Curiously, no entry for Felix appears in a birth register of the Jewish community of Hamburg and Altona from 1781 to 1811. A revealing though prejudiced remark by Carl Friedrich Zelter may explain the omission. In October 1821, Zelter described his “best student” to Goethe as “the son of a Jew, to be sure, but no Jew. His father made the significant sacrifice of not having his sons circumcised and has raised them as is proper; it would be truly something rare [Yiddish: epes Rohres ] if the son of a Jew became an artist.” 15 A literal reading suggests that Abraham intended to raise Felix outside Judaism. 16 Indeed, as Jeffrey Sposato has argued, there is no hard evidence that Felix ever “set foot inside a synagogue” or “received any kind of Jewish religious instruction, either formal or informal.” 17 Some evidence to support Sposato’s conclusion appears in a little-known Viennese review of a Berlin concert in which the thirteen-year-old Felix appeared on December 5, 1822. Here an anonymous correspondent asserts that the “boy was born and raised in our Lutheran religion.” 18 Perhaps Abraham, who himself had converted to Christianity only months before, in October 1822, disseminated this bit of misinformation—Felix was, in fact, baptized in 1816.
I
At the beginning of February 1811 Marshal Davout arrived in Hamburg as the new gouverneur . Two months later, Lea’s and Abraham’s second daughter, Rebecka, was born. Apparently, around this time Abraham and Joseph ran afoul of the French authorities, so that, according to Sebastian Hensel, “they were obliged to flee the town, and in mist and darkness (in Nebel und Nacht ) they escaped one night in disguise, turning their steps towards Berlin.” 19 Unfortunately, Hensel does not explain their plight, nor does he disclose when they reached Berlin. Presumably they were involved in some anti-French activity and were in jeopardy of Davout’s repressive measures. Ironically enough, after Napoleon’s fall, their sister Henriette, governess of the Parisian family of General Sebastiani, became Davout’s neighbor. The ruthless tyrant had now mellowed into a hen-pecked husband: “I must tell you as a curiosity that this dreadful Davoust [sic ], the terror of the north, the author of such unutterable misery, is at home the meekest of men. He has not the courage to give any orders to the lowest servant without the consul of his lady, who governs the household as sternly as he used to govern the conquered countries.” And further, “When he first heard my name, he asked General S[ebastiani], who happened to be with us, whether I had any relations at Hamburg, as he had known very worthy people of the same name in that place.” 20
Two documents suggest the worthy Mendelssohns’ surreptitious flight occurred near the end of June 1811. Six years before, the music lover Abraham had acquired a collection of J. S. Bach manuscripts auctioned in Hamburg. In June 1811, Abraham sent forty-three of them to the Berlin Singakademie (including the Suite in D major, BWV 1068, and ten cantatas). Zelter acknowledged the gift on June 29 and urged Abraham to “save” other Bach choral masterpieces, for, excepting connoisseurs, “who [else] during our times would understand these things?” 21
If Abraham and Joseph were still in Hamburg in late June 1811, on July 1 they were in Berlin, where they concluded with their “silent” partner, Joseph Fränckel, a contract dissolving the Hamburg and Berlin firms on December 31, 1811. 22 Subsequently, a new agreement, dated January 8, 1812, reorganized the firm of J. & A. Mendelssohn, owing to “changed circumstances,” and provided that each partner would receive one third of the profits and be liable for one third of the losses. 23 Exactly where the Mendelssohns first lived in Berlin remains unclear, but they appear to have resided principally at Markgrafenstraße No. 48 (between the Jägerstraße and Französische Straße), which belonged to the Pastor Stegemann, before they moved to Neue Promenade No. 7 (between the Spree and Haacksche Markt), since 1812 the property of Lea’s mother, Bella Salomon Bartholdy. 24
The first few Berlin years challenged the brothers’ business and personal lives, though the access of Lea’s family to the French ambassador advanced their interests. 25 In March 1812 the Prussian administration had to raise funds to support Napoleon’s Russian campaign, and J. & A. Mendelssohn was assessed 15,000 thalers (upon additional levies, the Mendelssohns refused to cooperate and paid the maximum penalty of 25,000 thalers 26 ). The same month the Prussian monarch decreed the Edict of Emancipation, rescinding many restrictions on Jewish subjects and guaranteeing them rights as citizens. On October 30, Abraham and Lea’s second son, Paul, was born; 27 by this time, Napoleon, having failed to conclude a truce with Tsar Alexander, had begun the retreat from Moscow. Within weeks the orderly withdrawal disintegrated into a desperate flight from the Russian winter and marauding attacks of the enemy. The emperor reached Paris in December 1812; only about one sixth, or 100,000 men, of the grande armée , the largest military force ever assembled, followed him.
