Rethinking Mendelssohn's Historicism: A Lesson from St. Paul

Abstract

Despite the relative obscurity in which Mendelssohn's St. Paul has languished for most of its existence, few critics would deny the work's significance as a landmark in the emergence of compositional historicism in the nineteenth century., Premiered only a few years after Mendelssohn's revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, St. Paul seems an almost polemically thoroughgoing effort to carve out a place in contemporary composition for the musical language of Bach's long-neglected choral works. From the time of the oratorio's premiere, however, it was one of the cornerstones of this stylistic reclamation Mendelssohn's inclusion of chorales-that most trou-