LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No
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Mendelssohn was one of the most lovable of men, gentle as his music, pure as the mountain stream. He had nothing Bohemian about him. Weaknesses he had, no doubt, but they were lovable too. He had little coaxing ways with his friends, which made them love him with something of a child’s love. When in company with Edward Devrient, he would sometimes pronounce his name with an affectionate and lingering drawl, "Ed-e-ward," apropos of nothing in particular. He retained through life something of the impulsiveness and the simplicity of a child.
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Came from a famous, wealthy and cultured Jewish family, Mendelssohn was a well-mannered boy. Yet his family loved music so much and he was no doubt musically talented. As a child, he knew all nine Beethoven symphonies by heart and even played them on the piano. His memory was therefore exceptional. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn could hear a piece of music once and never forget it.
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Mendelssohn knew he was extraordinarily talented, yet he never flaunted it, always preferring in genuine humility to elevate and encourage those around him. On one occasion, when he was to be the pianist in a piano-cello-violin trio, his music, the music for the piano-part, was missing. Now he didn't need his music, being able to play his part out of his head. But not wishing to embarrass the cellist and the violinist who needed their music, he placed any music he could find upside down on the piano (so as not to distract him) and then had a friend turn the pages throughout the performance.
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Mendelssohn's influence on the early career of Joseph Joachim is, next to his work in the rediscovery of Bach, his greatest bequest to later musical history. Those many profound and sincere admirers to Joachim to whom the name of Mendelssohn calls up only the Widow in Elijah and the weaker Songs without Words, may find the idea strange; but there is no doubt that Joachim regarded the continuation of a true Mendelssohn tradition as identical with his own efforts to "uphold the dignity of art."
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In his prolific writings, Wagner even made disparaging comments about Felix Mendelssohn. He tried to prove that the life and works of Mendelssohn clearly demonstrate that no Jew... gifted, cultured, and honorable, could create art that moved the heart and soul.
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The music belies its long gestation, causing even such a pooh-bah as Sir Donald Francis Tovey to assume that Mendelssohn was musically fluent to the point of glibness in one of the silliest analyses in his overrated lexicon. It was Tovey who persuaded subsequent pooh-bahs to single out "the roar of the waves rolling into the cavern, the cries of sea-birds, and perhaps almost more than anything else the radiant and telescopic clearness of the air when the mist is completely dissolved or not yet formed."
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Symphony No