The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition. By Jeffrey S. Sposato.

Abstract

To understand fully what is at issue in Jeffrey S. Sposato's book, it is necessary to review some of the historiography behind it. In 1963, following a series of prefatory articles, Eric Werner published (in a translation by the late Dika Newlin) a major work: Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and his Life. Basing his ‘new image’ largely on unpublished Mendelssohn letters in the New York Public Library, Werner proposed that his subject remained far more attached to his Jewish heritage than had previously been realized. From this position he drew far-reaching conclusions about the composer's view of life and presumed authorial intentions, particularly in music with religious texts. Werner's position remained unchanged in a revised edition of the original German text (Zürich, 1980). This position did in fact project a ‘new image’; one nineteenth-century view of Mendelssohn as ‘a conspicuously cultured, Christian gentleman’ (Joseph Mussulman, ‘Mendelssohnism in America’, Musical Quarterly, 52 (1967), 335–46) was widely held—and not only in America. (The opposing view, of course, was thoroughly tainted by anti-Semitism.)