Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) was a German composer, pianist, conductor, and musical organizer whose career joined extraordinary early achievement with a major role in European concert life. Born in Hamburg and raised largely in Berlin, he received intensive musical education alongside his sister Fanny. The Mendelssohn children were baptized into Protestant Christianity in 1816. Felix studied composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter and developed with unusual speed, producing the celebrated String Octet while still in his teens and the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream soon afterward.

Mendelssohn became an important advocate for earlier music as well as a leading composer of his own generation. His 1829 Berlin performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion played a major part in the nineteenth-century revival of Bach’s large-scale sacred music. He later directed the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and helped found the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843. His works include symphonies, concertos, chamber music, piano and organ works, sacred choral music, the oratorios St. Paul and Elijah, and the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

His connection with hymnody often came through later adaptation of concert works. In 1840 he wrote Festgesang for male chorus and brass to celebrate the Gutenberg printing festival in Leipzig. A melody from its second movement was adapted after his death by William Hayman Cummings and became the hymn tune MENDELSSOHN. Mendelssohn himself had cautioned that the melody would not suit sacred words, making its later success as a Christmas tune an especially striking part of his posthumous musical reception.