Review: A Life in Music

Reviewed Work(s): Mendelssohn: A Life in Music by R. Larry Todd

Review by: John Michael Cooper
Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2004), pp. 77-85
Published by: University of California Press
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 REVIEW

Review

A Life in Music
JOHN MICHAEL COOPER

R. Larry Todd. Mendelssohn: A Life in Music.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxix,
683pp.
Not long ago the posthumous reception of
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–47) was ap-
proaching a state of exigency. Public interest in
his music (as evidenced in performances and
recordings of unfamiliar works as well as the
standard repertoire) was on the upswing. New,
source-critical editions of the works were
steadily appearing, superseding the unreliable
editions issued in the Mendelssohn’s Werke
series of the 1870s and the many subsequent
editions derived from them. And, in a remark-
able extension of the scholarly reassessment
signified by Carl Dahlhaus’s 1972 symposium
on “Das Problem Mendelssohn,” the quantity
and quality of specialized scholarly publica-
tions was increasing more rapidly than anyone
would have expected even a decade ago. Lack-
ing, however, was an authoritative book-length
life-and-works study—a resource that would
synthesize the accomplishments of post-1970s
Mendelssohn scholarship and address the needs
of the broader musical public as well as schol-
ars. The strongest contenders for that position—
Eric Werner’s 1963 biography and its 1980 revi-
sion1—were dated and fraught with misinfor-
mation. A sizeable gap had thus arisen: the
musical public’s interest in Mendelssohn’s
music had advanced considerably, but the gen-
erally available resources for understanding that
music and its composer lagged far behind.
The gap has now been closed. R. Larry Todd’s
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music is the product of
a lifetime of exhaustive study by a scholar of
international eminence. Readers familiar with
Todd’s other writings on subjects ranging from
Mendelssohn and Schumann to Obrecht,
Haydn, Liszt, and Webern will quickly recog-
nize the scholarly voice that speaks in this
1
Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Com-
poser and His Age, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Free Press
of Glencoe, 1963; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978);
Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: Leben und Werk in neuer Sicht
(Zürich: Atlantis, 1980).

19th-Century Music, XXVIII/1, pp. 77–85. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2004 by the Regents of the University 77
of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the
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 19 TH contribution. The prose is mellifluous and en-
CENTURY
MUSIC gaging. Virtually every page offers information
obtained from little-known primary sources.
The book is generously illustrated (twenty num-
bered illustrations, plus detailed family trees
and a map showing the principal sites of
Mendelssohn’s travels). The documentation is
extensive (fifty-five pages of notes and fifteen
pages of bibliography), sufficient for scholarly
follow-ups, but not too cumbersome for less
expert readers. And there are abundant music
examples—a feature that surely would have
pleased this composer who maintained that
words as conveyors of meaning were decidedly
inferior to music.2
The book is organized into a prologue plus
three main parts. Titled “Porcelain Monkeys
and Family Identities,” the prologue offers the
historical and cultural Auftakt for the private
family initially propelled into public view be-
cause of the accomplishments of Felix’s pater-
nal grandfather, the Enlightenment philosopher
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86). At the center of
this account are issues that have generated
heated debate in Felix Mendelssohn’s recep-
tion history: the role of the Jewish heritage in
his upbringing; the political and ethical impli-
cations of “the rising tide of conversion” (p. 14)
in early-nineteenth-century German society
(rather less neutrally designated a Taufepidemie,
or epidemic of baptism, by some contemporar-
ies); and the ways in which these issues and
their attendant family politics influenced Felix’s
development and mature outlook. Structurally
analogous to chapter 1 of Werner’s biography,
this prologue typifies the progress that
Mendelssohn scholarship has made in recent
decades. Todd corrects familiar but specious
anecdotes;3 relates, explains, and documents
the complicated marital and religious histories
of both sides of the family; interweaves these
2
See Thomas Christian Schmidt, Die ästhetischen
Grundlagen der Instrumentalmusik Felix Mendelssohn
Bartholdys (Stuttgart: M & P Verlag für Wissenschaft und
Forschung, 1996), esp. pp. 155–240.
3
The title of the prologue alludes to one such instance: an
indecorous anecdote first reported by Mendelssohn’s
nephew, Sebastian Hensel, holding that the family for years
owned a set of porcelain monkeys that Moses Mendelssohn
supposedly had purchased in order to receive legal permis-
sion to marry. See Todd, pp. 4–5.
