Mendelssohn, Lost And Found

Conductor Stephen Somary, right, has worked several years to have the full range of Felix Mendelssohn’s compositions published and performed.

Conductor Stephen Somary, right, has worked several years to have the full range of Felix Mendelssohn’s compositions published and performed.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

Imagine that there is a great composer whose already prodigious output doesn’t even include over 250 more works of music that no one has heard since they were written in the mid-19th century. Make him a figure of controversy whose name comes up in one of the most heated debates of the past 150 years, the victim of anti-Semites around the globe.
Now call him Felix Mendelssohn.

It’s true. The composer who is probably most famed for penning the “Wedding March” that is heard at most nuptials, Mendelssohn is one of the central figures of Romanticism in 19th-century music. He produced more than 770 compositions, ranging from individual songs to full-length operas, from short piano pieces to large-scale symphonies. But over 270 of those

pieces have never been published and most of those have never been performed.

Stephen Somary, a distinguished conductor and founder-director of The Mendelssohn Project, has been working to rectify that situation for several years. The latest fruits of his efforts will be on display Jan. 28 in a concert that will include 13 world premieres of unpublished Mendelssohn compositions. But, as Somary said in a telephone interview last week, that is only a sliver of the music that remains to be brought to light.
“There are three reasons why so many of Mendelssohn’s works went unpublished,” Somary said. “Felix was wealthy and could afford the luxury of not having to publish. Only the first 72 opus numbers were published in his lifetime. Second, he certainly didn’t expect to die at 38 [in 1847].”

But the third reason lies outside Mendelssohn’s lifetime and intentions and is more sinister. Somary explained, “The key reason for all this unpublished work were the vicious anti-Semitic attacks on him initiated by [Richard] Wagner’s book, “Judaism in Music,” in which Wagner argued that as a Jew Mendelssohn was incapable of producing great music.”

Wagner’s attack on Mendelssohn, whose wealthy banker father Abraham had converted to Lutheranism and had his children baptized, presaged a new kind of anti-Semitic discourse, racial rather than religious in nature. If a Jew couldn’t change his “nature” by converting to Christianity, then there could be no place for him in a Christian society; it is one of the central tenets of Nazi ideology, gratefully derived from Wagner’s writings.

Wagner’s influence in Germany should not be underestimated, Somary suggested.
“He reflected a mindset of post-revolutionary Germany,” Somary said. “Mendelssohn went from being the most performed composer in Central Europe, to not being performed at all. Publishers stopped posthumous publications. It didn’t help that his wife died shortly after and their children had no interest in music. But the damage had been done by Wagner and like-minded people, establishing to the world that he was a second-rate composer. It’s a mindset that was forced on generations to come. In 1936 Mendelssohn was still important enough to be included on Nazi lists of forbidden Jewish artists.”

Fortunately, some who foresaw the rising tide of Nazi anti-Semitism smuggled Mendelssohn’s manuscripts out of Germany shortly before the outbreak of World War II. As the hostilities spread across Europe, those secret repositories were moved again and again, with the inevitable gradual scattering of materials. But Somary, a passionate advocate for Mendelssohn’s music, began searching for them in the mid-1990s, incorporating the Mendelssohn Project in 2004 to make it official. In that time, he has worked with musicologists to uncover countless pieces of music, personal letters to and from the composer and even examples of the multi-talented Mendelssohn’s paintings and drawings.

As is well known, Mendelssohn’s grandfather was the brilliant Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, an intellectual powerhouse who was instrumental in the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment and the emancipation of Europe’s Jews. It is hard to ascertain with any certainty what Felix’s attitude was toward his grandfather, who died before the composer was born, or to his father’s decision to abandon Judaism in the face of the overwhelming hostility of the society around him in the hope of normalizing his family’s life.

However, as Somary noted, there are a few indicators that Felix did not share his father’s desire to advance the family through conversion. Abraham went so far in his assimilationist project as to abandon the family name, replacing it with his wife’s family name, Bartholdy, which was less obviously Jewish. But Felix chose to drop Bartholdy and to be known as Mendelssohn, when the option was available.

“Until Abraham died in mid-1830s, he had a strong hold over his children in making sure they followed Christian doctrine,” Somary said. “It was his father who pushed Felix to write [the oratorio] ‘Saint Paul.’ But after Abraham’s death, in the remaining decade-plus of his life, Felix very overtly started looking back at his roots. He wrote that he felt in that last decade a great comfort in studying the Old Testament, that he had an uncomfortable feeling about New. He started learning Hebrew, and started translating texts from Hebrew Bible, not the German version. In his letters he made very little reference to his father, but expressed regret at not meeting his grandfather.”

The evidence is hardly conclusive, as Somary pointed out, but, he added, “One can surmise that he was beginning to question who he was. He never wrote about his deep beliefs.”

Of course, in the end we are always left with the music. It may be as difficult to translate into ideas the unspoken thoughts that died with Felix Mendelssohn. But thanks in no small part to Stephen Somary and his colleagues, there is much more of it to think about. n

“Mendelssohn: Lost Treasures and the Wagner Suppression,” a concert of 13 world premieres of music by Felix Mendelssohn, featuring pianists Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky, the Shanghai Quartet, bass Kevin Deas, and mezzo-soprano Abigail Nims, under the artistic direction of Stephen Somary, will take place on Wednesday, Jan. 28 at 7 p.m at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (36 Battery Place). For information, call (646) 437-4202, or go to www.mjhnyc.org.

Signup for our weekly email newsletter at this link http://www.thejewishweek.com/newsletter.html