Can you believe that Felix Mendelssohn is one of the world’s great unknown composers? Unknown? He has a violin concerto and three symphonies firmly lodged in every orchestra’s repertoire. His string octet, string quartets, piano trios, and cello sonatas are staples of chamber concerts and recordings. Every pianist knows several of his charming miniatures. Mendelssohn wrote the world’s most famous wedding march, and there’s plenty of hoopla surrounding him this year, the 200th anniversary of his birth. So how can we possibly count him as an unknown?

Because 270 of his works have never been published, and we’re not just talking about juvenilia, though Mendelssohn’s childhood compositions are some of his most loveable. There’s full-scale chamber music, including alternate versions of several of the movements of the three Op. 44 quartets; opera; and even a thorough revision of his “Italian” Symphony, all gathering dust in archives for a century and a half.

And soon, you’ll be able to hear and maybe play all of it—forgotten Mendelssohn string works were previewed in February in New York City (see sidebar, “New Mendelssohn in Concert” on page 45).

Stephen Somary is the founder and artistic director of the Mendelssohn Project, which, after 13 years of research, is poised to record all of Felix Mendelssohn’s music, including the unpublished material, on about 120 CDs, simultaneously recording all the compositions of his sister Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel on about 40 discs.

The Mendelssohn Project also is creating a Mendelssohn Center in New York City, which will host world-premiere performances of the hundreds of restored Mendelssohn works, and foster young artists of all disciplines, from music to poetry, and from painting to drama, just as the Mendelssohn family’s Sunday salons did when Felix was a child.

Among its other events, the center will recreate those Mendelssohn family Sunday afternoon chamber concerts, exhibit Felix’s paintings and drawings, and sponsor seminars and presentations revolving around Felix and Fanny’s grandfather, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Fifteen years ago, all conductor Somary wanted to do was oversee recordings of all Mendelssohn’s music, which at the time seemed like a large but manageable undertaking. “I had no idea what I was walking into,” he says.

Somary began his research by reading published letters to and from Mendelssohn and visiting libraries where he knew he could turn up a few unpublished manuscripts. He didn’t realize the scope of the project until a visit to the Berlin State Library. “What changed my life were the letters I came upon to and from Felix Mendelssohn that had never been published and that made reference to a whole number of works that nobody knew—chamber music, opera, lieder, piano pieces, all sorts of things,” he says. “I realized that there were hundreds of unpublished works, and over 9,000 unpublished letters [and 900 paintings and drawings].”

Somary assembled a team to follow the trail of this material across five continents.

“There’s a lot of work in this,” Somary says. “He did not finalize these pieces for performance. Working straight from the manuscripts will not be possible, because we have to make up for missing notes, missing inner harmonies. Unless one is familiar with the mind-set of Mendelssohn at each six-month interval in his life, it’s very difficult to fill in the blanks. There’s a lot missing. If he was just writing for himself and not finalizing something for publication, he didn’t bother to polish it.”

Much of that polishing is now the responsibility of Swiss musicologist Antonio Baldassarre, another member of Somary’s team.

Mendelssohn’s family was well off, so he didn’t have to support himself through sales of his scores; he published only 72 opus numbers in his lifetime (a few more followed posthumously). But there’s another important reason so much of this music is unpublished: He died young, at age 38, following a series of strokes, and never had a chance to put the finishing touches on pieces he may well have intended to publish later.

Mendelssohn died of natural causes, but Somary argues that he was the victim of assassination—posthumous character assassination, that is, which is why so many of his unfinished scores were never prepared for public consumption, and even his published works fell out of favor for decades.

This all started within five or 10 years of his death. Even Mendelssohn’s supporters had a hand in it. Particularly in England, he was sentimentalized as a delicate composer of gossamer fairy overtures, which led later generations to trivialize his music without really paying attention to it. Among more serious aesthetes, Mendelssohn’s Classical tendencies were regarded as out of touch with the increasingly strong Romantic and nationalist movements, particularly following the revolutions that swept European capitals in 1848.

But most damaging was a diatribe that Richard Wagner first published anonymously in 1850 called Judaism in Music. Wagner claimed that Jews had a retarding effect on culture, because their art had an “inner incapacity for life.”

For Wagner, one of the greatest Jewish malefactors, because of his prominence, was Mendelssohn.
“This became, in modern terms, a New York Times best seller,” Somary says. “Wagner’s theories were readily and widely accepted. So the [music] manuscripts
that were being published following Mendelssohn’s death ceased to be published; interest in performing him drastically slowed within a very short time.”

A few Mendelssohn revivals spurred by one of Fanny’s sons in the 1870s were not successful. Mendelssohn’s widow and their children, under the circumstances, had little incentive to promote Mendelssohn’s legacy. They transferred most of the manuscripts to what is now the Berlin State Library, and with other items migrating to England.
When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, Mendelssohn’s name was added to a very long list of Jewish composers whose works could not be performed in German-controlled areas.

The Nazis were in the habit of destroying the works of so-called “degenerate” artists—that is, anyone not heterosexual, Christian, “Aryan”—not to mention, in many instances, the artists themselves, so Mendelssohn’s relatively few supporters had to take quick, covert action.