78
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histories with bardic skill; and paints the com-
plicated artistic, personal, political, and social
considerations that faced most early-nineteenth-
century German Jews onto a richly dimensional
canvas. The burdens these issues placed on Felix
as he pursued his multifaceted professional
ambitions thus become not only clear, but com-
pelling. So do the reasons why these issues
have generated much discussion, with polar-
ized findings, in recent scholarship.4
The organization of the main body of the
book differs significantly from that of earlier
Mendelssohn biographies—and Todd’s view has
clear advantages. Traditionally, Mendelssohn’s
biographers have separated out his youth from
the main narrative and then dissected his pro-
fessional life according to geographic stations
(the “grand tour” of 1830–32—Düsseldorf—
Leipzig—Berlin—Leipzig). This organization
(represented also in Todd’s own entry in the
second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians) has its merits, of course.
But its emphasis on geography offers little op-
portunity for understanding Mendelssohn’s cre-
ative life in terms that are more intrinsically
musical—a significant issue not least of all be-
cause the genesis of many of his works spans a
number of years and locations. One example of
this problem is the Symphony in A Minor, op.
56 (“Scottish”). Mendelssohn sketched the
work’s first sixteen measures in Holyrood Castle
(Edinburgh) on 30 July 1829 and referred to
“[his] Scottish symphony” in a letter to his
family written that same day. But by the time
of its completion in 1842, a full decade had
elapsed since his last reference to it as “Scot-
tish.” (Indeed, neither the first editions nor any
contemporary reviewers acknowledge any such
topical reference.) Aside from Thomas Schmidt-
Beste’s well-taken point that Mendelssohn
would have resisted the application of such
4
See Jeffrey S. Sposato, “Creative Writing: The [Self-] Iden-
tification of Mendelssohn as Jew,” Musical Quarterly 82
(1998), 190–209; Leon Botstein, “Mendelssohn and the
Jews,” Musical Quarterly 82 (1998), 210–19; Michael P.
Steinberg, “Mendelssohn’s Music and German-Jewish Cul-
ture: An Intervention,” Musical Quarterly 83 (1999), 31–
44; Botstein, “Mendelssohn, Werner, and the Jews: A Final
Word,” Musical Quarterly 83 (1999), 45–50; Sposato,
“Mendelssohn, Paulus, and the Jews: A Response to Leon
Botstein and Michael Steinberg,” Musical Quarterly 83
(1999), 280–91.
nomenclature in 1842,5 there is also the trou-
bling fact that much of the Symphony’s mu-
sic—perhaps all but the opening measures—
was evidently written in the early 1840s in
Leipzig, not Scotland. To assign the geographic
epithet and the date of 1829 is thus to contra-
vene Mendelssohn’s wishes and the impres-
sions of his contemporaries, and to misrepre-
sent the Symphony’s genesis.
In Todd’s view, by contrast, Mendelssohn’s
life is recounted primarily according to his mu-
sical activities. His works and deeds, rather
than the locations in which he operated, oc-
cupy the foreground. Part I (“Precocious Deeds,”
six chapters) details Mendelssohn’s youthful
travels and education,6 as well as his rapid matu-
ration from the first studies in composition to
the production of mature masterpieces includ-
ing the Octet for Strings, op. 20, and the Mid-
summer Night’s Dream Overture, op. 21, in
his mid-teens. These early experiences, and with
them the first part of the book, culminate in
the landmark Berlin performances of Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion in April 1829. Part II (“The
Road to Damascus,” four chapters) begins with
Mendelssohn’s first visit to the British Isles in
1829, includes the “grand tour” and his first
professional engagement (as Municipal Music
Director in Düsseldorf), and extends through
his engagement to Cécile Jeanrenaud in the
spring of 1837. In this part, Mendelssohn’s own
first oratorio (St. Paul, op. 36) emerges as a
biographical counterpart to the 1829 St. Mat-
thew Passion performances. Beginning with the
composer’s marriage in March 1837, Part III
(“Elijah’s Chariot,” six chapters) details
Mendelssohn’s varied and rigorous activities in
the late 1830s and 1840s. The culmination of
these efforts was the completion and trium-
phant premiere of Elijah, the oratorio generally
5
See Thomas Schmidt-Beste, “Just How ‘Scottish’ is the
‘Scottish’ Symphony? Thoughts on Form and Poetic Con-
tent in Mendelssohn’s Opus 56,” in The Mendelssohns:
Their Music in History, ed. John Michael Cooper and Julie
D. Prandi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 147–
65.
