The hive of activity in nineteenth-century salons, especially those of Jewish women in Berlin, was the formative ground in which both Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn’s engagement with literature ostensibly developed. In such circles song as social document and song as a semi-confessional art were contexts that were as vibrant then as they are today. The classical and European contemporary poets who captured both siblings’ musical imagination serve as portals to their shared world and at the same time offer a strong conceptual sense of each individual self. It was, however, in the private salon of their own home where their poetic genius took root. Two literary traditions within their family circle – Moses Mendelssohn and Goethe, who was profoundly influenced by their grandfather’s writing and with whom both artists were personally acquainted –- offers a unique key to understanding Fanny and Felix’s literary inheritance and how each expressed themselves creatively.

This chapter illuminates the social relations of Felix and Fanny with fellow musicians and the functions both fulfilled in these networks. It shows how the siblings were central actors, at first in the mutual Berlin network; later in their respective semi-public (Fanny) and professional (Felix) music networks. The chapter describes some of the more important relations both had with the ‘greats’ of their time. At the same time, it is also pointed out that both rarely became close friends with fellow musicians after the Berlin years, which might be a result of three factors: The siblings’ social status, their confidence in their musical education, and their classically trained aesthetics. Felix also might have been suspicious of conflicts between professional and private interests. The few special connections both had with contemporaries (Fanny: Gounod, Bousquet, Keudell; Felix: Rietz, Moscheles) warrant special attention.

In developing their children’s cultural sensibilities, Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn Bartholdy emphasised the role of the visual arts. The parents not only instilled in their offspring an appreciation for all schools of European painting, they also encouraged engagement with living practitioners – visiting galleries, exhibitions, and studios. For Fanny, an important outcome of this exposure was her marriage to a professional artist, one whose artistic strengths proved well suited to embellishing manuscripts of his wife’s songs. For Felix, who also married an (amateur) painter, early recognition of his talent for drawing resulted in a lifelong preoccupation, one that at times took precedence over musical activities. His practice of drawing, especially landscapes observed from life, offered respite from the demands of professional life and opportunities for sensing achievement that otherwise often proved elusive. More importantly, artistic practice informed his musical pursuits by suggesting topics, materials and perspectives that helped shape compositional principles.

Modern scholarship has in general portrayed Mendelssohn as a composer held in high regard during his lifetime but posthumously downgraded. This chapter presents a more complex picture, arguing that his reception during his life moves through three distinct phases. It examines the themes present in the earliest reviews of his works (1824–9) revealing how German reviewers emphasised the young composer’s dependence on models. In contrast, English reviewers from the start acclaimed him as one of the leading composers of the age. It then explores the upturn in Mendelssohn’s critical fortunes in the 1830s and responses to key works such as the Piano Concerto in G minor and St Paul. It concludes by exploring negative assessments by Hegelian critics such as Franz Brendel in the 1840s, comparing Mendelssohn’s mixed reception in Germany with the continuing effusive praise he received from English critics such as George Macfarren.

Nowadays Beethoven’s canonic status is taken for granted, but in the 1820s as the Mendelssohns were coming of age, his music was still controversial, and their advocacy of it was something that set them apart from many contemporaries. In their roles as composers, performers, and promoters of music, both Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel would play a fundamental part in the evolving story of early nineteenth-century Beethoven reception. Moreover, their activities intersected with some of the other leading figures in the nineteenth-century canonisation of Beethoven in ways that shed light on the already contested legacy of their forebear. Equally, the influence of Beethoven on Hensel and Mendelssohn has often been misunderstood, commonly being viewed through later 19th-century anxieties and ideologies that remain extraneous to their world. In short, their relationship with Beethoven is crucial for understanding their own music – and historically was no less crucial for understanding Beethoven’s.

Felix Mendelssohn’s upbringing as a multi-skilled polyglot prepared him for his career outside the norms. As a pianist he developed his public persona as a Liszt antipode, shunned constant touring, and represented moral principles of integrity. He criticized foregrounded instrumental virtuosity, as in Liszt’s E -flat major Concerto, which struck him as containing strung-together cadenza materials. As an organist he rejected the traditional career path, as in 1842 when he declined the position of Thomas-cantor. He considered himself largely self-taught and performed predominately in England, including at St Paul’s Cathedral (1829; 1833) and Buckingham Palace (1842). He introduced English audiences to J. S. Bach’s music. As a string player, Mendelssohn’s taste was shaped in the French tradition, thanks to his teacher Eduard Rietz. As a conductor, Mendelssohn’s innovation was to conduct everything from his desk, regardless if vocal or instrumental, thereby freeing the concert master from having to beat time during instrumental passages, allowing for more unified interpretations.

The chapter provides a summary history of the Jews in Berlin following their readmittance in 1670 through to the period of the births of Fanny and Felix. It notes the relationship of Moses Mendelssohn with figures of the Berlin Enlightenment and the consequent parallel development of the Haskalah movement with the growing interest by prominent Jewish families in Gentile culture and Bildung, exemplified by the Berlin Jewish salons. The decision – or rather attempt – of Abraham Mendelssohn to dissociate from Judaism on the part of himself and his family is placed in the context of the development of German nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.

