One of the most gifted child prodigies in the history of music, Mendelssohn produced his first masterpiece at the age of sixteen. From then on, he was recognized, first in Germany and then throughout the West, as an artist of near-Mozartean abilities, and not only as a composer but also as a pianist and conductor.

But Mendelssohn's enduring popularity has often been at odds--sometimes quite sharply--with his critical standing. Despite general acknowledgement of his genius, there has been a noticeable reluctance to rank him with, say, Schumann or Brahms. Some critics have explicitly claimed that the composer of the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and the E-Minor Violin Concerto was (in the words of B.H. Haggin) a "minor master ... working on a small scale of emotion and texture." A few have gone further still: George Bernard Shaw, for example, attacked what he called Mendelssohn's "kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio-mongering."

born in Hamburg in 1809, the eldest son of a well-to-do merchant banker who was himself the son of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the Jewish philosopher and advocate of religious tolerance who sought to reconcile faith with Enlightenment rationalism. Felix and his three siblings, baptized into Protestantism in 1816 and given the surname "Bartholdy," were all tutored privately and expected to excel; but Felix's accomplishments were remarkable by any possible standard.

By the time he was fifteen, he had written a violin sonata, three piano quartets, four concertos, twelve symphonies for string orchestra, and dozens of other pieces. As adept with words as with music, he met and befriended Goethe at the unlikely age of twelve, by which time he had already embarked on what ultimately became a vast correspondence (some 5,000 of his letters have survived). In addition to German, he spoke English, Greek, French, Italian, and Latin, and painted uninspired but technically competent landscapes in his spare time.

Though Mendelssohn's student works were accomplished far beyond his young years, it was the E-Flat Octet for Strings, Op. 20 (1825), that constituted a truly astonishing step forward for the sixteen-year-old composer.(*) Like much of his later music, it is traditional, even conservative, in form, but idiosyncratic in concept and content: a four-movement classical symphony scored for a double string quartet (four violins, two violas, and two cellos), climaxing in a high-speed finale whose first subject is an eight-part fugue. The unorthodox instrumentation is deployed with dazzling ingenuity, while the feathery, mysterious sound of the gossamer-light scherzo would become a Mendelssohn trademark.

In the one hundred and fifty-six years since the composer's death in 1847, history has rediscovered Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy numerous times, with radically different results. Etched into our collective musical consciousness are several vivid images of the man and musician. He was a prodigious polymath/polyglot whose intellectual horizons—embracing music, drawing, painting, poetry, classical studies, and theology—were second to none among the “great” composers, and whose musical precocity, not just in composition but also conducting, piano and organ, violin and viola, was rivaled only by Mozart. Mendelssohn was among the first conductors to adopt the baton and to develop systematic rehearsal techniques that advanced the fledgling art of conducting as an independent discipline. He ranked among the very foremost piano virtuosi of his time and performed feats of extemporization legendary already during his lifetime; in addition, he was probably the most distinguished organist of the century. He was the “prime mover” in the Bach Revival, the stimulating agent behind the posthumous canonization of the Thomaskantor. Mendelssohn was the restorer of the oratorio, who produced two examples judged worthy of Handel: St. Paul (1836), which scored early international successes in Germany, England, Denmark, Holland, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States; and, second only to Handel's Messiah, Elijah (1846), premiered in Birmingham, England, and performed at every triennial musical festival there until the demise of the institution at the outbreak of World War I. 1 Mendelssohn was a versatile, craftsmanlike composer whose work effortlessly mediated between the poles of classicism and romanticism, and he convinced Robert Schumann to label him the Mozart of the nineteenth century. Mendelssohn composed several undisputed masterpieces still in the standard repertoire—the Octet and Midsummer Night's Dream Overture (created when he was sixteen and seventeen), the hauntingly ineffable Hebrides Overture and radiant Italian Symphony, and the Violin Concerto, the elegiac opening theme of which spawned several imitations.

But balancing these appraisals are commonplaces of a different cast. Mendelssohn was a musician whose delicate “parlor-room” Lieder ohne Worte betrayed a proclivity toward the saccharine, whose exploration of a diaphanous musical fairyland in the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, the Scherzo of the Octet and other works revealed a sentimental, effeminate nature. He was a composer of conservative tastes in pre-Revolution Germany who relied excessively on rhythmically predictable melodies with square-cut, symmetrical phrases. His treatment of harmony and tonality offered few innovations. By and large he adhered to classical blueprints and traditional, academic counterpoint, and was by nature a “dry” formalist. His Bach obsession led Mendelssohn, in Berlioz's view, to be too fond of the music of the dead. In the final analysis, Mendelssohn's music evinced a “pretty” elegance and superficiality that could not withstand the weightier “profundity” of Beethoven and Wagner, between whom the winsome Mendelssohn interloped as a “beautiful interlude” (schöner Zwischenfall) in nineteenth-century music.