6
This biography is the first to summarize the young
composer’s early general education accurately. Other biog-
raphers have consistently stated or suggested that he was
trained by private tutors from the outset, but Todd cor-
rectly reports (p. 33) that he attended Johann Christoph
Messow’s elementary school in Berlin from 1816 to 1818.
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considered Mendelssohn’s final masterpiece. In REVIEW
Todd’s view, that oratorio “continued the
project of assimilation advanced by [Felix’s]
grandfather Moses” and “completed Felix’s life’s
work” (p. 557). Nevertheless, Todd makes clear
that Elijah was surrounded by several other
compositions whose artistic radiance is tragi-
cally at odds with Mendelssohn’s increasing
despondency in the few months that remained
to him after the death of his older sister, Fanny
Hensel—a period he described as “gray on gray”
(p. 465).7
Some readers might wonder whether the tri-
partite organization simply represents another
application of an old historiographic model, a
superimposition of three style periods onto the
life of a composer who has only recently begun
to reclaim his erstwhile position as a signifi-
cant heir to the legacy of Beethoven. But Todd
avoids the methodological contrivances of that
model, instead offering a broadly conceived view
of a brief but full creative life and duly ac-
knowledging convergences of major personal,
professional, and stylistic caesurae. His presen-
tation of the last decade of the composer’s life
represents an especially important departure
from convention, contradicting the notion that
after about 1837 Mendelssohn began a compo-
sitional decline, a stylistic lapse into uninspired
formalism and saccharine conventionality.
Thoroughly documenting the composer’s ac-
tivities and contemporaries’ responses and ju-
diciously commenting on the works them-
selves, Todd marks the year 1837 as the initia-
tion of a personal and societal initiative that
would govern Mendelssohn’s activities for the
remainder of his life—what Leon Botstein has
termed “the Mendelssohnian project.”8
7
The majority of these works were published posthumously.
They include Mendelssohn’s final Liederheft (op. 71), the
motet for chorus and orchestra Lauda Sion (op. posth. 73),
and the String Quartet in F Minor (op. posth. 80).
8
See Leon Botstein, “The Aesthetics of Assimilation and
Affirmation: Reconstructing the Career of Felix
Mendelssohn,” in Mendelssohn and His World, ed. R. Larry
Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), esp.
pp. 32–37. Martin Geck has developed a similar paradigm
for the critical last decade of Mendelssohn’s life; see his
“Religiöse Musik ‘im Geist der gebildeten Gesellschaft’:
Mendelssohn und sein Elias,” in Von Beethoven bis Mahler:
Die Musik des deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler, 1993), pp. 256–79; rpt. in Von Beethoven bis
79
 19 TH Mendelssohn’s apologists find this perspec-
CENTURY
MUSIC tive appealing in part because it dislodges a
critique of Mendelssohn that originated in mid-
nineteenth-century anti-Semitic ideologies and
has since been ceaselessly troped even by au-
thoritative sources.9 But the view will also ap-
peal to other readers because it concurs with
the consensus among Mendelssohn’s contem-
poraries. Those observers overwhelmingly saw
in Mendelssohn during that last decade of his
life an increasingly influential composer of ex-
emplary integrity and a cultural icon who ben-
eficially influenced many of the major cultural
institutions of the day.
Most important, however, is that Todd’s per-
spective on Mendelssohn’s final decade also
concurs with the composer’s self-image.
Mendelssohn undertook his first oratorio project
as soon as he began to move toward a career as
an independent professional musician. Those
plans, which came to fruition in St. Paul, sus-
tained him through his troubled tenure in
Düsseldorf and his frenetic activities as he es-
tablished himself in Leipzig. They brought him
his first thoroughly international public tri-
umph. And the work itself manifested the pub-
lic image and societal ideals that would form
the guiding principle of the last decade of his
life. In the two completed oratorios (St. Paul
and Elijah, from which the titles of the book’s
parts derive) and the unfinished oratorio
Christus an extended compositional credo un-
folds, an artistic utterance that is both public
and deeply personal. But the oratorios do not
form the tripedal Gestalt described by Eric
Werner. Instead, they offer a developing ac-
count of significant shifts in Mendelssohn’s
own theological identity.
The elegance of Todd’s findings is evident
from this seemingly paradoxical fact: the con-
cept of the “Mendelssohnian project” (of which
the oratorios are cardinal manifestations), as
explained by Leon Botstein, interprets Men-
Mahler: Leben und Werk der grossen Komponisten des 19.
Jahrunderts (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-
Verlag, 2000), pp. 256–79.
