When we think of classical music today, names like Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach handily thought of as the three “b’s”, also help us to decide what to listen to on our classical Spotify music list. Surprisingly, Bach is not considered classical by music scholars, and Beethoven, while beginning his career as a classical emulator of Haydn, ended his musical compositional arc as a startling new kind of composer: a romantic.
By the time of Brahms, the world had rediscovered the classical era but was firmly on a romantic course. Who came between, influencing the late romantics like Brahms, Schumann, and Wagner? Mendelssohn, a key early romantic musician, was part of the Schumann circle of composers, larger gathered around Schumann the music critic and romantic composer’s “Neue Zeitschrifft für Music”, a journal debating the emerging forms of composition. It is hard to imagine such public energy around something like this, and the only comparable things like music and dance television shows of the recent past or current podcasts following styles of popular music.
Mendelssohn has not endured as the symbol of the romantic age, and this is because he came between two historic punctuations of romanticism. Beethoven, initially inspired but finally repulsed by the activities of Napoleon Bonaparte, was not only a romantic figure but a revolutionary one. The romantic spirit was seen as the source of the revolutionary urge, giving poets and musicians connected with the secularizing moment of the early nineteenth century a halo of seeming world historic significance.
Mendelssohn worked in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat and exile, and the return of conservative national governance and the influence of the Church. Mendelssohn, while musically innovative, was also conservative, pressing forward while bringing back the practices of the past. The musicians that followed, notably Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, would make the musician as revolutionary hero re-emerge, their music firing the uprisings around 1848, and in Wagner’s case, undergoing political exile under sentence of death. The idea of musician as revolutionary has fired the imagination of many since.
Mendelssohn, completely missing the revolutions beginning in 1848, would pass away in ’47. Wagner, in 1869, after his ascent to the top of the world of opera composition, would belittle the work of Mendelssohn, burnishing his own reputation as a solitary (and revolutionary) genius. Wagner classified Mendelssohn as one of the Jews who was holding musical progress back by his bourgeois sensibilities and lack of musical imagination. One would little suspect that Wagner had been a young disciple in the circle of the Schumanns, learning the romantic art at the feet of Mendelssohn. The aura of the revolutionary romantic requires the perception of complete originality. This is of course an impossibility, as every one of us stands on the shoulders of giants. Some of, sadly, take the opportunity to kick them. Mendelssohn’s reputation, much like that of his hero J. S. Bach, has been steadily rising again in our own post-revolutionary age.