This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of composer Felix Mendelssohn.
Since January the media have been filled with tributes to his artistic accomplishments, and most of them take the same form: assuring us that Mendelssohn really is a great composer. Why do all these commentators feel a need to come to Mendelssohn's defense? When we celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth back in 2006, no one bothered to argue that he is a great composer; that was taken for granted. All the attention Mendelssohn is getting this year in the press and in concert halls around the world would seem to be sufficient evidence of his enduring reputation.
And yet there seems to be something odd about Mendelssohn's reputation, something not quite right, something that requires reassurance that he really deserves this bicentennial commemoration. I would put the paradox this way: Mendelssohn is the composer of a remarkable number of great works of music, but for some reason we hesitate to rank him among the great composers.
Consider the extraordinary range of his achievements in one form of music after another. His Violin Concerto in E minor ranks with Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky at the pinnacle of the genre, and has become a rite of passage for all aspiring violinists. Of Mendelssohn's symphonies, the Scottish (#3) and the Italian (#4) are staples of the orchestral repertory, as is his Hebrides (or Fingal's Cave) Overture, which amounts to an early example of a tone poem. His incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream magically captures the fairy atmosphere of the play and includes the famous wedding march, perhaps the most widely played piece of classical music ever written.
In chamber music, Mendelssohn's output equals the achievement of all but the greatest composers. His Octet in E flat for Strings is undoubtedly the most impressive work ever produced in that genre (eat your hearts out Joachim Raff, Niels Gade, Max Bruch, and George Enescu). But if the competition here seems weak, one can turn to the area of chamber music where it is strongest, the string quartet, and Mendelssohn still stands out.
His six string quartets constitute a major contribution to the genre. Especially in the Op. 13 and Op. 80, he was among the first to appreciate and make use of what Beethoven was doing in his enigmatic late string quartets. Mendelssohn's Piano Trio #1 in D minor rivals Beethoven's Archduke Trio in popularity and has been recorded by just about every famous piano trio since the early 20th century, from Cortot-Thibaud-Casals, Rubinstein-Heifetz-Piatigorsky, and Istomin-Stern-Rose to the Beaux Arts Trio, Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson, and Golub-Kaplan-Carr.
Although Mendelssohn's output in keyboard music does not match what he achieved in orchestral and chamber music, he did produce one masterpiece for piano, his Variations sérieuses. His Songs Without Words for solo piano contain many musical gems that demonstrate his ability to compete as a lyrical miniaturist with the likes of Chopin, Schubert, and Schumann.
Mendelssohn's reputation as a composer is probably weakest in the area of vocal music. Most people do not even know that he wrote operas. The Uncle from Boston and The Marriage of Camacho are not exactly household names, and are unlikely any time soon to displace La Traviata and Tosca from the operatic stage. But Mendelssohn did write many beautiful songs and choral compositions. His greatest achievement in the area of vocal music came in the oratorio. Elijah, with its rich, sonorous, and deeply moving part for its titular hero, and its dramatic choruses, can lay claim to being the best oratorio written since the days of Handel and Haydn. Indeed, it is one of the few works in the genre that comes close to the exalted level of the former's Messiah or the latter's The Creation.
With all these extremely popular and highly regarded compositions to his credit, why is Mendelssohn not automatically enrolled in the ranks of the great composers?
He was arguably the most celebrated composer in Europe during his lifetime, but soon after his death in 1847 his reputation began to take a turn for the worse when Richard Wagner attacked him in an essay called "Judaism in Music," first published in 1850. A serious anti-Semite, Wagner argued that Mendelssohn's Jewish origins prevented him from joining the ranks of the truly great composers:
He showed us that a Jew can possess the greatest talents, the finest and most varied culture . . . and that none of those qualities can help him even once to move us to the depths of our being as we expect to be moved by art, and as we are when one of our own great artists simply opens his mouth to speak to us.
