Felix Mendelssohn

The manuscript arrives rolled in a leather tube at the Berlin salon of Abraham Mendelssohn, banker, philosopher, and father to a sixteen-year-old who has been composing since childhood. Inside is the String Octet in E-flat major, Opus 20 — eight pages of music so fully realized, so architecturally complete, so alive with what later critics will call "fairy-tale lightness" and "Shakespearean fantasy" that the musicians who first read through it cannot quite believe what they are holding. It is October 1825. Felix Mendelssohn is sixteen years old. The history of chamber music has just been permanently altered.

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy is born on February 3, 1809, in Hamburg, the second of four children of Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn. His grandfather is Moses Mendelssohn, the great German-Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment; his family is one of the most intellectually distinguished in Germany. Music saturates the household: Lea is an accomplished pianist who begins teaching Felix almost before he can sit at the bench without cushions. His first formal piano lessons start at five; his first public performance comes at nine; his first string symphonies are composed at twelve.

The early piano teacher is Ludwig Berger, but the formative figure is Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Zelter is a rigorous contrapuntist, a Bach specialist, and a man with a healthy skepticism toward prodigies in general — until he hears Felix. He takes the boy to meet Goethe in Weimar in 1821, when Felix is twelve. Goethe, already in his seventies, sits the boy at a piano and listens for two hours while Felix plays Bach, improvises, and sightreads difficult music at the first attempt. Goethe afterward writes to Zelter: "What a good-for-nothing boy! And what a genius!" The "good-for-nothing" is the highest praise Goethe tends to give: it means the boy has not been made artificial by his gifts.

By the time he writes the Octet, Mendelssohn has already composed a dozen string symphonies, piano sonatas, and chamber pieces of considerable sophistication. But the Octet is different. It is the first work in which the sixteen-year-old steps fully into his own aesthetic world: a world of crystalline textures, fleet-footed scherzos that seem to hover above the ground, formal structures of absolute clarity containing emotions of surprising depth. The scherzo of the Octet — one of the most immediately recognizable movements in all of chamber music — supposedly came to Mendelssohn while reading the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe's Faust. If so, it is the sound of a teenager who reads Goethe in the original and hears music in it.

The following year brings a work even more astonishing in its provenance: the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Opus 61, composed when Mendelssohn is seventeen. The opening four wind chords that initiate its fairyland atmosphere are among the most recognizable in the orchestral repertoire; the fleet string passage that follows has been described by conductors as containing the sound of fairy wings — and it does, somehow, accomplish what that metaphor suggests without being merely descriptive. This overture stands beside the Octet as a demonstration that, in Mendelssohn's case, the prodigy is not a preliminary to the composer: it is the composer, already arrived at maturity while still in adolescence.

At twenty, Mendelssohn conducts the first performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion since Bach's own time — a lost masterpiece revived from manuscript by a young man who spent months preparing the performance, reworking Bach's forces for a modern orchestra while preserving the Passion's austere grandeur. The 1829 performance in Berlin is sold out weeks in advance; the audience includes Hegel. The Bach revival Mendelssohn launches becomes one of the most consequential acts of musical stewardship in history — without it, Bach's choral works might have remained locked in institutional archives for another century.

He founds the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843, establishes it as the model for musical education that will be replicated across Europe and eventually America, and dies on November 4, 1847, at thirty-eight — barely a year after his beloved sister Fanny, her sudden death having broken something in him that no music could repair. He leaves the Violin Concerto in E minor (which Johannes Joachim calls "the jewel of all violin concertos"), the oratorio Elijah, five symphonies, and the Songs Without Words — forty-eight piano pieces that transform the domestic piano into an instrument of sustained lyrical poetry. The Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he writes at seventeen, is played at virtually every traditional wedding in the Western world to this day.