8 and 9, the unfailingly popular Prelude and Fugue in E minor, of Op. 35. Let us not be confused, incidentally, by opus numbers in Mendelssohn which have as little to do with priority of composition as they have in the case of Schubert.

Felix and Fanny read Shakespeare in translations of Schlegel and Tieck. Their particular favorite was the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. In August 1826, in the delightful garden of the Leipziger Strasse home the youth of seventeen signed the score of an Overture to the fantastic comedy which, as much as