Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah premiered in Birmingham in 1846

Person: Felix Mendelssohn
Lived: 1809–1847
Field: Music
From: German

The story

Felix Mendelssohn first visited Britain in 1829 and returned again and again, making ten visits that added up to about twenty months. He won a devoted following there, conducted the Philharmonic Society in London, edited Handel's oratorios for British publishers and met Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who both greatly admired his music. Handel's oratorios had never gone out of fashion in England, and Mendelssohn's own first oratorio, St Paul, had already sealed his European reputation in 1836.

He had been thinking about an oratorio on the prophet Elijah since the late 1830s, working first with his friend Karl Klingemann and then with Julius Schubring, the librettist of St Paul. Schubring wove the story of Elijah from the Books of Kings together with psalms and other passages from the Hebrew Bible. In 1845 the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival commissioned a new oratorio, and Mendelssohn spent 1845 and 1846 composing Elijah to German and English texts side by side, adjusting his phrases to fit the translation by William Bartholomew.

The drama is vivid: the raising of a widow's son, the contest in which the prophets of Baal pray in vain while fire descends on Elijah's altar, rain falling on a parched Israel, the prophet's flight into the desert and his ascent to heaven in a fiery chariot. The soprano aria Hear Ye Israel is said to have been tailored to the voice of Jenny Lind, though she sang it only after Mendelssohn's death.

Elijah was first performed in English at Birmingham Town Hall on 26 August 1846, conducted by the composer, with the Austrian bass Josef Staudigl in the title role. It was hailed at once as a classic. The Times wrote that there had never been a more complete triumph. Mendelssohn still revised it thoroughly before further London performances in April 1847, one of them attended by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Afterwards Albert inscribed a libretto comparing him to a second Elijah, true to the service of true art.

Mendelssohn died that November, aged 38, and the German version was first heard in Leipzig on his birthday in February 1848. Elijah became one of the best-loved oratorios ever written, especially in Britain, where choral societies have performed it for generations, carrying the story of a Hebrew prophet to audiences around the world.