In the February 23 issue of the New Yorker, Alex Ross writes, “Felix Mendelssohn, whose two-hundredth birthday fell on February 3rd, was the most amazing child prodigy in musical history. ‘What about Mozart?’ you may ask. Go talk to Goethe, who heard the child Mozart in 1763 and the child Mendelssohn almost sixty years later, and who gave the palm to young Felix. … Two of his adolescent works—the Octet for Strings and the Overture to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’—have won permanent places in the repertory. Mozart reached a comparable level only in his early twenties.” Ross claims there was no fall-off of inspiration or productivity as Mendelssohn moved into his adult years, but peers mocked him and critics dismissed him “as a relic of the Biedermeier and Victorian eras, of the bourgeois cult of comfort.” But Ross also mentions the Quartet in F Minor, “whose gruff rhythms and grinding chromatic lines suggest a creative departure. The composer’s beloved sister had just died, and, according to a tantalizing recent report in the British press, he may have been suffering from an infatuation with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. Mendelssohn seemed, in other words, on the verge of losing control. If he had lived to harness those darker emotions, particularly in the realm of opera, he might have become the rival that Wagner obviously feared.” Ross also mentions several Mendelssohn performances in New York, including by the New York Philharmonic, the Met Orchestra, and the Lyric Chamber Music Society.
