Part I
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47), lived but a little while longer than Amadeus Mozart, and like him, was a savant and a sensational musician, but in a less sensational age. The world of Mendelssohn was recovering itself in his youth as the Napoleonic era passed four years before the young musician was offering his first chamber music. The world of German culture was reasserting itself, a return to a more comfortable existence than the heroic pan-European dreams that had first stirred Beethoven’s romantic imagination, only to disillusion the continent and the artists as the exported French Revolution under Napoleon began to look less like the revelation of a new world and more like a game of musical chairs. Old dynasties had been toppled only to establish new ones, and these had passed away quickly with restoration of monarchies in the aftermath of 1815. There was a conservatism that returned to musical expression, and Mendelssohn has sometimes been unfairly painted as a non-revolutionary and therefore non-innovative musician. Nevertheless, Mendelssohn is hard to classify.
At times somewhat baroque, a classical consciousness of form, but with romantic expression, he is a catalog of historical musical development. This is not only his musical bestowal for the ages, but the way he began serving his own age. In fact, his public position on musical development is what we commonly experience today at symphonic concerts. Considering music through the ages as a progression, subsequent generations adding to the foundations of the previous, he was what we could call a popular musicologist. He presented music in historic order and context, capping programs with new developments on evening that had begun with foundational compositions from the past.
Mendelssohn was a gregarious man. His art expresses this, and his history as a musical concert presenter is an example of his sociability. Responsible for the 1829 revivals of the St Matthew Passion of JS Bach, a musician who, if it can be believed, had fallen into obscurity, he would program music for the public in a chronological way that highlighted musical development: evolution, not revolution. A baptized Lutheran, some grumbled that his presentations of the Lutheran master JS Bach turned every place into a church, and that his highly developed but allusive church music belonged in a concert hall. His settings of psalmody for the Church are subjective and evocative pieces that nevertheless owe their form to classical concepts of counterpoint as well modern modalism of his day. It is tempting to see him as a man of his times, a man who honored his forebears by acknowledging their contributions and developing upon them.
Such a piece is the Mendelssohn Te Deum for eight voices. What in another composer might be called juvenilia (he composed this at the age of 17), it falling five years into his public performance career in 1826, shows mastery of the contrapuntal style while foreshadowing his contributions to romantic composition to come.