The Russian disaster emboldened Prussian patriots to liberate German territories. In February 1813 the minister Hardenberg issued a call for volunteers, and the irresolute king, pressured by increasingly belligerent advisors, formed an alliance with the tsar and declared war against France on March 17. J. & A. Mendelssohn helped supply the Prussian army; in a secret communiqué of April 26 the firm offered to arrange for the delivery of 40,000 Austrian flintlocks. 28 Berlin was at once apprehensive about engaging the enemy and aroused by patriotic fervor: “For fourteen days fear and hope have alternated here in a dreadful way.” 29 So wrote Joseph Mendelssohn on May 22, 1813 to his son Benjamin, who at nineteen was experiencing combat as a lieutenant at Bautzen, where Napoleon managed to extract a costly victory from the allies. Joseph outfitted Benjamin and also Dorothea Schlegel’s son Philipp Veit, who served with the poet Joseph von Eichendorff at the Battle of Leipzig, where in October the allies dealt Napoleon a crushing defeat. In this culminating Battle of the Nations, a French army of 450,000 clashed with Austrians, Prussians, Silesians, Bohemians, and Swedes. Among the fatalities within the city of Leipzig was the police chief Friedrich Wagner, father of the six-month-old Richard. 30 Among the surviving combatants was the nineteen-year-old artist Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn’s future husband, who was wounded several times and nominated for the Iron Cross, 31 a commendation newly created to honor the military valor of ordinary Prussians. Meanwhile, to support the war effort, Abraham provided funds for a military hospital and equipped several volunteers; for his contributions, he was later elected a city councilor of Berlin. 32
One of Benjamin Mendelssohn’s comrades was the Mecklenburg artist August Grahl, who made the earliest known drawings of Felix and his siblings. According to Rudolf Elvers, Grahl executed four miniature, oval-shaped portraits subsequently reproduced during the family’s Parisian sojourn of 1816. 33 The seven-year-old Felix reveals a boyish face with ringlet locks of hair, an alert expression in his large, rotund eyes, and perhaps the beginning of a puckish grin. His eleven-year-old sister Fanny appears in a more serious, self-possessed pose; she wears earrings, and has gathered her hair in a chignon behind her head (plate 3 ).
On March 31, 1814, the victorious Allies entered Paris and imposed a peace treaty upon France (upon learning of Napoleon’s abdication, Hegel wrote of the “tremendous spectacle” of seeing an “enormous genius destroy himself” 34 ). The Bourbon monarchy returned with the accession of Louis XVIII, and Napoleon’s once vast empire shriveled to the eighty-six square miles of Elba, over which the Corsican now ruled as sovereign. At the resplendent Congress of Vienna, convened in September to re-map European political terrain, the allies regaled themselves in ballrooms with a new, socially daring dance, the waltz, prompting Prince de Ligne’s bon mot , Le Congrès danse et ne marche pas (“The Congress dances and does not march”). But that “object of unanimous hatred and fear” 35 —Napoleon—unexpectedly returned to Paris in March 1815 and shattered the allies’ triumph; phoenixlike, his vanquished army now rematerialized. When, in April, the Prussian minister issued a second call for volunteers, Benjamin Mendelssohn again reported for active duty. This time he served under Marshal Blücher, whose late arrival at
Waterloo on June 18 secured Napoleon’s final defeat and led to his second abdication and exile to St. Helena in the South Atlantic.
The emergence of Prussia as a post-Napoleonic power facilitated the rapid rise of the Mendelssohns’ bank. At the beginning of 1815 the brothers moved their business to the financial center of Berlin, the Jägerstraße, where the firm remained until its liquidation by the Nazis in 1938. According to the second peace treaty of Paris, France garrisoned allied troops for five years and paid reparations of seven hundred million francs. J. & A. Mendelssohn joined a consortium of banks led by the Rothschilds of Frankfurt to oversee the payments, which began on December 1, 1815. 36 At the end of October, Joseph took up residence with his family in Paris 37 and established a bureau to manage the fund transfers.
