Felix


(entry for 10/25/240


In the last post we talked about chromaticism and how its presence in music is one of the hallmarks of the Romantic Era.

One of the earliest Romantic composers was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was German and non-religious Jewish on his dad’s side, and English on him mom’s. (Bartholdy was his mother’s brother’s last name.) He was born in Germany and spent much of his life there, but was also beloved in England, which he visited only a dozen or so times in his entire life, and for only a total of about two years, if you put all the short visits together, but which was the site where wrote a lot of his most famous musical compositions, including the Elijah oratorio, the Fingal’s Cave overture, and his Symphony Number 3, the ‘Scotch.’ Plus his most famous piece of all: the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its played-to-death ‘Wedding March.’

He was a child prodigy, starting piano lessons at age six and having his first professional recital at age seven. By age nine he was a well-known composer, and by age fourteen, he had written a dozen string symphonies, which were performed at his home, by an orchestra paid for by his father, Moses Mendelssohn, a successful banker. At age sixteen he composed what some people still consider his masterpiece, the Octet in E-flat major, a genre he invented, though many other composers have followed suit in the years since.

But even though he was famous in England, and enthusiastically adopted his mother’s English family name when it was added legally to his dad’s (at both his parents’ request), the most important events in his life happened in Germany. In Leipzig, to be precise.

Up until the year 1843, he had lived most of the German part of his life in Hamburg, Dusseldorf, and Berlin, but in that year he was invited to move to Leipzig and to found a new music school and become the director of the cathedral’s music program there. He was a bit reluctant at first, but soon accepted, and it was the turning point not only in his own life but in the reputation of Johann Sebastian Bach, who by this time was virtually forgotten. Bach had enjoyed a similar role in that city’s musical life in the early 1700s, and the vast majority of his unpublished compositions were hiding in the cathedral’s basement.

Guess who discovered the ‘buried treasure’! That’s right. It was Jakob Ludvig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy! (What a mouthful! No wonder he just went by Felix!)

What followed was an enthusiastic revival of interest in J. S. Bach, to the point that within a few years, when you said the name ‘Bach,’ that’s who you meant, unless you specified a different first and middle name— a situation which is still true today. (Until Mendelssohn’s discoveries, that would have instead been true of Karl Philip Emmanuel Bach, J.S.’s son.)

One of the most interesting things (some students would say one of the most irksome things as well) that happened as a result of this revival, was that Mendelssohn set several of the students in his new school to sorting through and organizing Bach’s huge output. They were so impressed by what they were finding that they decided to impress their teacher with an entire set of ‘rules’ that they felt Bach must have followed in creating his wonderful compositions. Felix himself had not put them up to this, and was a bit bemused by it, but somehow that set of rules, which we now call ‘The Rules of Bach,’ even though Bach himself would have scoffed at the notion, have become the centerpiece of what is now called Music Theory. Music Theory is really just the study of harmony, but the harmony used in Theory classes is the type of harmony that Bach used, which is why his name is affixed to the study. (And Bach himself breaks these ‘rules’ all the time!)

If you take a Music Theory class today, in any college or university, you will be subjected to this set of ‘rules’ and expected to analyze Bach chorales (hymn tune settings which he himself harmonized) accordingly. (Interestingly enough, the same thing is not true of the dedicated professional-level music schools, such as Juilliard, Eastman, Curtis, Berklee, or the San Francisco Conservatory, where they have seen through, however belatedly, the smoke-screen that Mendelssohn’s students put up, way back when.)

Little did Felix know what he had set loose on the world!

He died young, though not quite as young as his idol Mozart, whose music his often resembles. He is buried in Leipzig, in the cathedral, though the treasure he found is no longer there, having been dispersed throughout the musical world.


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To see other entries in Len's Music Blog series, click HERE.


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