9
On this point, see especially Marian Wilson Kimber, “The
Composer as Other: Gender and Race in the Biography of
Felix Mendelssohn,” in Cooper and Prandi, The
Mendelssohns, pp. 335–51.
80
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delssohn’s post-1837 activities as syncretic en-
deavors intended to universalize the ethical and
religious values central to Judaism. The book’s
large-scale structure implicitly proceeds from
this concept. But Todd’s presentation of the
exegetic theological problems of the oratorios
and their import as indicators of Mendelssohn’s
theological and ethical agendas concurs with
the findings of Jeffrey Sposato, whose meticu-
lous examination of the works’ textual and
musical geneses interprets them as assimila-
tionist manifestos that downplay Mendels-
sohn’s Jewish heritage and implicitly advocate
for the eventual obliteration of Jewishness and
Christianness as socially divisive factors (p.
556).10 These seemingly contradictory findings
fueled the debate that unfolded in the Musical
Quarterly in 1998–99, and that debate ended in
an impasse.11 Todd, however, synthesizes the
essentials of these arguments into a coherent
view. The book thus acquires its own syncretic
attributes consilient with Mendelssohn’s life
and the perceptions of his contemporaries.
Numerous other general features make this
book unique among Mendelssohn biographies.
Despite the structural importance granted to
the oratorios, Todd also carefully considers the
instrumental music. He calmly corrects any
number of specious assertions that have been
frequently repeated—notably, for many readers
of this journal, the familiar story that Men-
delssohn lost or destroyed the score of Wagner’s
youthful Symphony in C Major (p. 316).12 He
offers the most detailed account yet of
Mendelssohn’s tenure in Düsseldorf (1833–34),
a crucial period in the composer’s professional
10
Todd here recapitulates the conclusions reached by Jef-
frey Sposato (see Sposato, The Price of Assimilation: The
Oratorios of Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Anti-Semitic Tradition [Ph.D. diss., Brandeis Univer-
sity, 2000], I, 481–87). A revised and expanded version of
Sposato’s work will be published by Oxford University
Press in 2005.
11
See n. 4, above. In addition to the essays by Botstein,
Sposato, and Steinberg, see Peter Ward Jones, “Letter to
the Editor,” Musical Quarterly 83 (1999), 27–30.
12
As Todd points out, the letter of 11 April 1836 that
accompanied the score when Wagner sent it to
Mendelssohn makes clear that it was a gift and that he
was soliciting suggestions, not the return of the score.
That letter from Wagner, along with several others, is found
among the volumes of Mendelssohn’s incoming correspon-
dence held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
development. And, most broadly, he thoroughly
interweaves Felix Mendelssohn’s life and works
with those of Fanny Hensel. Rarely do more
than ten pages elapse between references to
Hensel, and the discussions of her are more
substantive than in any previous biography of
Mendelssohn.
What made this substantial rethinking of
Mendelssohn’s life’s work possible is Todd’s
command of the voluminous and still-
unpublished primary sources that document
Mendelssohn’s activities. Despite plans for an
epistolary Gesamtausgabe in series XI of the
Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke von Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy, nearly two-thirds of
his approximately 5,000 surviving letters re-
main unpublished.13 The majority of his music
likewise remained in manuscript at his death,
and the number of still-unpublished works is
surprisingly large.14 In other words, if the musi-
cal and epistolary sources comprise the
evidentiary foundation of the narrative of
Mendelssohn’s life, biographies that rely solely
on the published materials have little hope of
supporting more than the framework.
Not so this book. Its pages abound with ref-
erences to works and documents that remain
unpublished (as well as the familiar ones).
Among the unpublished compositions are the
overture to a farce by Lea Mendelssohn titled
L’homme automate (1821),15 a series of fugues
for string quartet (1821),16 a song cycle on texts
13
See Rudolf Elvers, “Die Bedeutung einer Mendelssohn-
Briefausgabe,” in Komponistenbriefe des 19. Jahrhunderts:
Bericht des Kolloquiums Mainz 1994, ed. Hanspeter
Bennwitz, Gabriele Buschmeier, and Albrecht Riethmüller
(Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1997), pp. 58–63. On the Leipziger
Ausgabe, see http://www.saw-leipzig.de/sawakade/
3vorhabe/femebart.html#Anker10 (accessed 5 July 2004).