“His letters and manuscripts and beautiful artworks were moved to what were believed to be safe places in Krakow and Warsaw,” Somary says. “Then when those cities came under Nazi control, [the works] were given out, packed in bags, put on trains, in cars, whatever they could find to get them out of Nazi-controlled areas. These works eventually found themselves in Japan, Brazil, New York City—name a continent except Antarctica and Africa, and we found things there.”

So now that Somary’s Mendelssohn Project has located and begun processing the disparate manuscripts, what sort of material is coming to light? Somary says the unpublished manuscripts are not at all inferior to the published works. “What is out there [among the recovered works] runs the entire gamut,” he says. “There are no bad works, and there are some phenomenal, great works on par with the greatest Mendelssohn things known.”

There’s a revision of the “Italian” symphony, unpublished because Mendelssohn’s widow mistakenly sent an earlier draft to the publisher. There’s an opera Mendelssohn wrote in French toward the end of his life, “which is in my mind his real genius of an opera,” Somary says.

“Some of the pieces we’re performing are juvenilia, but not in a pejorative sense—they’re proof of Mendelssohn being the greatest child prodigy of all time.”

He claims that a dozen fugues for string quartet “are anything but a dry exercise in fugue writing; the set is one of the most spectacular works of the 1820s.”

There’s an 80-minute cantata written to celebrate the anniversary of Albrecht Dürer, which Somary says “has exactly the same brilliance as [the] St. Paul [oratorio].”

Despite comments like those, Somary is reluctant to extol the music’s virtues. “One mission of the Mendelssohn Project is not to editorialize,” he says, “but to give the world the first chance ever to judge the complete output, not only the music and artworks of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, but the true biographical history and the historical perceptions of their family. I don’t want to tell the world what to think. We’re trying to give the new generation a chance on their own to figure this out.”

Download two pages of missing Mendelssohn manuscripts here.

At Last, the Missing Mendelssohn in Concert

Some composers write for the future (Gustav Mahler: “My time will come”). Others attain success and fame in life, but are ill-served by posterity. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), a sensational prodigy, became the most esteemed, beloved composer of his day, but after his death fell victim to critical misconceptions and adverse political circumstances. Like all prodigies, Mendelssohn exhibited extraordinary gifts early, but his precocity was unique: he wrote some of his greatest compositions before he was 20, notably the String Octet and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This premature blossoming led some commentators to the fallacious conclusion that all his youthful works are equal if not superior to his later ones, and that his creative genius never really developed.

This contention was disproved decisively at the Mendelssohn project’s January 28 concert at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, featuring the Shanghai String Quartet and others. The “Mendelssohn: Lost Treasures and the Wagner Suppression” program featured 13 works never before published or performed, written between 1820 and 1843, and the progress in compositional technique and emotional depth was unmistakable. Those included 12 fugues for string quartet, written in 1821 as a composition exercise and modeled closely on those of Bach, Mendelssohn’s lifelong idol. The fugues display remarkable mastery of counterpoint, inventiveness, and variety. Still, they cannot escape a certain sameness of form and texture, so Mendelssohn’s injunction to play them as a set was probably misguided.

Written in 1823, the Sonata in D minor for violin and piano has two movements connected by a violin cadenza. The slow first movement opens with piano arpeggios and sustained notes on the violin that turn into running double-stops; the second is fast, agitated, and surging. The seeds of Mendelssohn’s romantic sensibility were already planted, but he was struggling with structural problems: there are too many scales, sequences, inconclusive phrases. He also was still more comfortable writing for piano than for strings, so the piano dominates. The same is true of the Trio in C minor for violin, viola, and piano—an unusual combination—written in 1821 and revised in 1826. Cast in four movements, it is harmonically and structurally simple, but its changes between drama and lyricism foreshadow the two great mature trios. It also presages Mendelssohn’s compulsion to revise and rewrite, sometimes years later and more than once.

The program’s earliest and latest works were the songs, the most striking dating from 1836–38, and the piano pieces. In the highly dramatic Piano Sonata in F minor of 1820, Mendelssohn is struggling with developments and ambiguous endings. His choice of tonality is significant: it became a hallmark of his later tragic works. The brilliant, exciting “Presto agitato” in the unusual key of Bb minor (1833) and the beautiful, serene “Song without Words” in D major (1845) were formally and emotionally most satisfying.

Mendelssohn left an enormous number of compositions in manuscript, resisting publication as “too final.” Though it was rampant anti-Semitism that later kept them from being printed or performed, one must wonder whether the obsessively self-critical composer would not himself have wished to suppress works that failed to meet his draconian standards. He did not want the 12 fugues to be performed; might he not have felt equally reluctant to expose other juvenalia to the public?

Heard at the concert’s dress rehearsal, the performers—the Shanghai Quartet, pianists Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky; mezzo-soprano Abigail Nims; and bass Kevin Deas—were admirable. In music they must have learned just for the occasion, the musicians displayed virtuosity, commitment, and heartfelt expressiveness.
—Edith Eisler