Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47)

German composer. Mendelssohn was a child of privilege, son of a prosperous Hamburg banker and grandson of the distinguished philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His elder sister Fanny Hensel, (1805-47) also became a successful pianist and composer. He had excellent teachers (notably Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin) and traveled widely, visiting much of Europe and eventually developing a rapport with England and Scotland that took him there on ten different occasions. As a gifted conductor, Mendelssohn helped revive interest in Bach with the 1829 Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion; from 1835 he led the famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. In 1842, he and others, including Schumann, founded the Leipzig Conservatory. His oratorio Elijah was a triumph at its first performance in Birmingham, England (1846). News of his sister's death hastened his own a few months afterward. One of Mendelssohn's most imaginative works, the overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, was composed when he was 17. In this and many of his later compositions his formal adventurousness combined with a remarkable technical polish make his legacy central to the first generation of Romanticism. Three of his symphonies are in the central orchestral repertoire (Nos. 3, "Scottish"; 4, "Italian"; and 5, "Reformation") as is the great Violin Concerto.

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