When was felix mendelssohn born

His schedule was marked with several trips to London, with performances of his works in London and Birmingham, England. He completed the Scottish Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and other major works of his maturity in Leipzig. In he conducted five Philharmonic concerts in London, and in he gave the first performance of his Elijah, written for the Birmingham Festival of that year.

His chief occupation was still as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts, but he also functioned as director of the Leipzig Conservatory, teaching piano and composition as part of his duties. Mendelssohn's health began to fail in Three years later he was literally devastated by the death of his beloved sister, Fanny, on May From then on his health fell apart drastically, and although he went on a short summer trip to Switzerland for his health, finishing the String Quartet in F Minor, he returned exhausted to Leipzig, where he died on November 4, , at the age of thirty-eight.

Mercer-Taylor, Peter. The Life of Mendelssohn. New York: Cambridge University Press, Radcliffe, Philip. New York: J. Dent, Todd, R. Larry, ed. Mendelssohn and His World. Werner, Eric. 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.

His conversion was more a matter of pleasing his father than anything else. However, in the past twenty years, the composer has begun to attract new attention. The estimate of the chamber music especially has revised the composer's reputation upward. Writers have begun to see Elijah as an innovative and powerful fusion of oratorio and Romantic opera. It's a rare professional violinist who doesn't know the E-minor concerto.

Mendelssohn excelled in every genre except opera. In the summer he visited Edinburgh, where he met among others the composer John Thomson, whom he later recommended to be Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. On his eighth visit in the summer of , he conducted five of the Philharmonic concerts in London, and wrote:. On subsequent visits he met Queen Victoria and her musical husband Prince Albert, who both greatly admired his music.

In the course of ten visits to Britain during his life, totaling about 20 months, Mendelssohn won a strong following, sufficient for him to make a deep impression on British musical life.

He composed and performed, and he edited for British publishers the first critical editions of oratorios of Handel and of the organ music of J. Mendelssohn suffered from poor health in the final years of his life, probably aggravated by nervous problems and overwork. A final tour of England left him exhausted and ill from a hectic schedule. The death of his sister Fanny on 14 May caused him great distress. Less than six months later, on 4 November, Mendelssohn himself died in Leipzig after a series of strokes.

He was His grandfather Moses, his sister Fanny and both his parents had died from similar apoplexies. The pallbearers included Moscheles, Schumann and Niels Gade. Although the image was cultivated, especially after his death in the detailed family memoirs by his nephew Sebastian Hensel, of a man always equable, happy and placid in temperament, this was misleading. Mendelssohn was frequently given to alarming fits of temper which occasionally led to collapse. Such fits may be related to his early death.

Mendelssohn was a fine and enthusiastic artist in pencil and watercolour, a skill which he used throughout his life for his own amusement and that of his friends. His enormous correspondence shows that he could also be a witty writer in German and English — sometimes accompanied by humorous sketches and cartoons in the text.

Although Mendelssohn was a conforming if not over-zealous Christian as a member of the Reformed Church, he was both conscious and proud of his Jewish ancestry and notably of his connection with his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn. Throughout his life Mendelssohn was wary of the more radical musical developments undertaken by some of his contemporaries.

When his friend the composer Ferdinand Hiller suggested in conversation to Mendelssohn that he looked rather like Meyerbeer — they were actually distant cousins, both descendants of Rabbi Moses Isserlis — Mendelssohn was so upset that he immediately went to get a haircut to differentiate himself.

In particular, Mendelssohn seems to have regarded Paris and its music with the greatest of suspicion and an almost puritanical distaste. Attempts made during his visit there to interest him in Saint-Simonianism ended in embarrassing scenes.

It is significant that the only musician with whom he remained a close personal friend, Ignaz Moscheles, was of an older generation and equally conservative in outlook. Moscheles preserved this outlook at the Leipzig Conservatory until his own death in The second youngest child, Felix August, contracted measles in and was left with his health impaired; he died in The eldest, Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy 7 February — 23 February , became a distinguished historian, and professor of history at Heidelberg and Freiburg universities, dying in in a psychiatric institution in Freiburg.

Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy — was a noted chemist and pioneered the manufacture of aniline dye. Marie married Victor Benecke and lived in London. Papers confirming this were alleged to exist, although their contents had not been made public. Mendelssohn met and worked with Lind many times, and started an opera, Lorelei , for her, based on the legend of the Lorelei Rhine maidens; the opera was unfinished at his death.

His attachment to Mlle. The first winner of the scholarship was Arthur Sullivan, then aged 14, in Richard Taruskin points out that, although Mendelssohn produced works of extraordinary mastery at a very early age,. In this way he differed substantially from contemporaries such as Wagner and Berlioz, and even from Schumann and Chopin. The young Mendelssohn was greatly influenced in his childhood by the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, traces of whom can be seen in the 12 early string symphonies, which were mainly written for performance in the Mendelssohn household and not published or publicly performed until long after his death.

He wrote these from to , when he was between the ages of 12 and The order of actual composition is: 1, 5, 4, 2, 3. The placement of No. The Symphony No. This work is experimental, showing the influences of Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. Mendelssohn conducted this symphony on his first visit to London in , with the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. For the third movement he substituted an orchestration of the Scherzo from his Octet.

Felix is Latin for "happy. His grandfather was the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, but Felix Mendelssohn lived at a time when it was very difficult to be Jewish in Germany -- there were all kinds of laws and taxes that applied only to Jews.

Felix Mendelssohn's father Abraham was a banker who didn't want to deal with anti-Semitism -- people discriminating against him just because he was Jewish. So he converted to Christianity, and changed the family name to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.