Music criticism mushroomed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe during Felix Mendelssohn’s lifetime, playing a key role in the transformation of musical ideals and values. While Mendelssohn – unlike his contemporaries Schumann and Wagner – refrained from publishing his views on music, he was well acquainted with the major German, French and English critics of the day and acknowledged the importance of criticism in helping to drive musical reforms. The chapter examines the reasons behind Mendelssohn’s reluctance to write criticism, his attitudes towards different forms of music criticism and his troubled encounters with individual critics, including François-Joseph Fétis and Heinrich Heine. It also explores his relationships with critics who supported him over his career and in some cases helped shape his music, such as Ludwig Rellstab, Adolf Bernhard Marx, Henry Fothergill Chorley, James William Davison, Johann Christian Lobe and Alfred Julius Becher.

This essay places Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel’s Protestant faith in the context of the complex religious and theological world of early nineteenth-century northern Germany. The Mendelssohns’ religious education and practice was deeply influenced by the early nineteenth-century creation of the Prussian Union of Churches. In this context, the Mendelssohns’ approach to religion was ecumenical, non-dogmatic, and influenced by rationalism. While the siblings both relied on Reformed or Prussian Union churches for major personal events throughout their lives, they engaged with the German Lutheran tradition in their musical practices, including both performance repertoire choices and compositional influences. The essay explores extant documents and known events that indicate the Mendelssohns’ theological perspectives. It also examines the Mendelssohns’ relationships with noteworthy theologians, including Friedrich Wilmsen, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Julius Schubring, and Christian Bunsen, and the range of religious ideas expressed by these thinkers.

According to his father, Mendelssohn had to fulfil his destiny as a professional musician by becoming a music director at a major institution; this chapter explores his relationship with musical life in the city with which he became most closely associated, Leipzig. When Mendelssohn was appointed Kapellmeister at the Gewandhaus in 1835, most of the closely entangled institutions which formed the basis of Leipzig’s musical life were already in existence. The reputation of the Gewandhaus concerts was achieved not only by their quality and frequency but also by a close cooperation with other institutions, especially with the city’s music publishers and their music journals. The canonisation of the Austro-German repertory, meanwhile, was already underway well before Mendelssohn’s arrival. Mendelssohn built on this legacy while reforming the city’s musical institutions with remarkable success. In addition to the established institutions, like the Gewandhaus and the Theatre, Leipzig possessed a lively musical culture in its salons and homes of the well-educated bourgeoisie, and the final section of the chapter looks at this private musical world and Mendelssohn’s role within it.

Although little of her music appeared during her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was well known due to the numerous publications about her brother Felix. With the rise of feminism in the late nineteenth century, she was frequently mentioned as part of the larger discourse about the problems that women composers faced. After the publication of Sebastian Hensel’s Die Familie Mendelssohn (1879), Hensel came to serve as a symbol for women’s societal restrictions, most notably for pro-suffrage writers in the United States and England. Hensel was frequently at the centre of published arguments about women’s creativity, and her music was sometimes programmed to rebut assertions of their inability to compose. Knowledge of Hensel was transmitted through American women’s organizations, and children’s music clubs were named for her. Although Hensel’s fame faded in the mid twentieth century, publications and recordings of her music were stimulated by second-wave feminism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s.

Taking its cue from passages in the Mendelssohn family’s correspondence concerning aspects of Jewish tradition and Christian conversion, and drawing on the work of modern scholars, the chapter considers from a variety of angles the sense of Jewishness with which Fanny Hensel’s and Felix Mendelssohn’s lives were imbued. With reference to a range of literature on Jewish history, the question of the siblings’ Jewish identity is explored in the wider context of German Jewish social and religious life at the time, as well as its implications within the Mendelssohn family’s private circle, for example, inter-generational tensions. Attention is given to the reception history of the family’s Jewish identity in the context of anti-Jewish attitudes, reflected in a range of sources including the remarks of the siblings’ composition tutor, Carl Friedrich Zelter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the writings of Richard Wagner, while also identifying echoes in modern Mendelssohn scholarship.

The Mendelssohn family Sunday musicales were and are one of the most prominent examples of private music making from nineteenth-century Germany. Yet their importance lies not so much in their singularity, as in the way that they were an especially successfully representative of a much larger set of private music-making practices throughout Berlin and German-speaking cities more generally, some of which took place in Jewish-women-led salons. This chapter looks at a diverse range of private music-making practices during the period, many of which were important to the Mendelssohn family’s musical activities. Private music-making offered musicians and listeners an alternative to the public concert hall; travelling virtuosi chances to get to know the local music scene; and composers like Felix and Fanny a laboratory for trying out new works. Perhaps most importantly, private music-making offered women, including Fanny Hensel, an opportunity to shine in multiple overlapping organisational and musical roles at once.

Moving between absolutist Prussia, urban bourgeois Leipzig, and late Hanoverian/early Victorian Britain, Felix Mendelssohn experienced and actively engaged with the (cultural) politics of pre-1848 Europe. His correspondence reveals him to have been distinctly inclined towards a reformist, liberal standpoint, yet increasingly sceptical of the political difference he or art could make. Despite remaining in Berlin, Fanny Hensel (as well as their younger sister Rebecka) appears to have greater radical sympathies – this in marked contrast to the conservative politics of her husband Wilhelm Hensel.

One of Mendelssohn’s most lasting historical legacies is his role in founding the Leipzig Conservatory, which became a model for higher musical training across Europe. Unlike Italy and France, prior to 1843 Germany had no conservatories. Mendelssohn proved to be a driving force in founding the institution mediating between the city of Leipzig, the Saxon king, the musical elite at home and abroad, and also in the acquisition of startup capital, which drew on all his diplomatic and political skills. As the oldest German Conservatory, the Leipzig Conservatory was a highly successful and sustainable approach to placing the education of musicians on a holistic and professional foundation.

This chapter begins by asking what music is. It first considers the idea that music is ‘humanly organised sound’ before progressing to a definition of music as social interaction. This idea is unpacked throughout the chapter and it is argued that musical interaction is embodied, multivalent and multiply embedded.

This chapter argues that musical interaction is often also economic interaction, involving interdependence and power. It elaborates upon these ideas, discussing both the music industry and the interplay of music and capitalism in doing so. It concludes with a discussion of the distinction between mainstream and alternative music.

The final chapter considers the various ways in which musical interactions might be considered political interactions. It begins with a critical discussion of Adorno’s account of the politics of avant-garde and popular music respectively, moving on to a discussion of the ways in which music might help to create a public sphere. It then considers both how music might serve as a political resource and politics as a musical resource, before discussing the ways in which music worlds sometimes serve to incubate alternative values and identities, potentially prefiguring wider political changes. Music worlds can be political worlds too.

This chapter argues that musical interactions orient around meaning, that the meaningfulness of music is one key reason for its sociological importance, and it offers a discussion of one facet of musical meaning: semiotic meaning. Drawing upon the work of C.S. Peirce in particular, it is argued that various aspects of music function as (meaningful) signs, and that music has both internal and external meanings.