Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn composed the String Octet at sixteen and the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream at seventeen. Born in Hamburg and raised in Berlin in a household where music sat beside literature, languages and drawing, his travels inspired the Italian and Scottish symphonies; the E minor Violin Concerto rebuilds the form so that the soloist enters in the second bar and the cadenza arrives before the recapitulation, and the Songs without Words contributed to the domestic piano repertoire. St Paul and Elijah renewed the Handelian oratorio for the nineteenth century. As conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus from 1835 he restored music that had fallen out of use; his Berlin performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion in 1829, when he was twenty, set the Bach revival moving. In 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory. He died in 1847, at thirty-eight. His teachers in Berlin, where the family settled in 1811, were Ludwig Berger for piano and Carl Zelter for composition and counterpoint, the latter grounding him in the old masters; he gave his first concert at nine and conducted the court chapel at thirteen. He was a grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the son of the banker Abraham, who had his children baptised in 1816 and added Bartholdy to the family name, and his sister Fanny was a composer and pianist herself. Beside the numbered symphonies stand thirteen works known as the string symphonies, and a series of strokes ended his life.