Mendelssohn as Jew: Revisiting Controversy on the Occasion of the Composer's 200th Birthday

Abstract

The year 2009 marks the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn. While there will be celebratory conferences in honor of Mendelssohn’s birth, including one in Leipzig this August, the 2009 anniversary will turn out to be surprisingly muted. There have been special concerts in New York presenting heretofore unknown or lesser-known works, and some effort has been made in Israel by performing organizations to mark this Mendelssohn year. Among the most touching gestures was a decision by the 2009 Leipzig Bach Festival to open the season with a performance of Elijah. On the scholarly side, 2009 will bring the publication of yet another impressive biography by Larry Todd, whose formidable 2003 biography of the composer set a new standard for all Mendelssohn scholarship. Todd will be publishing Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, a biography of the composer’s sister, complete with an updated work list. There will also be a continuing group of new scholarly editions of Mendelssohn’s music, and a twelve-volume set of Mendelssohn’s letters based on the collection of Rudolf Elvers has begun to be published. Modest as the commemorations of Mendelssohn are, they do not entirely reflect an absence of controversy concerning Mendelssohn. Over the past decade, few scholarly debates have been as heated and widely noticed as the one concerning Mendelssohn sparked by the work of Jeffrey Sposato. Sposato’s findings were first published in this journal. Indeed, the claims Sposato made reflected the fact that the underlying issue of Mendelssohn’s reputation and place in the repertory has never entirely been resolved. The fame he possessed during his lifetime was not sustained posthumously. More was at work after 1848 than shifts in taste. The success of a Wagnerian aesthetic coincided with an explicit attack on Mendelssohn as a Jew in the context of an elaborate ideology that