Cutting Room Floor: Felix's Dark Side

As has become the custom around here, we'll devote a few posts in the weeks leading up to our next Inside the Classics concerts to covering some of the things we won't have time to get to in the show. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries fitting this description.) In the case of Felix Mendelssohn, there's so much available material to choose from that it was initially tough even to know where to focus our energies. And just when I thought I was getting a handle on the man's biography, an article from one of Britain's leading dailies shattered a fair chunk of his squeaky-clean reputation only this past weekend.

At the heart of the posthumous bombshell dropped by London's Royal Academy of Music is an allegation that Mendelssohn may have written a letter to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, "declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused." Lind's husband destroyed the letter to preserve the reputation of his wife, but later swore out an affidavit testifying to the letter's existence, and placed it in the Royal Academy's Mendelssohn archive with orders that it remain sealed for a century. Now, after years of questions from scholars regarding the affidavit's contents, those in the know are speaking about it, just in time for the composer's bicentenary.

Now, the possible romantic link between a 19th-century composer and a woman not his wife might not seem like a very big deal, but in the case of this particular composer, it's causing quite a stir. As The Independent puts it:

"Until now, Mendelssohn has been deemed the happiest of composers... Born into a privileged family, he was a child prodigy, and went on to become a highly successful composer, conductor and educator. He was also gifted in painting and writing, enjoyed a happy marriage, and had five children. It has been thought that the only tragedies he experienced were the death of his sister Fanny in May 1847, followed by his own six months later, aged 38."

The circumstances of Mendelssohn's early death have always seemed a bit, well, storybook. Stroke risk ran in the family: a stroke killed Fanny, and doctors at the time pronounced Felix, too, a victim of "a series of strokes." But the suicide threat, coming shortly after Fanny's demise, would seem to at least suggest the possibility that Mendelssohn made good on his threat. It certainly makes clear that the composer's life was not as charmed as we've been led to believe.

We won't be getting much into Mendelssohn's personal life in our concerts, but in rethinking his reputation, The Independent touches on a theme that, by coincidence, Sarah and I had already decided to use as the centerpiece of our script...

"The nature of Mendelssohn's music could be a giveaway... Its emotional content is high-impact, driven, with deeply romantic sensibilities, but almost always within contained classical forms. But it packs such an intense punch in terms of nervous energy, something probably had to give."