The Gifted Youth: Life 1809-1826

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born on 3rd February 1809 in Hamburg, the second of the four children of Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn. The eldest child, Fanny Cäcilia, was four years older and plays a major part in the story, first as a devoted companion and later as a faithful correspondent. The other two, Rebecca and Paul, are shadowy figures, whose names crop up in the Mendelssohn literature and letters relatively rarely.

As its name suggests, the family was Jewish something that has, and had, to be reckoned with, given the circumstances of the time. It had a bearing on Felix's background and inheritance, as it also did now and then on the course of his career. Grandfather Moses had been a remarkable man: a philosopher, a humanist, and a protagonist of Jewish emancipation, he was immortalized by Lessing in his play Nathan the Wise and known among his intimates as 'the Jewish Socrates'. In the face of Gentile complacency and worse, he made his way from humble beginnings as a scholar - one of the few avenues of advancement open to his race. The other and equally traditional avenue was through finance. Two of Moses' sons, Joseph and Abraham (Mendelssohn's father), went therefore into banking. The latter, who was to describe himself wryly as 'formerly the son of my father and now the father of my son', worked for some years in Paris at the turn of the century, and during one of his journeys called on Goethe at Frankfurt. Welcomed as 'the son of his father', he was instrumental in bringing together the poet (also Minister of State) and the Berlin musician Zelter, who had set some of Goethe's songs and whom Abraham knew quite well. In due course Zelter was to have Abraham's son as his most brilliant pupil, and was in his turn to take the boy to see Goethe at Weimar.

Left: Mendelssohn's father Abraham. He used to describe himself as 'formerly the son of my father, now the father of my son' (Mendelssohn Archive, Berlin) Right: Mendelssohn's mother Leah, née Salomon. The Mendelssohn family was already rich: the addition of her family's even greater wealth gave the composer a most unusually comfortable start in life. (Mendelssohn Archive, Berlin)

Abraham's wife, Leah Salomon, came from a more prosperous and settled background, where the arts were cultivated with gusto. She was highly educated, polyglot, read Homer in the original, and was a good pianist into the bargain - a woman of charm and character, and something of a snob. It was on her insistence that Abraham left his post as clerk in Paris, where there was no racial discrimination, in order to return to Germany. There, in Hamburg, he joined his brother Joseph as a partner in his banking firm.

The Mendelssohns' stay in Hamburg was short lived. The French army of occupation under the command of Marshal Davout was ill-disciplined, and for this and other reasons Abraham came to the conclusion in 1812 that it would be healthier to move to Berlin. Theirs was a happy, hard-working, strictly organized and early-rising household prosperous, of course, but not showy. The only commodity in short supply was leisure. Abraham ensured a well-rounded education for his children, which included dancing and physical training as well as more bookish activities and, needless to say, the pursuit of music. Instead of going to school, the young Mendelssohns were instructed first by their mother and then by private tutors. General literary subjects were taught by Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse, father of the novelist, piano by Ludwig Berger, a partisan of the Clementi and Field school, violin first by a member of the opera orchestra and later by Eduard Rietz, and harmony, counterpoint and composition by Zelter, by far the strongest personality of all the tutors. This elaborate and systematic education of a master-musician of the 19th century was topped up by Felix's joining the singing classes of the Singakademie when he was ten. Needless to say, his obvious gifts had been recognized at an earlier age, for in 1816 the family paid a visit to Paris, and Felix and Fanny had piano lessons from the celebrated teacher Madame Biget.

Also in 1818, Mendelssohn made his public debut as a pianist in a trio for keyboard and two horns by Woeffler, and parallel with that was his increasing activity as a composer, writing a trio and three piano sonatas. A visit by Weber to Berlin in 1821 sparked off a couple of one-act operettas, followed by a third and later by a three-act opera Der Onkel aus Boston (The Uncle from Boston). It was at about this time that Zelter took the twelve-year-old boy to see Goethe.

Meanwhile Mendelssohn advanced in grace and accomplishments, worked very hard and enjoyed the benefits of the musical salon set up by his mother. If in some respects his life was cushioned against the rough and tumble of a more humdrum upbringing, it did not seem to make much difference in the long run, though it may have made him more sensitive than most. Zelter was an excellent teacher and took care that Felix did not let the slightly euphoric home atmosphere of love and encouragement go to his head. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to have gone in the other direction.

New works flowed from Mendelssohn's pen. These included the First Symphony in C minor, op. II, actually the thirteenth in order of writing, and the Piano Quartet in B minor, op. 3. In addition there were family trips abroad - in 1822 to Switzerland, a country Mendelssohn fell in love with and where he met Spohr and Hiller. Two years later, they went to the Baltic and for the first time Mendelssohn saw the sea. Back in Berlin, the Mendelssohn home had become a natural rendezvous for visiting musicians, among them the outstanding young pianist Moscheles, who gave the awestruck youth and his sister some piano lessons. Subsequently they were to meet frequently in London, and eventually Moscheles was to join the staff at the Leipzig Conservatorium during Mendelssohn's regime.

Meanwhile, it is important to record, the Mendelssohns had decided to abandon their Jewish patrimony and become Protestants. The repercussions of such a step within the family can be imagined, but given the situation at the time, it was a politic move, strongly advocated by Leah and her worldly-wise diplomatist brother. The problem was one that had been faced by many, inside and outside the families immediately concerned. (Indeed, Abraham's sisters had turned Catholic.) That was where the additional name of Bartholdy came in. It had been adopted by Leah's brother Jacob Lewin Salomon, who had taken it from a previous owner of his Berlin property, and then shared it with his brother-in-law. Felix, however, never took kindly to his double-barrelled name and dropped the Bartholdy to all intents and purposes. That was partly a matter of principle and partly, one suspects, of defiance of his uncle. It was no secret that he, Jacob Lewin Bartholdy, was very much against his nephew becoming a professional musician: 'It is no career, no life, no aim.' Unhappily that attitude coincided all too well with Abraham's misgivings about his son's talents. Hence his appeal in 1825 to a higher court - his old acquaintance Cherubini - when father and son were in Paris. Fortunately, the verdict was favourable. As could be expected in so lively a youth as Mendelssohn, his letters from Paris were nothing if not vivid, often scathing, sometimes very funny. He met everybody - Auber, Kalkbrenner, Hummel, Liszt, Onslow, Meyerbeer and Rossini - and he was confirmed in his ingenuous view that charlatanry was rampant, ignorance widespread and frivolity in control. This denunciatory reaction to Paris became something of an obsession with him, and was to be repeated on later visits.

Mendelssohn's beloved sister Fanny. The overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream was originally written as a piano duet for her and the composer when he was seventeen. (Mendelssohn Archive, Berlin)

These were happy years for Mendelssohn. The bank flourished, the family moved into an imposing mansion in Leipzigerstrasse, a stream of interesting and amusing people came to the house, and among Felix's closest associates were A. B. Marx (editor of the musical journal the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung), Hiller, Zelter, Moscheles, Rietz, and Carl Klingemann, who in due course was to ease Mendelssohn's path in London's musical and social circles. And all the time there was the close companionship of Fanny, who understood him better than anyone else, even if her love for him only just stopped short of the possessive and obsessive. It was during this halcyon period that Mendelssohn wrote two of his most enduring works -- the Octet for strings, op. 20 (1825), and his Concert Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, op. 21(1826).

---[Back to Felix Mendelssohn]---