The future of Mendelssohn and Hensel studies holds out some exciting prospects. What might be the most profitable directions to take, and what are the ongoing challenges that still face scholarly scrutiny? Taking bearings from this volume’s final section on reception and placing the preceding book as a whole ‘in context’ of the present and its concerns, this brief epilogue looks to the two siblings’ current standing in scholarship and public perception, summing up the state of research from the last couple of decades, identifying some persisting ideological problems that require addressing, and outlining some possible future directions that might be taken.

Felix Mendelssohn’s departure from Berlin in 1833 necessarily changed the dynamics of friendship, with the family home remaining the focal point for Fanny Hensel (sometimes to her frustration) while Felix established new networks of friends on his travels – in London in particular – and in his new home in Leipzig. Some of the old friends remained close, such as Karl Klingemann and Ignaz Moscheles (in London) or Ferdinand David (in Leipzig), others receded into the background, such as Adolf Bernhard Marx and Ferdinand Hiller, while new ones emerged, most intriguingly that with the ’Swedish nightingale’ Jenny Lind. Fanny, meanwhile, retained many of the friendships of her youth, some of them shared with Felix, and took advantage of her own travels to Italy to forge a few new ones, notably with Charles Gounod in Rome.

The posthumous reception of the life and works of Felix Mendelssohn differs from that of any other composer of his generation. The unique esteem and admiration he experienced during his lifetime, especially in Germany and England, changed into a more ambivalent or critical evaluation, often tinged with anti-Semitic ressentiments. In a musical culture that valued progress, genius and nationalist narratives, he was increasingly sidelined by music writers and composers because of his stylistic choices, his perceived embodiment of bourgeois values and his cosmopolitanism, despite his continued popularity with performers and audiences. Mendelssohn’s reception reached its nadir when his works were banned in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Since then, interest in the composer has increased, supported by scholarly editions of his works and letters, and his symphonies, concert overtures and oratorios are performed consistently, although his choral music and piano pieces have suffered from the decline in amateur music-making.

This chapter explores the “joint” musical education of the two siblings Fanny and Felix, taking as its point of departure the educational backgrounds of the parents which differentiated little by gender in terms of approach and content, but certainly in the intended paths for the two children. Felix was destined to become a professional composer, and the genres in which he was groomed were thus the “public” ones (opera in particular) while Fanny was expected to excel in the “small” genres: piano pieces and songs.

The Mendelssohns were active at a time of contestation and change within music aesthetics and broader aesthetic theory. As well as outlining how they positioned themselves in relation to some of the key issues and debates of their time, the chapter examines their continuing investment in Enlightenment and classical aesthetic ideals and how this interacted with their engagement with Romanticism. It also explores the extent to which moral and aesthetic criteria are entwined in their judgements of contemporary music, fuelling their hostility towards French grand opera, the programmatic orchestral works of Berlioz, and French virtuoso pianism. Their own compositions frequently function as music-aesthetic interventions, aiming to counterbalance trends in musical life that they viewed negatively. Crucial is a discussion of the conceptions of truth and emotion at the heart of Felix’s aesthetics, explored through a comparison of his views with those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

This chapter explores the extraordinarily close relationship between the two eldest Mendelssohn siblings, the challenges and occasional tensions between them, especially following Fanny’s marriage after which their ways separated. The two had access to the same economic status, social circle, educational opportunities, and entertainment, but their paths were largely determined long before they were born. Fanny and Felix provide a salient example of how gender above all else can determine the outcomes of an otherwise identical entry into the world. Contexts for the choices their parents made can be drawn from their family history; the results of those choices can be observed in how the relationship between Fanny and Felix formed and transformed from their years as students, to emerging composers, and then correspondents when their relationship was carried out primarily via letters.

The notion that Western classical music would revolve around a fixed repertoire of canonical works began to assume its modern form in Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn’s lifetimes. In their tireless advocacy of the work of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, both siblings played substantive roles in the modern canon’s crystallisation. Their remarkably rigorous musical education was calculated to instil a sense that they were direct inheritors of a coherent German musical tradition that effectively began with J. S. Bach. Much of their energies, in their adult lives, went toward striving to make this outlook universal. Each contributed profoundly both to the stabilisation of a historical German repertoire and to the consolidation of the ideology of the ’work-concept’.

Mendelssohn worked out his publishing career strategically. His first opus numbers established his place in various genres and styles. In his maturity, regular publication of roughly one major work per year supported his reputation as a composer of serious music. Modestly scored pieces accommodated the domestic music market, as did larger works in two- or four-hand piano arrangements. Early nineteenth-century laws established copyright within countries, but no international agreements prevented pirated editions beyond borders. Negotiations with publishers therefore occupied much of Mendelssohn’s time and energy. Mendelssohn undertook two substantial editions of music by his eighteenth-century forebears, Handel’s Israel in Egypt, and Bach’s organ music. Insisting on a rigorous editorial policy, he anticipated now-standard musicological principles. Fanny Hensel began publishing late, the small number of her publications reflecting social and familial constraints. Seven opus numbers appeared during her lifetime, all within her last year and all addressing the bourgeois, domestic audience. Four posthumous works resulted from her family’s project to honour her and promulgate her music.