Felix Mendelssohn Research Articles

The Moral Dyad: A Fundamental Template Unifying Moral Judgment

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety. —Felix Mendelssohn Felix Mendelssohn, the famous Romantic composer, sought to take the unique experiences of each human life—distinctive sorrows an...

Musik als Bekenntnis: Christus-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert (review)

Reviewed by: Musik als Bekenntnis: Christus-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert Jesse Rosenberg Musik als Bekenntnis: Christus-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert. By Daniel Ortuño-Stühring. (Weimarer Liszt-Studien, im Auftrag der Deutsche Liszt-Gesellschaft, ed. Detlef Altenburg, Band 6). Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2011. [399 p. ISBN 9783890073439. €64.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, list of abbreviations. Richard Wagner's putdown of the sacred oratorio ("an obvious misconstrual of the present"), cited more than once in the book under review, is a good indication of how low the genre had fallen in general esteem by the 1830s. In Wagner's view, the primary defect was the extreme conservatism of subject matter and musical style. By an ironic twist, the subsequent reawakening of interest in the oratorio as a viable genre was closely tied to the baroque revival lead by Felix Mendelssohn, and crowned by Mendelssohn's own superlative contributions to the genre, St. Paul and Elijah. These works, along with the eighteenth-century masterpieces of Bach and Handel championed by Mendelssohn, cemented the association between large-scale sacred [End Page 573] drama and the employment of eighteenth-century models for form and texture. But other views were also expressed; Robert Schumann, though observing that the "bloom" of the oratorio had faded long ago, praised Ferdinand Hiller's Die Zerstörung Jerusalems (1840) for more closely approaching "the future," and Franz Liszt wondered how a genre in which the best-known works belonged to the past could be made to live again in the present. The ways in which these issues played out in sacred oratorios of the latter half of the nineteenth century make for a fascinating and complex history, but one too large to be encompassed in a single volume. Daniel Ortuño-Stühring has chosen to focus on a subset within a subset of this history. First, as regards subject matter, he concentrates exclusively on the "Christ-oratorio," a term used to denote a work which presents the life of Jesus as a whole, or at least an extended stretch of it, as opposed to a single episode such as the Nativity, the raising of Lazarus, or the Last Supper. Ortuño-Stühring's interest, moreover, falls principally on Germany, where by far the greater number of these works were conceived and performed, and in particular on the last four German works in the genre completed in the nineteenth century. The first three of these works, remarkably, share the identical title, Christus: Liszt's composition of 1872, Friedrich Kiel's of the same year, and Anton Rubinstein's "sacred opera," completed in 1893. Felix Draeseke's Christus-Mysterium, completed in 1899, is the fourth work. Why a whole book on these four compositions? As the author explains in his introduction, they have notable commonalities which strongly suggest the need to be examined as a group. The table printed on pages 13-14, an annotated list of all the German "Christ-oratorios" between 1827 and World War I, clarifies that the four works in question form a consecutive sequence within the list overall. All four are further united by the evident centrality of Liszt, since, in addition to his own oratorio, we have three works by composers with close personal and professional ties to him. Each of the four works was considered the crowning achievement by the composer in question, as little as posterity may have concurred in the assessment. In all four works the composer was creatively involved in the text as well as the music, whether writing the libretto (Liszt, Kiel, and Draeseke) or closely supervising it (Rubinstein). The works, finally, are also linked by a reception history which focused largely on the artistic manifestations of their composers' religious identities or convictions (Liszt's Catholicism, Kiel's Protestantism, Rubinstein's Jewishness) during the contentious period of the Kulturkampf and its immediate aftermath. The excellent introduction, which focuses on the vexed history of the oratorio genre against the background of contemporary developments in religion and theology, lays the groundwork for an important theme of the book: that the late-nineteenth-century works under consideration, far from being neobaroque or neoclassical attempts to recapture the styles and approaches...

Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n:Essays In Honor of Christoph Wolff , and: "Ein förmlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus". Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, mit einer Doku mentensammlung zur musikalischen Familiengeschichte der Vorfahren von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (review)

Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n: Essays In Honor of Christoph Wolff. Edited by Paul Corneilson and Peter Wollny. Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein, 2010. [xiv, 234 p. ISBN 9780981985015. $50.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Ein formlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus. Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, mit einer Doku mentensammlung zur musik - alischen Familiengeschichte der Vorfahren von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. By Peter Wollny. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Bach-Rezeption, Bd. 2.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 2010. [145 p. ISBN 9783765103902. i24.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. The volume Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n (He is the father, we are the boys) takes its title from a statement allegedly made in 1789 by Mozart to Johann Fried - rich Doles, cantor at Leipzig's St. Thomas church, in reference to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. However, the title clearly serves a dual purpose, as the present volume serves as a Festschrift for Christoph Wolff, the highly influential scholar of the music of Bach, his sons, and, others, on the occasion of Wolff's seventieth birthday. Though lacking what would have been a valuable bibliography of Wolff's extensive scholarship, the volume is adorned with other equally reverential set pieces: a dedicatory acrostic poem by Lisa DeSiro and a closing musical tribute by Robert D. Levin. The main body of the volume consists of ten separately authored chapters, of which five are in German and five in English, focusing primarily on aspects of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's compositional thinking. In the first chapter, Uwe Wolf presents specific details of the revisions made by C. P. E. Bach in the autograph manuscript of J. S. Bach's B-minor Mass, BWV 232. In clarifying the stages of the revisions, Wolf offers information useful to the understanding of the text that appears in that manuscript, which has appeared in several facsimile editions and is available in a high-resolution scan online (available at http://www.bach-digital.de/receive /BachDigitalSource_source_00001048, accessed 15 September 2011) as well as a means toward understanding the editorial decisions that one encounters in the numerous editions of the B-minor Mass. Darrell M. Berg's article treats the process of melodic variation in C. P. E. Bach's music, examining the utilization of this technique in his formal structures and considering the resulting pieces in the context of late eighteenth-century instrumental forms. Laura Buch discusses the closely allied notion of improvisation as manifest in Bach's trios. In this she addresses both simple embellishment and the effect on the trio genre of the increasing significance of the keyboard part. Ulrich Leisinger's contribution examines musical declamation as exhibited in Bach's text setting, which, as with the previous chapters, situates Bach within the transition between baroque and modern styles. Peter Wollny's chapter on the Easter cantata Gott hat den Herrn auferwecket examines the documents associated with that compostion, in a manner which Wollny has perfected, in elucidating biographical details of the composer's professional ambitions. Paul Corneilson reviews the music composed by Bach for Johann Heinrich Michel as a means of examining the parameters in which Bach worked in composing for his Hamburg soloists while also providing musical insight into the biography of Bach's primary Hamburg copyist. Jason B. Grant describes the depiction of the the city of Hamburg in four occassional works by C. P. E. Bach which reference the city and specific sites in the city, providing insight into its citizens' attitudes toward it. Wolfram Ensslin and Tobias Rimek examine his use of pastiche and arrangements of pre-existing music as demonstrated in the chorale settings in the composer's vocal works, providing among other copious details a 25-page index of chorales and their source attributions. Christine Blanken provides valuable details of the reception of C. …

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Research and Information Guide (2nd edition)

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Research and Information Guide (2nd edition)

Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 33: Kantate zum 13. Sonntag nach Trinitatis (komponiert zum 3. September 1724) = Cantata for the 13th Sunday after Trinity (review)

