Mendelssohn in Berlin

Composer Felix Mendelssohn was a Berliner -- he grew up here in an extremely plugged-in intellectual household. Old Goethe use to drop by in the evenings for margaritas and Trivial Pursuit (well not exactly that, but it was that sort of thing). So since I'm in Berlin now, here is some more about Mendelssohn (continuing the story that was at the bottom of this blog posting, in case you missed it).

When Felix had grown up and become a famous composer, he used to travel to England all the time and hang out with a couple of other German music lovers at Buckingham Palace -- Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. All three of them spoke German at home, although Vicky and Al would never speak it in public, of course (even though this was years before Victoria's grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II started all that "Great War" trouble in Europe). They would pass evenings together making music. 

In Düsseldorf and Leipzig, statues of Mendelssohn stood for decades in front of the town concert halls. But Mendelssohn's grandfather Moses, a famous philosopher, was a Jew, and although Felix and his parents and siblings were all baptized in the early 1800s, as far as the Nazis were concerned Mendelssohn was still a Jew. His "degenerate" music was banned, and in 1936 they pulled down the statues. The Düsseldorf one was melted down for metal but the fate of the Leipzig one is unknown. Both statues have now been replaced.

When I was 17,

instead of composing glorious timeless music, I was reading Mad comics and jerking off. But when Felix was 17, inspired by Schlegel's translations of Shakespeare, he composed this overture (click here). At 3:16 in the piece, notice the "Hee-haw! Hee-haw!" (in the play, as you will doubtless recall, the character Bottom has been turned into a donkey - Ha ha!).