The Blog

Today is the Mendelssohn bicentennial.  Felix Mendelssohn (born February 3, 1809, died 1847) was truly one of the great composers of the nineteenth century, and one of the great child prodigies of all time.  In his short life, he composed an enormous amount of music.  He was also responsible for helping to recover the music of J.S. Bach, which at the time was rarely performed.  Mendelssohn considered Bach’s music “the greatest Christian music in the world,” and through Mendelssohn’s advocacy, Bach’s music began to be performed again in what historians have called the “Bach revival” of the nineteenth century. 

Among all these accomplishments, one of the lesser known facts about Felix Mendelssohn is that he was a Jewish believer in Jesus as the Messiah.  His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was an important Jewish philosopher who tried (rather unsuccessfully) to harmonize Judaism with the humanism of the Enlightenment.  Felix’s parents had their children baptized into the Lutheran church out of a desire to assimilate with respectable society rather than conviction, but evidence indicates that Felix embraced faith in Jesus wholeheartedly.  (See Patrick Kavanaugh, Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers, for documentation.)

So, happy birthday to a great Messianic Jewish composer today!