BACH SOURCES REUNITED Johann Sebastian Bach. Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 33: Kantate zum 13. Sonntag nach Trinitatis (komponiert zum 3. September 1724) = Cantata for the 13th Sunday after Trinity (composed for September 3, 1724). Facsimile: Autographe Partitur = Autograph Score, Scheide Library, Princeton, NJ; Originalstimmen = Original Parts, Bach-Archiv Leipzig, Thomana-Sammlung; Textheft = Text Booklet (1724), Russische Nationalbibliothek St. Petersburg. Mit ein Kommentar von = With a Commentary by Christoph Wolff & Peter Wollny. (Faksimile-Reihe Bachscher Werke und Schriftstucke. Neue Folge, Band V.) Leipzig: Bach- Archiv; Kassel: Barenreiter, 2010. [4 items in slipcase: (1) facsim. of autograph score from the Scheide Library (12 fols. in wrapper); (2) facsim. of parts from the Bach-Archiv Leipzig (SATB, oboes 1 & 2, violins 1 & 2, viola, 2 continuos, in wrapper); (3) facsim. of cantata text published Leipzig: Immanuel Tietzen, [1724], from the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; (4) commentary in Eng., Ger. (15 p.). ISBN 978-3-9811902-2-9 (Bach-Archiv), 978-3-7618-2201-2 (Barenreiter). euro298.] The item under review here is a facsimile edition of the original sources for a church cantata that received its premiere in Leipzig's Thomaskirche on 3 September 1724, the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 33) was composed when Johann Sebastian Bach was thirty-nine years old. Fifteen months earlier, in May 1723, the composer relocated from Kothen, where he had served for five-and-a-half years as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold. During the first few years of his tenure as music director in Leipzig, where he remained until his death in 1750, Bach immersed himself in the task of creating an inventory of cantatas for performance in the liturgies at the principal churches on Sundays and other feasts. Since it was possible to adapt several works that had originated in Kothen, and others from the period when he was Konzertmeister in Weimar (1714-16), it was necessary for Bach to write about forty new cantatas during his first year in Leipzig. Thereafter, beginning in June 1724, he embarked on the most ambitious project of his entire career: the composition of fifty-two additional works in as many weeks (though not evenly distributed throughout the year), most of them based on traditional Lutheran chorales (i.e., hymns dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The result was more than sixteen hours of complex and nuanced music for four voices with instrumental ensembles of varying sizes. BWV 33 is the twelfth cantata of this second cycle (the so-called chorale cantata Jahrgang), an ordinary work for an ordinary Sunday but produced within the context of an extraordinary creative enterprise. The decision to publish a facsimile of the sources for this particular composition was influenced by the convergence of several factors. The original performing parts were sold shortly after Bach's death by his widow, Anna Magdalena, to the city of Leip zig, where they remain to this day as part of the Thomana Collection at the Bach-Archiv Leipzig. The autograph score was inherited by Bach's eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. After his death in 1784, it came into the possession of several collectors, including Felix Mendelssohn's friend Julius Schubring, before being acquired in 1965 by the Scheide Library in Princeton, New Jersey. William H. Scheide, who also holds the 1748 version of Elias Gottlob Hausmann's famous portrait and other important Bachiana, is a Bach scholar of long standing and a member of the board of the Bach Archive Foundation. Cooperation between the owners of the two primary musical sources is therefore not surprising. The decisive event, however, was the recent discovery of a booklet containing the texts of BWV 33 and four other cantatas dating from September 1724 (BWV 78, 99, 8, 130) among the holdings of the National Library of Russia in St. …

'The joyous light of day': New Year's Day Music in Leipzig, 1781-1847

Unlike other European cities, where the rise of the public concert in the eighteenth century diminished the church’s prominent role in musical life, Leipzig was a city in which the church maintained a strong influence over public concert institutions. On 25 November 1781, Leipzig’s new concert hall, the Gewandhaus, was inaugurated as the home for the subscription series directed by Johann Adam Hiller. Launched along with the hall was a tradition of performing one of the subscription concerts on New Year’s Day, a practice that may well have been the first of its kind on the continent. At first, the New Year’s concert was like any other of the season, comprising a variety of musical genres, including symphonies, concerti, and operatic fare. Quickly, however, concert organizers attempted to give this particular programme a distinct identity. Sacred music became a tradition in these concerts, which soon came to resemble the New Year’s Day music at the Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche. Despite its sacred bent, the New Year’s Day concert was also infused with strong political overtones. Indeed, it was the sacred components of the concert that became the vehicle for praising political figures. New Year’s Day music in Leipzig was not sacred or political, it was often sacred and political simultaneously—not surprising for a city in which sacred and civic music institutions had such blurred boundaries. Vestiges of this tradition continued into Felix Mendelssohn’s Gewandhaus directorship, during which he composed at least two psalm cantatas for New Year’s Day performance.

