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Mendelssohn: Felix Mendelssohn
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Felix Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy Hamburg family, studied the piano with his mother at an early age, and later took formal instruction on the piano from Carl Zelter in Berlin. When still only a child, he began to compose chamber works - his family often held chamber soirées in their home, and young Felix had ample opportunity to hone his craft on these impromptu ensembles. Soon he was composing trios, quartets and operettas, and was making his mark as a pianist; his public debut on the keyboard came at the age of nine. By the time Mendelssohn was seventeen, his fame as a musical prodigy was spreading; that year, his first great composition - the overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - was produced.
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Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of the distinguished Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, the additional surname Bartholdy adopted on his conversion to Christianity, was born in Hamburg, the son of a banker. The family moved to Berlin, where Mendelssohn was brought up, able to associate with a cultured circle of family friends. He was associated with the revival of public interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and in the early 1830s travelled abroad for his education, spending time in Italy and ... visiting England, Wales and Scotland. He was later conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, where he also established a Conservatory, his stay there interrupted briefly by a return to Berlin. He died in Leipzig in 1847. Prolific and precocious, Mendelssohn had many gifts, musically as composer, conductor and pianist.
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Far from the troubled, coarse libertine that has become an archetype of the Romantic composer, Felix Mendelssohn was something of an anomaly among his contemporaries. His own situation -- one largely of domestic tranquility and unhindered career fulfillment -- stands in stark contrast to the personal Sturm und Drang familiar to his peers. Mendelssohn was the only musical prodigy of the nineteenth century whose stature could rival that of Mozart. Still, his parents resisted any entrepreneurial impulses and spared young Felix the strange, grueling lifestyle that was the lot of many child prodigies. He and his sister Fanny were given piano lessons, and he ... studied violin, and both joined the Berlin Singakademie. Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Singakademie, became Mendelssohn's first composition instructor.
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Felix Mendelssohn was born February 3rd, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany, to an upper-middle class family. His father, Abraham, was an affluent banker and his mother, Leah Salomon, was an amateur musician who aided in his cultural and artistic development. Mendelssohn was one of four children, his siblings being Fanny, who would ... become a noteworthy composer, Rebecca, and Paul. His grandfather's philosophical and literary views were important in the education of his grandson. During the Napoleonic invasions of Hamburg, the family escaped to Berlin, a city which was a flowering intellectual and artistic metropolis.
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Like many other famous composers, Felix Mendelssohn began his musical life as a child prodigy. He and his sister Fanny learned many languages and artistics pursuits from their mother. Felix, born in Hamburg, performed at the piano and composed music from a very early age. The social life of his parents brought him widespread recognition, and provided much experience. His grandfather was a Jewish philosopher, but his father (a banker) left the Jewish faith for Christianity and adopted the family name of Bartholdy which is why Felix's surname is sometimes quoted as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. As a young boy, Felix met and befriended the elder Goethe who was to prove an enduring influence on the musician.
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Felix Mendelssohn was something of a prodigy. He wrote his first piece at the age of eleven, beginning a prolific period in which the youth created pieces in virtually every genre from sonatas to concertos and even a Singspiel. At the age of twenty, he conducted a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie. This was the first modern performance of the work and was an important event in the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Bach.
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Felix Mendelssohn