On March 21, 1816, Abraham and Lea witnessed the baptism of their four children by Johann Jakob Stegemann, the Reformed Protestant minister of the Jerusalemskirche near the Gendarmenmarkt. The baptismal record reveals that the children added the surname Bartholdy, and Felix the names Jacob Ludwig, so that he now became Jacob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Fanny became Fanny Cäcilia; Rebecka, Rebecka Henriette; and Paul, Paul Hermann). 38 The ceremony was a clandestine affair in the family residence, and the parents withheld news of the conversion from Lea’s mother Bella, who had disowned Jacob Bartholdy in 1805 upon his apostasy. As late as December 1823, Bella was unaware that her grandchildren were Christian, and that Lea and Abraham too had converted in 1822. 39
No doubt by 1816 Lea was instructing Fanny and Felix in piano; according to Jules [Julius] Benedict, Lea offered five-minute lessons and “gradually increased the time until he and his sister Fanny went through a regular course of instruction.” 40 Felix’s formal education began at the Lehr-, Pensions- und Erziehungsanstalt, a private elementary school on the Kronenstraße directed by a Dr. Messow. School reports document Felix’s progress from 1816 to 1818. At age seven, he earned praise for his memory, and on April 1, 1816, was promoted from the fourth to third class for his “laudable efforts and good manners.” Exactly two years later, Dr. Messow declared him fit to enter the first class. 41 By July 1818, Abraham altered course: “Felix has now finished all the classes of elementary school, and his father has finally decided to engage a tutor for him, an instructor from his school, of whom Felix was very fond. I am convinced he will learn much more through private instruction and still have the leisure time to cultivate his talents. Outside his musical interests, he is also inclined toward drawing, which he could only practice from lack of time in a limited way during his attendance at school.” 42
Abraham’s choice as a tutor was G. A. Stenzel, a history docent at the University of Berlin employed at Dr. Messow’s school. For more than a year, from Midsummer Day through Michaelmas (June 24, 1818–September 29, 1819), Stenzel instructed Felix and his younger brother Paul. Felix, it seems, developed a childlike attachment to the young man, which elicited Lea’s disapproval: “The father was a reasonable man and not displeased by the influence Stenzel had on Felix. But the mother could not at all grasp why her son followed every word, indeed every glance of his teacher. She was visibly dissatisfied that Felix clung to him with such affection. For this reason Stenzel probably gave up his position half a year before he left Berlin.” 43 His replacement was C. W. L. Heyse, a young classical philologist who fathered the writer Paul Heyse, the first German to win the Nobel Prize in literature. For seven years, from October 1819 until April 1827, Heyse instructed the Mendelssohn children and prepared Felix for the university entrance examination. 44
Writing from the Bartholdy Meierei in 1818, Lea disclosed that Felix was athletically inclined: “here in the country he also has the opportunity to practice gymnastics, for which we have found a little equipment; he visits too the very good swimming school in the immediate vicinity, and so physical exercise should prepare him and make him fit for intellectual endeavors.” 45 The Mendelssohns owed their athletic interests to the Turnvater Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, “father” of the modern gymnastics movement. During the French occupation Jahn had established near the Kreuzberg a gymnastic society that “blended paramilitary drills and spurious Teutonic symbols with classical ideals of bodily strength.” 46 A German nationalist intent upon purging French cognates from the mother tongue, Jahn sought to liberate the Volkstum , or cultural essence, of his countrymen. In 1818, the nine-year-old Felix must have been among the youngest athletes to visit Jahn’s society. 47 But by 1819 Jahn’s populist elocutions prompted the regime to curb the gymnast’s activities.
