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.

The barline is a ubiquitous feature of musical notation. It appears throughout Debussy’s music, just as it does in the music of Mozart and Stravinsky. The barline has myriad functions and can produce diverse responses. It may be an audible component of musical notation or rather the trigger for an audible event or performers may go out of their way to render it inaudible. Debussy’s arabesque-like melodic lines and flowing parallel chords seem to invite the interpreter to overlook the barline and seek cues for agogic stress or accent elsewhere in the notation. However, a tendency on the part of some performers to delay the arrival of the first beat after a barline produces its own form of stress, which may not be supported by duration or accent. This chapter explores changing performance styles, drawing evidence from the earliest recordings of Debussy to the most recent.

Reading was one of Debussy’s favourite occupations, without doubt one of the activities that nourished and sustained him the most. Still, any attempt to uncover greater detail about the kind of reader Debussy actually was, remains a complicated, almost archaeological task. Although the sale of scores, manuscripts and several books sent to Debussy offers some leads, it does not make it possible to reconstruct their precise importance or to show their full diversity. In order to understand Debussy’s literary inclinations as fully as possible, it is thus necessary to examine other sources, such as letters, books sent to him, testimonies of friends, as well as the diaries and notebooks that have been miraculously preserved – notably those in which he noted references to works likely to interest him and even specific sentences that he particularly liked. By cross-checking these various elements, I sketch a portrait of a composer through one of his most essential passions.

With Debussy’s adoption of a markedly nationalist position at the onset of World War I, in appending the epithet ‘musicien français’ to his name, it was by no means evident during the years immediately following his death that he would, in time, become one of the most influential figures for later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century composers in France and elsewhere. While his music endured in the interwar years, his musical and aesthetic concerns were largely rejected or eclipsed. In 1956 Boulez identified Debussy as forming part of a peculiarly French axis of aesthetic modernists – Debussy-Cézanne-Mallarmé, ‘a solitary church spire’ and ‘an excellent ancestor’. This chapter investigates ways in which Debussy’s music and ideas implicated themselves within the work of composers active after 1945 from Messiaen, Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana through the work of Boulez and Barraqué to his continued influence on various branches of contemporary French composition, not least the Spectralists.