14
He authorized and oversaw the publication of seventy-
two numbered opera (including two bearing the number
“19”), as well as twenty-four minor publications released
without opus numbers. Despite the 106 individual compo-
sitions distributed over fifty posthumous opus numbers
and numerous other posthumous editions, a great
many works remain unpublished. See my “Knowing
Mendelssohn: A Challenge from the Primary Sources,”
Notes 61 (2004), 35–95, esp. 38–39, 52–56.
15
See p. 65; see also Rudolf Elvers, “Unbekannte
Aufführungsdaten einiger Werke Mendelssohns,”
Mendelssohn-Studien 13 (2003), 71–75.
16
See pp. 54–55; see also Gerda Friedrich, Die Fugenkompo-
sition in Mendelssohns Instrumentalwerk (diss., Friedrich-
Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1969), pp. 25–29, 34–38.
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by an anonymous poet or poets (1830),17 the REVIEW
recently unearthed incidental music Kurfürst
Johann Wilhelm im Theater (1834),18 an unfin-
ished E-Minor Piano Concerto (ca. 1842–44),19
and an unfinished Symphony in C Major
(1845).20 Todd also mentions lost or missing
compositions—most intriguing among them a
cello concerto written sometime after 1844 (p.
546)—as well as works planned but evidently
never realized. And it draws extensively on
unpublished chronographic archivalia, includ-
ing not only Mendelssohn’s outgoing letters
and diaries, but also his incoming correspon-
dence.
The book’s extensive use of unpublished
materials is significant in part because it per-
mits a vivid synchronic reconstruction of the
day-to-day events of the composer’s life. Equally
important is that the documents give elo-
quent voice to Mendelssohn himself. Berlioz,
Schumann, and Wagner were active as review-
ers. Berlioz and Wagner published autobio-
graphical documents working out, explaining,
and defending their views. All three also re-
leased retrospective collections of their public
writings in the last years of their lives. But
Mendelssohn, at least in part because of what
he termed his father’s “law” that he should
never publish his writings,21 published only
three relatively insignificant items during his
lifetime.22 Recognizing that many of the letters
17
See p. 226; see also Douglass Seaton, “Mendelssohn’s
Cycles of Songs,” in Cooper and Prandi, The Mendelssohns,
pp. 203–29; and my “Of Red Roofs and Hunting Horns:
Mendelssohn’s Song Aesthetic, with an Unpublished Cycle
(1830),” Journal of Musicological Research 21 (2002), 277–
317.
18
See p. 299; see also Ralf Wehner, “‘. . . das sei nun alles
für das Düsseldorfer Theater und dessen Heil . . .’:
Mendelssohns Musik zu Immermanns Vorspiel ‘Kurfürst
Johann Wilhelm im Theater’ (1834),” Die Musikforschung
55 (2002), 145–61.
19
See pp. 479–80; see also Todd, “An Unfinished Piano
Concerto by Mendelssohn,” Musical Quarterly 68 (1982),
80–101.
20
See pp. 492–93; see also Todd, “An Unfinished Sym-
phony by Mendelssohn,” Music & Letters 61 (1980), 293–
309.
21
Letter to Eduard Otto, 26 February 1841 (Heinrich-Heine
Institut, Düsseldorf).
22
See pp. 227–28 for a discussion of Mendelssohn’s two
letters written for inclusion in Ottilie von Goethe’s pri-
vately disseminated journal, Chaos. On only one other
occasion did Mendelssohn write for public consumption,
81
 19 TH remained unpublished, Eric Werner (like George
CENTURY
MUSIC Grove and Ernst Wolff before him) went to
considerable lengths to address the problems
they posed.23 But thousands of letters remained
unpublished, and many of the documents
Werner cited are either unverifiable or demon-
strably misrepresented.24 Todd’s account repre-
sents the Mendelssohn literature’s greatest step
yet toward a biographical narrative constructed
on a solid foundation of the composer’s own
writings and other primary sources. Mendels-
sohn scholarship, suddenly, has its first real
counterpart to David Cairns’s and D. Kern
Holoman’s biographies of Berlioz and John
Daverio’s biography of Schumann.
Good scholarship tends to beget further re-
search. In this sense, too, Mendelssohn: A Life
in Music represents a milestone in musical
erudition—and not only with regard to
Mendelssohn. In virtually every chapter, read-
ers with musicological experience will find in-
formation and ideas that beckon for scholarly
pursuit. The many references to still-unpub-
lished works (which may be read as implicit
invitations for further investigation) are one
such instance, but there are many more. One is
the matter of Mendelssohn’s relationship with
Berlioz.
