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This is the 200th anniversary of Felix Mendelssohn's birth, and his music is being played everywhere. The following are exerpts of an article by Warren Boroson that appeared in The Jewish Standard:

The Prodigy

Mendelssohn was surely the greatest musical prodigy who ever lived. Greater than Mozart? The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had met both of them, said that Mendelssohn bore "the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child." (Actually, Mozart was only 7, Mendelssohn 13.)

At age 17, he wrote the enchanting overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The New Yorker magazine's Alex Ross has written: "That it came from a boy of 17 essentially defies explanation."

Still, Mendelssohn's greatest works came later: the Violin Concerto in E Minor, the Scottish Symphony (Number 3), the Italian Symphony (Number 4), the Reformation Symphony (Number 5), The Hebrides Overture.

Sister Fanny

Mendelssohn's beloved and loyal sister Fanny, a few years older, may have been as gifted as he was — both as a pianist and as a composer.

But Fanny didn't enjoy any sort of career. In a famous and appalling letter, her father wrote that she must "prepare earnestly and eagerly for your real calling, the only calling of a young woman — I mean the state of a housewife."

She did compose some music — 466 pieces — and Felix had some of it published under his own name (with her permission).

Years later, when Felix was in England playing the piano with Queen Victoria and her consort, Victoria played one of her favorite Mendelssohn songs, called "Italy." Felix told her: Fanny wrote it.

Nancy B. Reich, author of a biography of Clara Schumann, has written: "When Fanny ... finally summoned up the courage to publish her work, defying her brother who disapproved of professional music making by a woman, sudden death cheated her of the satisfaction and triumph she surely would have had." (She died at age 42.)

In his book, "The Life of Mendelssohn" (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Peter Mercer-Taylor writes that it is "one of music history's most heartbreaking stories of squandered potential."

Drastic Decline

During the 19th century Mendelssohn was considered to be on the same lofty level as Beethoven and Mozart. Composer Robert Schumann, in fact, called him the Mozart of the 19th century.

But a reaction set in after his Mendelssohn's death — to a large extent thanks to the bilious efforts of Richard Wagner, who continually disdained Mendelssohn in his anti-Semitic writings. (Although Mendelssohn had converted to Lutherism at age 7.) This was so even after Mendelssohn had helped boost Wagner's career, and even after the Iago-like Wagner wrote to him, after meeting him in Berlin, "My dear, dear Mendelssohn: I am really happy that you like me. If I have come a little closer to you, it is the nicest thing about my Berlin expedition."

Bernard Shaw, as a music critic, also regularly disparaged Mendelssohn, referring to his "conventional sentimentality." (While usually a shrewd critic, Shaw also absurdly characterized Schubert as "brainless.")

Mendelssohn certainly was conservative; the composer Hector Berlioz complained that he was "rather too fond of the dead." A modest decline in his reputation was to be expected.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, in 1934 they forbade the playing of Mendelssohn's music. At book-burnings, Mendelssohn's music was thrown into the fires. His name was erased from histories of music.

The Nazis also called upon German composers to write a new, non-Mendelssohnian version of "Mid-Summer Night's Dream." Carl Orff, the composer of "Carmina Burana," agreed, but he never got around to it.

For many years Mendelssohn had conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, and a statue of him stood in front of the concert hall. The Nazis wanted to take it down and use it as scrap metal. The courageous mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, wouldn't allow it. But while he was out of town, the Nazis destroyed the statue. Enraged, Goerdeler resigned as mayor. (He was later executed for his role in the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944.)

Mendelssohn Today

Today, Mendelssohn's star has risen again. There are monuments to him all over Europe — even in Leipzig. Germany this year issued a postage stamp honoring him. His music is being played everywhere, and a whole treasure chest of his music still has yet to be played. (He was such a perfectionist that he kept many of his compositions from ever being published.)

When he was told that his sister Fanny had died, Mendelssohn fainted. He himself died less than six months later, also from a stroke — at age 38. What new masterpieces he would have written had he lived, we will never know. (Verdi wrote his opera "Falstaff" in his 80s.)

Before he died, Mendelssohn was asked what he thought the afterlife was like. He said that it is "where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings."

Seven Surprising Facts

1. Mendelssohn wrote the music used for the song, "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."
2. His own critical comment about his "Hebrides" overture: too much counterpoint and not enough seagulls.
3. He may have had an affair with Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. There is supposed to be in existence a letter in which Mendelssohn proposed that the two of them elope to America together.
4. Jenny Lind was distraught when Mendelssohn died. In his memory she endowed a scholarship for a promising English composer. The first winner, in 1854, was Arthur Sullivan, age 14. Of Gilbert & Sullivan fame.
5. His grandfather was a wise and observant Jew, Moses Mendelssohn. Moses was a hunchback, and when he proposed marriage to a beautiful young woman, she had reservations. So he said to her, when I was born, my future wife was also named. But alas, I was told, she will have a dreadful hunchback. She will become bitter and unhappy. So, he prayed, dear lord, give me the hunchback, and let the maiden be well made and agreeable! Upon being told this, she agreed to marry him.
6. All was not all sweetness and light between him and sister Fanny. Once, when they were young, she rummaged through his belongings without his permission. He wrote her an angry note: "You must get a rap on the knuckles... are you the inquisition? Do you spy on me? ... You were in my room? Prying into my things?... Take care, fair flower, take care!"
7. He also had issues with his younger brother, Paul. As an adult, he wrote to him that their disputes were now over — "since the morning when we were quarreling so awfully and I threw you off the chair, whereupon you scratched me, whereupon I told on you, whereupon you couldn't stand me...." (Sounds like a normal family.)

Warren Boroson writes about personal finance as well as music.

— NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM