Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Romantic composer; he gave Bach back to the world
He was baptised at seven, on 21 March 1816, in a domestic Reformed ceremony together with three of his brothers and sisters; the parents themselves were baptised only in 1822. And in 1829, at twenty, he put on Bach's St Matthew Passion in Berlin—forgotten for a hundred years—and with that the return of Bach began.
The name Bartholdy was taken from his mother's brother, and his father explained its meaning outright: it is "a decisive break with the tradition of my father Moses," since "there can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than a Jewish Confucius." Felix himself valued his descent, but he was a practising Lutheran and set Christian liturgical texts.
What he did not conceal was not forgotten for him. Wagner attacked him by name in Jewishness in Music (1850), and the Nazis banned his music and demolished the Leipzig monument in 1936. It must not be printed that he converted himself or as an adult, or that the family "concealed" its origins: neither happened.
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Sources
Scholarship
- Wikipedia, “Felix Mendelssohn”; the letters of Abraham Mendelssohn — the private baptism of 21 March 1816; the meaning of the name Bartholdy
Basis: documents and evidence.