II
Though receiving scant discussion, a few sources establish that the Mendelssohns visited Paris in 1816 and in 1817. En route in 1816 they stopped on April 10 at Goethe’s residence in Weimar, where Abraham appeared bearing a letter from Zelter. “He has lovely, worthy children,” Zelter noted, “and his eldest daughter can let you hear something by Sebastian Bach.… He, the husband, is very well disposed toward me, and I have an open till with him, for during the times of general need he became rich, without blemishing his soul.” 48 The poet received only Abraham, who stayed one afternoon. 49 By May 1816 the Mendelssohns reached Paris, where Abraham relieved his brother Joseph, 50 and by mid-November returned to Berlin. 51 In Paris, Abraham and Lea renewed their relationship with Henriette Mendelssohn and procured lessons for Fanny and Felix from two celebrated musicians, Marie Bigot and Pierre Baillot. 52
The Alsatian Madame Bigot de Morogues (née Kiené) settled in Paris in 1809. During Napoleon’s Russian campaign, while her husband, librarian of Count Razumovsky, was incarcerated as a prisoner of war, she gave piano lessons to support her family; she died of consumption eight years later at age thirty-four. Her performance of one of Haydn’s works nearly convinced the composer she had created the composition. With Beethoven she developed a more complex relationship. On one occasion, while sight-reading the Appassionata Sonata from the autograph, she negotiated its illegible scrawls so successfully that the startled composer gave her the manuscript. According to J. F. Reichardt, Marie specialized in the more difficult piano works of Beethoven, whom she idolized as a saint. 53 But when he innocently asked her to accompany him on a walk, she misunderstood the invitation, and the mortified composer had to repair the strained relationship. 54
In Paris Marie performed chamber music with Pierre Baillot, a Viotti disciple and perhaps the last serious exponent of the French classical school of violin playing, distinguished by its full tone, seamless legato, and varied bowings and articulations. (Baillot reportedly grimaced when he witnessed Paganini’s pyrotechnical feats.) Among the first to join the faculty of the Paris Conservatoire in 1796, Baillot won fame as a virtuoso and chamber musician; in 1814 he established a public concert series that endured through the post-Napoleonic Restoration and featured quartets by Boccherini, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. 55 Henriette Mendelssohn was among the subscribers to the 1816 season and reported that Baillot was especially fond of Fanny and Felix, whom he coached in chamber music. “You know Baillot’s sensitive face,” she wrote to Lea in November 1816; “this expression remained as long as he spoke of Fanny and Felix, and we spoke of no one else.” 56
The Mendelssohns’ itinerary between Berlin and Paris led them through Frankfurt, where they stopped midroute during their 1816 journey. Fanny and Felix met their aunt Dorothea Schlegel, who marveled at the “energy, skill, precision and expression” with which her niece and nephew performed her favorite composers, Bach and Handel—Fanny with a virtuosity and Felix an ingenuity that boggled the mind. 57 Exactly when the prodigies departed Paris has eluded scholarly investigation, although the children resumed their studies some time in 1817 with Bigot and Baillot. 58 Eight-year-old Felix was apparently transposing at sight the etudes of J. B. Cramer into different keys, a pastime probably encouraged by Bigot, who later recommended Cramer’s exercises to Fanny. 59
On April 27, 1817, Friedrich Schlegel inscribed some paternalistic verses for Fanny that likened her to fragrant flowers blossoming
in the fields; 60 presumably the Mendelssohns were then visiting Frankfurt en route to Paris or Berlin. By July Abraham was in Berlin, where he signed a letter of credit for Wilhelm von Humboldt. 61 In August, Felix may have been in Weimar, when he wrote a French letter to Carl von Stein, grandson of Charlotte von Stein, Goethe’s intimate friend. Rediscovered in 1987 as Felix’s earliest surviving letter, the text concerns an invitation from Carl delivered by messenger, from which we may infer Felix’s reply originated around Weimar. 62 Abraham’s business often separated him from his family; from Hamburg in October he chided Felix for careless orthography, 63 though Lea no doubt assumed a strong matriarchal role during Abraham’s absences.
III
By 1818 the siblings’ prodigious talents were a frequent topic of conversation among the Mendelssohns’ circle. Rebecka Meyer declared the “angelic” Felix a veritable musical genius, and the twelve-year-old Fanny strikingly precocious. 64 An astounding demonstration of Fanny’s acumen came later that year, when she performed from memory for Abraham twenty-four Preludes from J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier . Aunt Henriette reacted from Paris with appropriate awe but fretted, “I think the thing decidedly blamable: the exertion is too great, and might easily have hurt her. The extraordinary talent of your children wants direction, not forcing.” 65
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