Matthew Passion, which had by then been quite forgotten. The success of the performance — the first since Bach's death in — played an important role in reviving Bach's music in Europe. Mendelssohn traveled widely, and made the first of his ten visits to Britain in Afterwards he headed off to Italy. The buoyant and optimistic mood with which his Italian Symphony begins bears all the hallmarks of a happy man, eager to make his mark on the work and express his travels through music.
Mendelssohn was a great lover of Britain and the people of Britain loved him and his music back in equal measure. He travelled widely around the country, with trips to Scotland sparking two of his best-loved works: his Scottish Symphony and the Hebrides Overture.
Mendelssohn was an excellent watercolour painter. He also maintained an enormous correspondence which demonstrate his wit. Sometimes he would draw sketches and cartoons in the text of his letters. As well as composing, Mendelssohn was a highly proficient conductor, being given the plum job of music director at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in , when he was just His concert programmes included many of his own works as well as pieces by his contemporaries.
That year he also wrote his official op. All these works were well received. He had a private orchestra, for which he wrote the work now known as Symphony no. He also continued with other work, such as the Piano Quartet in F Minor In the famous pianist Ignaz Moscheles — arrived in Berlin from London, England, and for a time Mendelssohn studied piano with him. The following year Mendelssohn visited Paris, where he met many famous composers and performed his Piano Quartet in B Minor, dedicated to Goethe.
More successful was the Octet for Strings, one of Mendelssohn's freshest and most original works. The same year he became acquainted with Anton Thibaut, a professor of law and a gifted amateur writer of music who was concerned with revitalizing interest in old church music. Through him, Mendelssohn came to know the masterpieces of the Renaissance a period of great artistic awakening during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and early baroque choral music, an elaborate style of music popular in the eighteenth century.
On March 11, , a great musical event occurred: Mendelssohn conducted the Singakademie in the first complete performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's — St.
Matthew Passion since the composer's death. The work was a huge success, and the performance was of great importance to all later German composers for it marked the beginning of the revival of Bach's works. Later that year Mendelssohn visited England, where he conducted a concert of the Philharmonic Society. He took a long trip through Scotland, where he sketched the now famous Hebrides, or Fingal's Cave, Overture. On his return to Berlin he was offered the post of professor of music at the university but turned it down.
After writing the Reformation Symphony Mendelssohn began a series of visits to various European cities that lasted for almost three years. After a short stay with Goethe at Weimar, Mendelssohn went to Rome, Italy, where he began both the Scottish and the Italian symphonies. He wrote the Reformation Symphony in , and followed that accomplishment with a three-year European tour. During that time, he published his first book of songs, entitled Songs without Words Italian Symphony , another of Mendelssohn's best known works, was also born of this period.
In , Mendelssohn was granted an illustrious role: conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. Mendelssohn was 10 years Jeanrenaud's senior. She was just 16 when they got engaged. The couple married on March 28, Over the course of their marriage, they had five children. The same year that he married, Mendelssohn composed his Piano Concerto No. From to , he toiled away on his Violin Concerto in E Minor. Prior to the piece's completion, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory of Music and became its director.
In so doing, he put Leipzig on the map as the musical center of Germany. In he presented his newly written Elijah at the Birmingham Festival. In May , Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny, who was a lifelong inspiration to him, died suddenly. Her death left him so devastated that he soon lost his own zest for life. Major works of this period include his String Quintet in B-flat , the Violin Concerto in E-minor , and the oratorio Elijah , a rethinking in Romantic terms of the Handelian oratorio and one of the monuments of the choral repertoire.
The amount of overwork as well as the death of his beloved sister Fanny led to a series of strokes and finally death at the age of Among the works left incomplete, we find fragments of a third oratorio, Christus, which arguably could have become his greatest, and an opera, Die Lorelei. During his lifetime, Mendelssohn was regularly compared with good reason to Mozart. He won the championship of Robert Schumann.
However, by the s, his reputation, after such inflation, predictably began to sink. Wagner singled out Mendelssohn as an icon for decadence in his notorious essay "On Jewishness in Music. However, he praised the early music like that "of a very young composer astonishing the world by a musical style at once fascinating, original and perfectly new. The fact that Mendelssohn was baptized Protestant and that the family had converted in the s taking the name "Mendelssohn-Bartholdy," to distinguish themselves from all those lower-class Mendelssohns made no difference, of course.
Ironically, religion wasn't that big deal to Mendelssohn himself. Despite his many sacred works, he approached the subject either as a practical musical matter or as drama.
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