The essentials of the relationship between
Berlioz and Mendelssohn are well known. The
composers first met in March of 1831 in Rome,
where they shared all manner of musical expe-
and that open letter (published in Adolph Bernhard Marx’s
Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung) was occasioned
by Fétis’s publication of Mendelssohn’s private (and de-
rogatory) remarks concerning Purcell’s Te Deum; see Todd,
pp. 204–05.
23
Grove’s essay for the original edition of his Dictionary
was the starting point for Ernst Wolff’s 1906 biography.
See George Grove, “Mendelssohn,” in Grove’s Dictionary
of Music and Musicians, ed. George Grove (London:
Macmillan, 1880), vol. 2, pp. 253–310; and Ernst Wolff,
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Berlin: Harmonie, 1906; 2nd
edn., enlarged, 1909).
24
See Marian Wilson [Kimber], “Mendelssohn’s Wife: Love,
Art and Romantic Biography,” Nineteenth-Century Stud-
ies 6 (1992), 1–18; further, Wolfgang Dinglinger, Studien
zu den Psalmen mit Orchester von Felix Mendelssohn
Bartholdy, Berliner Musik Studien: Schriftenreihe zur
Musikwissenschaft an den Berliner Hochschulen und
Universitäten, 1 (Cologne: Studio, 1993), passim, esp. pp.
62–64 and 117; and the publications identified in nn. 4 and
11, above.
82
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riences and commiserated over what they con-
sidered the deplorable state of musical affairs
in Italy. Their next encounter occurred in Feb-
ruary 1843, when Berlioz gave two concerts in
Leipzig, where Mendelssohn was the music di-
rector of the Gewandhaus Orchestra; during
this stay the two conductors exchanged batons
in a symbolic display of professional esteem.
Whatever the nature and extent of that esteem,
however, they never met again—and as com-
posers they are generally considered stylistic
antipodes.
On the whole, Todd’s account adheres to
these essentials, although it fleshes out the
context of the Roman encounter and includes
some generally overlooked (if also minor) de-
tails of the Leipzig one. On page 239, however,
we encounter the following statement: “Upon
[Berlioz’s] return [to Rome] in June, the two
briefly renewed their friendship; not until 1843
did they cross paths again.” There are no obvi-
ous signs that this sentence departs from the
comfortable essentials of other accounts of the
composers’ relationship—no italics, no footnote
taking exception to conventional wisdom, no
elaboration in the main body of the text. But
the statement raises a red flag for readers famil-
iar with those accounts. Berlioz stated in his
Voyage musicale en Allemagne et en Italie
(1844) and again in his Memoirs (1869) that
when he returned to Rome in June 1831
Mendelssohn had just left for Naples. This claim
has been faithfully repeated by both compos-
ers’ biographers ever since. But difficulties
have now arisen: Did or did not Berlioz and
Mendelssohn see each other upon Berlioz’s re-
turn to Rome in June 1831? If they did, what
transpired at that meeting, and what accounts
for Berlioz’s statement to the contrary? If they
did not, why does Todd state that they did?
As it turns out, Todd’s statement is a nugget
of gold mined from one of the many unpub-
lished primary sources hitherto overlooked: the
second of two diaries Mendelssohn kept during
his Roman sojourn.25 This personal account of
25
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS M. Deneke Mendelssohn
g.3. The first of these two diaries has been edited and
published, with generous annotations. See Pietro Zappalà,
“Dalla Spree al Tevere: Il Diario del viaggio di Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy verso l’Italia (1830–1831): Edizione
Mendelssohn’s experiences, evidently intended
to serve as both a planner (conscientiously re-
vised as his plans changed) and a chronicle that
he could consult afterward, records two meet-
ings with Berlioz in June 1831. The entry for
Monday, 6 June, notes that on that evening he
conversed about Paris with Berlioz, and the
entry for Saturday, 18 June, reveals that he
visited and bade farewell to Berlioz just as he
was preparing to depart from Rome.”26 The di-
ary also provides other information concerning
the encounter in March 1831 that has eluded
both composers’ previous biographers, includ-
ing the day-to-day details of their activities. For
many readers’ purposes, Todd’s summary sim-
ply tells the truth of the matter. But for schol-
ars, his account opens the door for further re-
search whose implications extend beyond
Mendelssohn’s own life and works.27
The same might be said of the book’s many
musical examples. Todd’s global knowledge of
Mendelssohn’s music enables him to discern
resemblances between Mendelssohn’s and other
composers’ works. Of the 193 numbered ex-
amples (many of which are subdivided into two
or more parts), fifty-eight are partially or en-
tirely taken from works by other composers.