Dream Analysis: Korngold, Mendelssohn, and Musical Adaptations in Warner Bros.' A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

Abstract In his first film score, Erich Wolfgang Korngold adapted the works of Felix Mendelssohn so that the music seemed to interact and respond with the visual editing of the film, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Warner Bros., 1935). By detailing the facets of this unusual production, which range from Korngold's presence on the set to the publicity department's efforts to spotlight Mendelssohn's music and Korngold's arrangements, I argue that the score for Dream played an important role in elevating film music and film composers within the hierarchy of Hollywood production and publicity. Not only was the Mendelssohn-Korngold score given greater consideration during the film's making, but also audiences were reminded to listen to the film's music, a facet rarely acknowledged in other contemporaneous publicity drives. Importantly, these changes were effected and rationalized through the self-conscious foregrounding of the music, principles, and rhetoric of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Documents at the Warner Bros. Archive reveal how the confluence of these factors not only established the unusual tenor of Korngold's career within the Hollywood studio system but also helped construct the film composer's public image as an incongruously independent artist working within an otherwise collaborative medium.

Interview with Eckard Rödger, 16 March 2010, Leipzig

Eckard Rödger worked for the radio in Leipzig following his training as a sound engineer. He then worked as sound engineer for the theatre at the Palast der Republik 1 (TiP) in Berlin, where he developed and oversaw concert series of electroacoustic music and was responsible for the production of numerous electroacoustic works. After the fall of the Berlin wall, he received a tenured professorship in sound technology at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy College for music and theatre in Leipzig. Rödger worked with renowned musicians from both serious and pop music.

In Memoriam: Robert M. Chanock, MD, 1924-2010

In Memoriam: Robert M. Chanock, MD, 1924-2010

Noting Images: Understanding the Illustrated Manuscripts of Mendelssohn’sSchilfliedand Hindemith’sLudus Tonalis

Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith, composing about one hundred years apart, integrated visual elements, including drawings and illustrated notations, into musical manuscripts they designed as gifts for women they admired. The two documents, illustrating Mendelssohn’sSchilflied(1842) and Hindemith’sLudus Tonalis(1942), are strong declarations of compositional and artistic ideology. This article examines the scores as reflecting, respectively, aspects of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conceptions of musical composition and form, and their relation to visual media.

The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts

Since the Renaissance, classical subjects have exerted an ever-present impact on musical composition. Composers have responded in diverse, revealing ways to the challenge of setting classical texts. Some have harnessed their prestige as a platform for social or political commentary; others have regarded classical literary works as structural archetypes to be preserved by music; still others have re-interpreted or even negated those texts’ original meanings. Combining musical and classical scholarship, this outreach panel consists of four papers specifically chosen because they discuss the musical scores themselves as well as the texts they set. This dual study of music in collaboration with text is a potentially unique contribution to the offerings of the APA. The panel will consider the works of four composers who have set classical texts or subjects: Francesco Cavalli, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, and Iannis Xenakis. Ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the pieces represent different genres: opera, art song, incidental music, and concert/theatrical music. Progressing chronologically, the composers engage with their ancient sources in an increasingly direct manner. Cavalli’s seventeenth-century opera Il Giasone, the earliest work, sets an Italian libretto that draws on Apollonius’ and Ovid’s characterizations of Jason as an effeminate hero (Panelist 1). Many of Franz Schubert’s early nineteenth-century art songs set poems by such contemporaries as Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, which regard Greek antiquity from the perspective of German Romanticism (Panelist 2). In the 1840s, Felix Mendelssohn makes a studied attempt to forge a structural connection between music and text by aligning the rhythmic and metrical patterns of his incidental music for Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus as closely as possible with Sophocles’ Greek, albeit by way of a contemporary German translation (Panelist 3). Finally, Iannis Xenakis, alone among the four composers, directly sets ancient text, using original passages of Aeschylus’ Greek in his concert/theatrical Kassandra (Panelist 4).In spite of these varying degrees of distance from the ancient texts, each composer engages deeply with his literary sources, and follows distinct methodologies in setting the text to music. A series of interesting questions emerges, which will be explored by the respondent. For example, are ancient texts a viable platform for political and social advocacy, as the papers on Cavalli and Schubert discuss? In this case, composers may value a text’s classical origin – and its corresponding prestige and exemption from serious reproach (or even censorship) – more highly than any esthetic attributes the text itself may possess. Or, are ancient texts honored archetypes, literary molds into which music may be productively poured? Mendelssohn’s intellectualized experiment, a conscious re-creation of imagined ancient performance practice, could be considered in keeping with this view. Do ancient texts have value as collections of smaller “particles” of meaning and syntax that can be freely divorced from their original contexts, suffer the stretching or negation – both conceptually and performatively – of their significations, and still maintain a central relationship to the expressive totality of the work? Xenakis’ approach in his “Kassandra” seems to pose these questions.Each 20 minute paper will be accompanied by audio-visual and music notation examples to support its major points. The co-organizers are a classicist who has worked on the reception of classics in music, and a composer whose works reflect the classical tradition. The classicist will introduce and moderate. Following the presentations, the composer will offer a twenty-minute response that summarizes the most important points of the conversation, and adresses the questions above to raise issues for future exploration. Remaining time will be taken up with questions and discussion.

