The Home Life of Mendelssohn

by Arthur S. Garbett

"Home" may be said to be the keynote of Felix Mendelssohn's existence. All through the rushing years from 1809 to 1847, when he triumphed as composer, conductor, teacher, organist and pianist, when his dazzling personality and genial character hypnotized Europe, he never fully escaped the home environment. All things were reported to the family at Leipziger Strasse, No. 3, Berlin. He made his father and his mother and the children, Fanny, Paul and Rebekah - especially Fanny - share with him his joys and sorrows, triumphs and troubles, and all the intimate happenings of his astonishing career. Even before becoming engaged teh Cecile Jeanrenaud he was careful to ask him mother's consent (his father being dead). After marriage, when he was a power in Leipzig and a dominant factor in the musical world, he continued to write "home" to Fanny, now Fanny Hensel, and Rebekah, by now Rebekah Dirichlet, and Paul, who still resided at No. 3 The only real calamities he ever knew were the loss of his father, his mother, and that last shock from which he never recovered, the loss of Fanny. Even Cecile and his children did not seem to mean quite as much to him as Fanny, who shared his musical gifts to almost an equal degree, having been born, as her mother said, "with Bach-fugue fingers."

That home at No. 3 Leipzig Strasse was almost as wonderful as the family in it. A great mansion of a place, set in a lovely garden of seven acres of shady trees and emerald lawn. Here Felix learned not only to love music, but to love Shakespeare, too. Here the children ran their little newspaper, entertained friends no less brilliant than themselves, met many of the leading intellectual lights of Berlin, who delighted to visit the Mendelssohns. Here Felix hatched his schemes to popularize the music of Bach. Here, too, he wrote some of the most wonderful of his music, including the overture to A Midsummer Nights Dream.

The first break in the family circle came when Fanny married Wilhelm Hensel. Felix was in London at the time, detained by an injury. It was his first trip abroad, and he reported home every detail of his great successes. He even describes his costume at an afternoon recital - "very long white trousers, brown silk waistcoat, black necktie, and blue dress coat." Had he been at home no doubt he would have accompanied the wedding anthem Fanny composed in her own honor. The following year, just before Fanny Hensel's baby (Sebastian) was born, he wrote a Song Without Words (Book 2, No. 2) not in celebration, but, as he says, "under the impression of the first half anxious, half joyful letter."

After Fanny's marriage he spent two years as musical director of Dusseldorf (1833-35), where he lived a bachelor existence. Two more bachelor years followed in Leipzig, where his friends included Moscheles an dSchumann, Friedrich Wieck and his daughter Clara, afterwards Schumanns wife. His marriage to Cecile Jeanrenaud, a French lady he had met in Frankfort, occurred in 1837, and they made Leipzig, where Felix was conductor of the Gewandhaus Concerts and director of the conservatory, their permanent home. They never left it except for a brief period in Berlin (1841) when an attempt to find Felix a place among the court musicians came to nothing.

His married life was supremely happy. He and Cecile had five children in all - Carl, Marie, Paul, Felix and Lilli. "You ask me to describe our manner of life", he writes to Fanny, some years after his marriage. "I work early in the morning, and at ten Carl comes and sits by me for an hour, reading and ciphering. At five in the afternoon I try to instill into his mind some notion of geography and spelling * * * Marie is learning to scale of C, and even that I partially forget, for I made her turn her thumb under after the fourth finger, till Cecile came in upon us and was amazed." And well she might be: the most famous composer in Europe and director of the Leipzig Conservatory, unable to remember the fingering of the C Major scale!

Despite this lapse, Mendelssohn was a strict disciplinarian at the conservatory, when his crowded time permitted him to teach. Together with his normal suavity and grace, he had a sharp tongue and occasionally said more than he meant. He complained bitterly to the Bishop of Limerick in 1847 of his short temper at rehearsals or with his pupils.

Greatly as he loved Cecile, whose presence, according to Fanny, "produced the effect of a fresh breeze so light and natural is she", his marriage did not cause any break with the family. Rather he and his father seemed drawn closer together. It was, therefore, a great shock to him when his father died, 1837, shortly before his marriage. "Not only have I to deplore the loss of a father, but also that of my best and most perfect friend of the last few years and my instructor in art and life." Five years later his mother died also, after a merry family reunion for the Christmas festival. The greatest loss of all, however, was the sudden death of Fanny, from an illness which attacked her while she was, characteristically enough, seated at the piano, rehearsing her choir. This was in May, 1847. The following October Felix Mendelssohn himself died, his end unquestionably hastened by the death of his sister, which left him broken in spirit. "Anyone reading Felix's letters after Fanny's death," writes Hensel, "and hearing the sad, passionate F minor quartet which he wrote in the summer of 1847, will at once feel the change which had come over his spirit; the blow was mortal." Mendelssohn lies in the churchyard of Holy Trinity at Berlin, beside his sister he loved so well. His wife, after his death, went to her mother's home in Frankfort, devoting herself to the education of her children. She never recovered from the blow, however, and six years later became a victim of tuberculosis, from which she had suffered for some years.

The Etude Magazine May 1921