Collectively, these resemblances affirm not
only the historical and stylistic breadth of
Mendelssohn’s musical interests, but also his
diligence in assimilating often-contradictory
stylistic impulses into his own distinctive com-
positional voice. But they have a downside:
they implicitly raise the question of Mendels-
sohn’s stylistic dependency on other compos-
ers (especially Bach, Handel, and Mozart)—an
issue that has been particularly thorny in his
posthumous reception. By convention, such
examples tend to suggest that Mendelssohn’s
musical voice was overly derivative. But if one
concedes that historically remote styles and
techniques influenced most nineteenth-century
composers and considers references to those
styles as a kind of poetic translation (an act of
e commento,” in Album amicorum Albert Dunning: In
Occasione del suo LXV compleanno, ed. Giacomo Fornari
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 713–88.
26
MS M. Deneke Mendelssohn g.3, fols. 17r and 19r.
27
See my “Mendelssohn and Berlioz: Obscure(d) Affinities?”
in Proceedings of the North Texas Berlioz Conference, ed.
Frank Heidlberger (forthcoming).
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creation that, according to Novalis, required REVIEW
“the highest poetic spirit”),28 then Todd’s thor-
ough documentation of the historical influences
on Mendelssohn affirms this composer’s con-
tributions to the historically eclectic stylistic
discourses of Romantic music.
Influence is difficult to demonstrate; origi-
nality, more so. More often than not, the case
for originality rests on the proposition that a
composer influenced his contemporaries or suc-
cessors—an area to which Mendelssohn’s pre-
vious biographers have generally paid little heed.
Nevertheless, Todd’s narrative makes clear
what Donald Mintz acknowledged already in
1960: that the composer’s contemporaries cel-
ebrated him as a “modern” artist, not “a ro-
mantic classicist or a classical romanticist or
any other kind of quasi-reactionary figure” (as
Mintz put it).29 In this sense, too, the book
offers fertile soil for future explorations of
Mendelssohn’s historical significance. Al-
though the examples favor works preceding
Mendelssohn’s generation, the text frequently
cites contemporary critiques celebrating his
modernity. It also explores Mendelssohn’s in-
fluences on and interactions with his contem-
poraries. Fanny Hensel emerges as a composi-
tional as well as familial sibling, with some
twenty-four examples entirely or partially de-
voted to her music.30 Robert Schumann, whose
op. 41 String Quartets (dedicated to Mendels-
sohn) are substantively indebted to the latter’s
op. 44 Quartets, is an obvious compositional
friend and colleague. Finally, Todd also touches
28
See James A. Garratt, “Mendelssohn’s Babel: Romanti-
cism and the Poetics of Translation,” Music & Letters 80
(1999), 23–49.
29
Donald Monturean Mintz, The Sketches and Drafts of
Three of Felix Mendelssohn’s Major Works (Ph.D. diss.,
Cornell University, 1960), I, 9–10. Mintz’s verbiage is a
response to Alfred Einstein’s well-known description of
Mendelssohn as “the romantic classicist,” as opposed to
Schubert (who was the “romantic classic”). See Alfred
Einstein, A Short History of Music [New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1937], pp. 196–97. For a discussion of how the
classic/romantic dichotomy has figured in posthumous cri-
tiques of Mendelssohn, see my “Mendelssohn Received,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. Peter
Mercer-Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), esp. pp. 245–48.
30
See also Todd, “On Stylistic Affinities in the Works of
Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,” in Coo-
per and Prandi, The Mendelssohns, pp. 245–61.
83
 19 TH on later composers’ indebtedness to Mendels-
CENTURY
MUSIC sohn (although these references are necessarily
few, since they fall outside the book’s chrono-
logical scope). Brahms of course figures promi-
nently among these composers, as does the
young Wagner—but there are also numerous
other composers whose musical liaisons with
Mendelssohn have been explored in other con-
texts (among them Berlioz, Liszt, Bruckner,
Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Sibelius).
