Felix Mendelssohn sparked a Handel revival in Germany

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

The story

George Frideric Handel wrote his oratorio Israel in Egypt in London in just one month in the autumn of 1738. Its text is made up entirely of passages from the Hebrew Bible, mainly Exodus and the Psalms, and its great choruses tell the story of the plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea and Israel's song of deliverance. The first audience in 1739 was unenthusiastic, and while Handel's oratorios never went out of fashion in England, in Germany they were little performed.

Felix Mendelssohn had grown up studying the music of the Baroque masters with his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin. In 1829 he revived Bach's St Matthew Passion, and on his visits to London he found the original score of Israel in Egypt. In 1833, after he lost the election to succeed Zelter at the Berlin Singakademie, a defeat some attributed partly to his Jewish ancestry, he took his first paid post as municipal music director in Düsseldorf.

That spring Mendelssohn directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf and opened it with a performance of Israel in Egypt prepared from Handel's original score. The performance set off a Handel revival in Germany, much as his St Matthew Passion had done for Bach four years earlier.

Mendelssohn cared deeply about performing older music as its composers intended. He prepared and edited Baroque works as close to the originals as he could, studying early editions and manuscripts. When he edited Israel in Egypt for the London Handel Society in 1845, he refused, for example, to add dynamics that Handel had not written or extra trombone parts, which led to a contentious correspondence with the publishers. He also edited the first critical editions of Handel oratorios and of Bach's organ music for British publishers. In Leipzig he presented three series of historical concerts of eighteenth-century music, helping audiences rediscover composers who had fallen out of fashion.

Through this work as conductor, pianist and scholar, Mendelssohn helped create the very notion of a musical canon of great works from the past, kept alive in the concert hall alongside new music.

Why it matters

Mendelssohn helped create the idea of a living musical heritage, returning great Baroque works to audiences and setting a standard of faithfulness to composers' intentions.