Mendelssohn Felix Archives - Behind the Music

Felix Mendelssohn Takes to the Woods and Celebrates Autumn

August 31, 2026August 27, 2026 by debisimons

Image provided via Wikimedia Commons–oil portrait by Edward Magnus, Berlin State Library

We don’t typically think of Felix Mendelssohn as a great outdoorsman nor as a composer of intimate songs. He’s associated most commonly with big orchestral works, notably his symphonies and concerti. His second area of expertise is in the area of big choral works, either his own (Elijah) or those of J. S. Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn was pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting Bach’s great music back into the public sphere, starting with his direction in 1829 of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in Berlin. Mendelssohn was only 20 at the time, and for the rest of his short life he was profoundly influenced by Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, his final large-scale masterwork achievement completed before his death, was written very much in the style of the Passion. (If you’re curious about how and why this young man was so taken with a Baroque composer whose works had completely fallen out of favor, you can’t do better than to read this article that lays out the whole chain of transmission. Key sentence: “Only the advent of an extraordinary individual could redirect an entire society’s attention towards a forgotten composer.”)

But enough of that. What about these outdoorsy songs? Well, I honestly don’t know why the rather frail young man who suffered from chronic ill health all his life liked being out in nature; I would have thought that he’d stick close to home and its comforts. But he wrote a whole set of lieder that were subtitled “To be sung outdoors” (“Im Freien zu singen”) and actively sought out lyrics to be used. In one letter he asked for his friend the poet Karl Klingemann to “send me a song or a pair, to be sung in autumn, or better yet in summer, or in spring, on the water or in a meadow or on a bridge, or in a forest or garden. …” And we do have one description in a letter to his mother of a time when Mendelssohn indeed got to fulfill his dream of an open-air concert:

Why Is Mendelssohn’s Name Sometimes Listed as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy?

August 19, 2026July 23, 2026 by debisimons

*(Image accessed via Library of Congress website)*

Note to my readers: This post is a chapter from the book I wrote about Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, which I was privileged to perform with my own choir a number of years ago. This coming October the Cherry Creek Chorale will be performing one of Mendelssohn’s songs in a lovely, varied program titled “Harmony and Hops.” I’ll be writing specific posts about our selections, but in the meantime here’s this material on one of our composers:

I remember seeing this version of Mendelssohn’s name on a piano piece I was (very unsuccessfully) working on, and thinking, Is this another Mendelssohn? You’ll see both version of Felix’s last name used. So what gives? It’s a very complicated, and fascinating, story that concerns itself with Jewish culture in Europe and the role of anti-Semitism.

To begin with, Felix’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, came to Berlin from a small town in Germany in 1743 at the age of 14, even though that city’s society was very hostile to Jews. He managed to become quite prominent in the philosophical and literary world, beating Immanuel Kant in an essay contest sponsored by the Berlin Academy. Frederick the Great even granted him the title of “Protected Jew,” which guaranteed his right to live peacefully in Berlin. (But of course this distinction only makes the lowly status of most Jews even more obvious by contrast.) Moses is a worthwhile historical figure in his own right and was hailed as the “German Socrates.” He devoted much of his later life to writings that eloquently supported the idea of religious freedom, saying that the state should not seek to control the religion of its citizens.

But even such a respected and beloved figure as Moses Mendelssohn couldn’t wipe out the widespread anti-Semitism in European culture. So Abraham, Moses’ son and Felix’s father, took several steps to distance himself and his family from their Jewish heritage. One of those actions was to adopt the surname “Bartholdy,” an action suggested by Abraham’s brother-in-law, Jakob Salomon, who took the name from a property he had acquired. Abraham urged Felix to drop the Mendelssohn name and just use Bartholdy, but even though Felix was baptized as a Protestant and married a minister’s daughter, he refused to drop his use of Mendelssohn. It’s never possible to know exactly what was going on in the mind and heart of someone from the past (or even someone in the present), but it seems to me that Felix wanted to honor both aspects of his background. Most of the time, his public knew him as Mendelssohn without the Bartholdy, but sometimes both names were listed. And that inconsistency has carried over until today.

What’s a herald angel? And other questions answered about a confusing Christmas carol.

October 28, 2025November 10, 2023 by debisimons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

It’s a great joy to begin introducing music that will be included in the December 2025 concert of my own beloved community choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale. If you live in the Denver area, be sure to follow the link to our website and click on the “purchase tickets” tab.

Let me start out with the correct way to punctuate the title; it should be “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” So the title actually comprises two sentences. “Hark!” is a one-sentence command meaning “Listen!” or “Pay attention!” (The same thing is going on grammatically in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal,” which is also not typically punctuated properly.) And to whom should we pay attention? Why, the “herald angels,” of course. (Let’s spare everyone the joke about the angel’s name being “Harold,” okay?) A ”herald” is a messenger who sometimes blows a trumpet to get everyone’s attention before an announcement. The angels in the Christmas story don’t blow trumpets; they don’t even sing. They simply proclaim. So the illustration that I chose for this post is not correct biblically, but it does agree with the carol.

Mendelssohn’s Farewell–Three Sections from His “Christus”

June 21, 2022November 10, 2021 by debisimons

O-o-o-o-h man! Are there ever going to be some deep theological highways and byways in this post. So hang on and let’s get started with this wonderful choral piece which was tragically truncated by Mendelssohn’s early death in 1847 at the age of 38. He had apparently planned to write an entire oratorio, Christus, following the same trajectory as Handel’s Messiah, but left only a few finished sections and a number of fragments. A set of three excerpts dealing with the birth of Christ is well suited for use at Christmas, and consists of a soprano recitative, a male trio, and a chorus.