And what of Beethoven, whose shadow
loomed larger than any other over composers
of Mendelssohn’s generation? Not surprisingly,
he figures more prominently in Todd’s account
than almost any other composer. After the mid-
1830s Mendelssohn never got along well with
Ferdinand Ries or Anton Schindler, but most
contemporaries regarded him as one of the prin-
cipal stewards of Beethoven’s legacy in the
1830s and 40s. The reasons for this view be-
come clear in this book. Mendelssohn diligently
promoted Beethoven’s music (including the late
works that remained elusive for much of the
musical public in the 1830s and 40s). He ex-
erted his considerable influence as conductor
to realize Beethoven’s deletion (not reflected in
the editions then in print) of two measures
from the minuet of the C-Minor Symphony,
thereby igniting a controversy that drew Berlioz,
Habanek, and Schindler into its fray (although
Beethoven scholarship has since sided with
Mendelssohn in the debate; see p. 516). And,
perhaps most importantly, he was among the
earliest and most influential composers to re-
spond compositionally to the challenges and
ideas offered by the Viennese master’s late
works. The familiar example of the symphony-
cantata Lobgesang was preceded in this regard
not only by well-known precocious youthful
compositions including the A-Minor String
Quartet (op. 13) and the B
-Major Piano Sonata
(1827; posthumously published as op. 105), but
also by little-known works like the Große
Festmusik zum Dürer-Fest (1828), which relies
directly on the “Heiliger Dankgesang” of
Beethoven’s String Quartet, op. 132, and the
“Über Sternen muß er wohnen” setting from
the finale of the Ninth. Todd’s index specifi-
cally identifies twenty such responses under
the subheading “Beethoven influences” in the
entry for Mendelssohn, but the text actually
84
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suggests many more. Here more than in any
previously published Mendelssohn biography
we see the reasons for his contemporaries’ ref-
erences to him as heir apparent to the Viennese
master’s legacy.
Clearly, then, this book’s synchronic recount-
ing of Mendelssohn’s life and works and the
aesthetic issues presented by his music ad-
dresses a crucial component of the “Mendels-
sohn Problem.” Yet that problem is also in-
separably bound up with the complex aesthetic,
historiographic, and political vacillations in his
posthumous reception—matters that are rel-
egated to the preface and exert little influence
on the substance of the remainder of the book.
As a result, Todd’s discussions of Mendelssohn’s
works (and, to a lesser extent, his life) occa-
sionally recall verbiage indeliably associated
with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-cen-
tury historiographic polemics.
One example of this problem obtains in con-
nection with Mozart. Although early- and
mid-nineteenth-century commentators often
referred to Mozart in their remarks on
Mendelssohn’s music, most of those comments
celebrated Mozart as a thoroughly Romantic
artist, despite his chronological distance from
the musical culture of the 1830s and 40s. In
this book, however, contemporary associations
of Mendelssohn with Mozart do not refer to a
forward-looking Romantic who exemplified the
benefits that compositional integrity could im-
part to the development of music. Rather, they
proceed from a historiographic construct that
gained widespread acceptance only later. This
view attributes grace and charm to Classicism
but drama and emotional depth to Romanti-
cism: Haydn and Mozart epitomize Classicism;
Berlioz and Wagner, Romanticism. Since Todd
uses the Mozartean references in this sense, his
plentiful descriptions of certain moments and
works in Mendelssohn’s output as “classiciz-
ing” or “Mozartean” construe Mendelssohn as
an exponent of “classical” values privileging
beauty and order over expressiveness and origi-
nality. The historically retrospective aspects of
his music are thus emphasized, whereas the
many original and innovative dimensions are
given less attention. Even here, amid vivid docu-
mentation of the modernity and progressive-
ness that characterized his life and works,
Mendelssohn seems ill at ease in his own age.
The reception-historical dimension of the
“Mendelssohn problem,” represented by
Einstein’s characterization of the composer as
“the romantic classicist,” still looms, albeit
only as a shadow.
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music is the third
significant book-length Mendelssohn biography
published since the sesquicentennial of the
composer’s death, the most expansive and au-
thoritative realization of the scholarly impulse
manifested in Peter Mercer-Taylor’s thought-
ful contribution to the Cambridge University
Press Musical Lives series and Clive Brown’s
impressive documentary biography.31 It is un-
31
Peter Mercer-Taylor, The Life of Mendelssohn (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Clive Brown, A
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precedented in its breadth of scope, its com- REVIEW
mand of the primary sources, and its vivid re-
construction of Mendelssohn’s multifaceted cre-
ative life. It offers a new image of the composer
and his age, vividly envoicing both him and his
contemporaries. Unquestionably, it is the new
essential resource for research concerning
Mendelssohn’s life in music. But its value ex-
tends considerably further. Because of this
book, the biographical literature concerning
Mendelssohn now can sustain the general re-
surgence of interest in this remarkable com-
poser, at the same time meeting the challenges
of modern musical scholarship and raising
valuable questions for future inquiries. l
Portrait of Mendelssohn (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003).
85