Felix Mendelssohn's music is heard at weddings and Christmas

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

The story

Few composers are heard as often in everyday life as Felix Mendelssohn, though many people do not know it. At 17 he wrote his famous concert overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the early 1840s, at the request of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, he returned to the play and composed full incidental music for an 1843 production, seventeen years after the overture. It included the Wedding March in C major.

The march first appeared at a real wedding in 1847, when the organist Samuel Reay played it at St Peter's Church in Tiverton, England. It became truly popular after 25 January 1858, when Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Victoria, the Princess Royal, chose it for her marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia. Queen Victoria loved Mendelssohn's music, and he had often played for her on his visits to Britain. Since then it has become one of the most frequently used wedding marches, often played on the organ as the couple leave the church, paired with Wagner's Bridal Chorus for the bride's entrance.

Mendelssohn's music also rings out at Christmas. In 1840 he wrote a secular cantata, Festgesang, for Leipzig's celebration of the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's printing press. Mendelssohn himself felt one of its melodies was unsuited to sacred words. But in 1855 the English musician William Hayman Cummings, organist at Waltham Abbey, adapted it to fit Charles Wesley's hymn Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. The tune, known simply as Mendelssohn, became the standard melody for the carol. Cummings' harmonisation, with a descant later added by David Willcocks, has long served as the closing hymn of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College, Cambridge.

Other Mendelssohn melodies are equally familiar, among them the song On Wings of Song, the anthem O for the Wings of a Dove and the Songs Without Words for piano.

During the Nazi era, Mendelssohn's Jewish origins led the regime to ban his music, and composers were even asked to write replacement music for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ban did not last. His melodies remain part of the soundtrack of celebrations for millions of people every year, from wedding days to carol services.