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Mendelssohn: Symphony No
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Mendelssohn had a great affection for London. He called it "the grandest and the most complicated monster on the face of the earth." He came to it again and again, and was never tired of praising the "smoky nest." Amid the glories of a Naples spring he could write that "My heart swells when I even think of London.’ On this first visit he lodged with a Mr. Heinke, a German ironmonger, at 103 (now 79) Great Portland Street. Mrs. Heinke made capital bread-and-butter puddings, and Mendelssohn was so found of them that he asked her to keep a reserve in the cupboard of his sitting-room, so that he might help himself when he came in late at night. The cup supporting a pie-crust was a novelty to him, and he was always much amused when it was lifted and the juice bubbled out. He had the simple enjoyments of an overgrown boy. An incident of this same visit may be told in his own words.
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Mendelssohn's criticisms of Spinoza are discussed below but first the complexity of his relationship to Spinoza should be noted. In his first publication, Dialogues (1761) he argued that many of Spinoza's views were compatible with "true philosophy and religion." In Mendelssohn's mind, Leibniz may have given that "true philosophy" its sharpest formulation but in all likelihood by deriving its central idea of a preestablished harmony from Spinoza. Moreover, as Mendelssohn puts it, Spinoza does not so much deny the distinctiveness of the actual world as construe it as it is in the mind of God before the creation, existing only as a part of God (Philosophical Writings, 102ff, 108ff). A quarter of a century later, Mendelssohn recapitulates the latter argument as the key to understanding Lessing's "purified" or "refined" Spinozism.
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Gumperz or Hess rendered a conspicuous service to Mendelssohn and to the cause of enlightenment in 1754 by introducing him to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Just as the latter afterwards makes Nathan the Wise and Saladin meet over the chess board, so did Lessing and Mendelssohn actually come together as lovers of the game. The Berlin of the day -- the day of Frederick the Great -- was in a moral and intellectual ferment. Lessing was the great liberator of the German mind. He had already begun his work of toleration, for he had recently produced a drama (Die Juden, 1749), the motive of which was to prove that a Jew can be possessed of nobility of character. This notion was being generally ridiculed as untrue, when Lessing found in Mendelssohn the realization of his dream.
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Just as Spinoza explains the matter but not the form of the physical world, so, too, Mendelssohn charges, he gives an account of the matter but not the form of the spiritual world. In this connection it is helpful to recall Mendelssohn's differentiation of knowing, approving, and desiring from one another. Truth and falsity, corresponding to knowing, provide the matter of the spiritual world. While they may, as Spinoza maintains, have their origin in thought as the attribute of a single, infinite substance, categories corresponding not to knowledge but to approving or desiring must have some other source. Thus, according to Mendelssohn, Spinoza leaves unexplained "the difference between good and evil, desirable and undesirable, pleasure and pain" (Gesammelte Schriften, III/2, p. 109).
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The Mendelssohn String Quartet has established a reputation as one of the most imaginative, vital and exciting quartets of its generation. The Quartet tours annually throughout North America with regular trips to foreign destinations.
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The two magnificent sonatas of Mendelssohn have not tempted the great international violoncellists. It is strange that they constitute in fact the first sonatas for violoncello and piano of the first order, those of Beethoven being, significant inversion, sonatas for piano and violoncello, still marked symbolically by the spirit of the 18th Century. If we except Lynn Harrell, the only violoncellists who have performed Mendelssohn in the last twenty years are the less media-hyped artists like the excellent Maria Kliegel, who has recorded on Naxos a version that until now one could have considered the reference point.
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