Much Ado about The Tempest: London Opera Politics, Intercultural Incomprehension, and Felix Mendelssohn

The eventual failure of Mendelssohn's sporadically intense involvement with operatic life in 1840s London is much less surprising when analyzed using methodologies of miscommunication adapted from current intercultural research. For the English, Mendelssohn was potentially as brightly burning an operatic star as Weber or Meyerbeer, an assessment optimistically based more on fervent hope than appropriate achievement. However, a closer look at largely unpublished documents relating to Mendelssohn's Shakespearian opera commissions, The Tempest for Her Majesty's Theatre, and A Winter's Tale for Covent Garden, uncovers a surprising story of ineptitude and missed opportunities. The composer found himself “double-dating” the main London opera houses during a protracted operatic courtship, while simultaneously stringing along librettists Eugène Scribe in Paris and Felice Romani in Italy. In the process, he only narrowly avoided alienating Emanuel Geibel, author of his opera-in-progress in Germany, Die Lorelei. The naivety of Mendelssohn's reaction to the collapse of his cosmopolitan operatic visions, and the dismay routinely expressed by his disappointed collaborators, were classic cases of intercultural misunderstanding.

“With True Esteem and Friendship”: The Correspondence of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Louis Spohr

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Louis Spohr, two of the most influential musical figures of Restoration musical culture in the German lands, exchanged detailed letters about some of the most important issues of their day. Most of this correspondence has remained unpublished. Thirty-nine letters exchanged by these two composers are presented in English translation and the original German. The letters contain pithy discussions of individual works of both composers—Mendelssohn's St. Paul and Elijah, the symphony-cantata Lobgesang, his “Scottish” and “Italian” Symphonies, and the Melusine Overture; as well as Spohr's oratorio Des Heilands letzte Stunden, his “Historical” Symphony, and the Tochter der Luft Overture, among others. The letters also collectively offer insight into general aspects of mid-nineteenth-century musical life, such as recommending and hiring singers and instrumentalists, arranging for the performance of new music and concert programming generally, the politics of libretto creation for nineteenth-century oratorios and operas, and the state of current musical affairs, especially where the revival of earlier music and the issues facing the historicist movement are concerned.

Mendelssohn's Other Concerto: The Changing Reception of the Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 40, in D minor

Felix Mendelssohn's two mature piano concertos, Op. 25 in G minor (1831–32) and Op. 40 in D minor (1837), were widely performed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the D-minor Concerto fell completely out of favor and came to be regarded as a work the composer had completed hurriedly. However, the numerous extant autograph sources for the second Concerto reveal that Mendelssohn considered it worthy of the meticulous revision customary of his major artistic efforts. The problematic reception of the D-minor Concerto was due to a convergence of factors, not the least of which was the highly favorable reception of its predecessor, Op. 25, deemed historically significant due to its formal innovations. But more subtle forces also shaped the decline of Op. 40, including a perceived seriousness of musical content as opposed to popularizing virtuosic display, as well as a long history of performance by women and amateurs rather than male virtuosi. In addition, the second Piano Concerto's biographical association with Mendelssohn's 1837 honeymoon and thus with modern critiques of his all too happy, “bourgeois” marriage linked the work to a larger anti-Semitic narrative of a supposed artistic decline.

