FAMOUS COMPOSERS
FAMOUS COMPOSERS
Monograph Number Two in The Mentor Reading Course
The life of Felix Mendelssohn strikes one because of its remarkable activity, begun at a very early age. The son of a wealthy banker, he was born at Hamburg on February 3, 1809. As the French occupied Hamburg in 1811, it was necessary for the Mendelssohn family to move to Berlin, where Felix received his first training from his mother.
At the age of eleven Felix was composing with extraordinary rapidity, producing sixty pieces during the first year of composition, and the next year he was writing opera.
The Mendelssohn family had established the custom of holding musical festivals in the dining room of their home on alternate Sunday mornings. The music was rendered by a small orchestra under the direction of Felix. For each of these festivals the boy had some new composition. Thus, at the festival on his fifteenth birthday a private performance of his first three-act opera was held.
At the age of sixteen his father took him to Paris, where he met Rossini and Meyerbeer and other well known composers. With these men he worked and discoursed on music as if he were their equal in experience.
When only a little over seventeen he completed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which made an immediate success. During 1829 the composer made his first of ten trips to England, where “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was produced. On this occasion the director of the performance left the entire score in a coach on his return from the theater; but Mendelssohn wrote another from memory without a single error.
The next few years were full of activity. Mendelssohn produced many compositions, and filled the position of director of music, first at Düsseldorf, then at the Gewandhaus, Leipsic. The latter position was the highest honor in the German music world.
In 1837 he was married to Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud, whom he took on his concert tours, and it was during a tour in England with her that he received a call to Berlin from the king of Prussia. He left Berlin with the title of Kapellmeister.
The worry of his Berlin duties, a number of which he frankly told the king he could not fill, on account of the work at the Gewandhaus, began to wear on his health. Despite his weakened condition, he continued to do things. In 1843 he opened a college of music. Three years later he introduced Jenny Lind at the Gewandhaus, and then made a tour with her in England.
His activity was telling on his failing health, and when he reached Frankfort in 1847, returning from England, the news of his sister Fanny’s death caused him to collapse in the street. Five weeks later he had sufficiently recovered to take a trip with his family to Interlaken, where he remained until September, when he returned to Leipsic and lived in privacy.
On October 9 he asked Madam Frege to sing his latest songs. She left the room to get some lights, and on her return found him insensible. He lingered until November 4, when he died in the presence of his wife, his brother Paul, and three friends. A cross marks the site of his grave in Berlin.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATIONILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 1, No. 41, SERIAL No. 41COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.
FRANZ PETER SCHUBERT
FRANZ PETER SCHUBERT