A Minor Mendelssohnian Mystery: The Curious Case of the Credo and the Nachspiel

Felix Mendelssohn composed his Nachspiel for organ on the verso of the final page of the manuscript of his cantata Wir glauben all' an einen Gott. In 1853 his brother Paul had the autograph removed from its binding and copied by a Berlin copyist, presumably intending to send the copy to Bradford, England, to be premiered at the ceremonies celebrating the opening of St. George's Hall. Presumably, it was also Paul Mendelssohn's intent to reinsert the autograph back into its original binding. Inadvertently, both the autograph and the copy were sent, and the organizers assumed the autograph had been “presented to the Festival Committee” by Paul Mendelssohn. The principal mystery surrounding these two works involves their relationship to each other, if, indeed, there was one. Did Mendelssohn intend the Nachspiel as a Postlude to his cantata? After all, it is in the same key as the cantata: D. If not, then what could have been its purpose—a Postlude to what? Apparently, the Nachspiel was actually incorporated into the performance of the cantata in Bradford in 1853, but whether as a prelude or a postlude is unclear. How the Nachspiel was positioned relative to the cantata is less important than the fact that it was regarded and treated as an integral component of the cantata, which may have been the intention of the composer. The autograph score was never returned to Berlin, but remained in Bradford, where it was mentioned as late as 1859. Presumably, it is still somewhere in the Bradford area.

Foreword: In Honor of Peter Ward Jones

In 2009, the musical world celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose music has experienced a strong revival over the past thirty years. An ever-increasing number...

The East/West Dialectic in German Actor Training

In this article Steve Earnest discusses contemporary approaches to performance training in Germany, comparing the content and methods of selected programmes from the former Federal Republic of Germany to those of the former German Democratic Republic. The Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock and the University of the Arts in Berlin are here utilized as primary sources, while reference is also made to the Bayerische Theater-akademie ‘August Everding’ Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, and Justus Leibig Universität in Giessen. The aim is to provide insight into theatre-training processes in Germany and to explore how these relate to the national characteristics that have emerged since reunification. Steve Earnest is Associate Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His publications include The State Acting Academy of East Berlin (Mellen Press, 1999) and articles in Performer Training (Harwood Publishers, 2001), New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Western European Stages.

Korngolds Mendelssohn

Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s short, successful, and influential career as a film composer got its start when stage director Max Reinhardt hired him to arrange Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for his Warner Brothers production of 1935. The article examines the techniques Korngold used for his adaptation, which utilized the score of the incidental music and additional excerpts from other compositions by Mendelssohn. The historical circumstances surrounding the production, namely, the Third Reich’s ban on Mendelssohn’s music in general and on his incidental music for The Dream in particular, are recounted. This essay, published here for the first time, is based on numerous versions of lectures given on both sides of the Atlantic, beginning at Harvard University in 2000 and including a plenary address for the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, in 2002.

Review: The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition by Jeffrey Sposato

Review: The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition by Jeffrey Sposato

Fra Leopold Ranke ed Eduard Gans. Un autografo inedito di Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy dalle lezioni rankiane del 1827 sulla Rivoluzione Francese

- Certain circumstances and stylistic considerations lead us to believe that the manuscript MS. 114 in the Mendelssohn Archive at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is (in part) evidence of a course in "Contemporary History" held by Leopold Ranke at the city's university in the summer term of 1827. The course was on the chronological history of the French Revolution. Ranke had already dealt with the same subject the year before, though in a less detailed manner. And it was not until 1875 that he published a work on the period of the Revolution, but focussing solely on the war between the European powers in 1791-1792. Hence the importance of the new manuscript - in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's own hand - which, previously, had been mistakenly connected with the teaching of the Hegelian jurist Eduard Gans. Mendelssohn attended his course on the French Revolution in the summer of 1828.