<<  -- 6 --  Jennifer Paull    THE BONSAI SEQUOIA

However, he was working too hard, perhaps in an effort to catch up with time in being the composer he now knew himself to be, and his health began to deteriorate. Overwork and exhaustion in meeting demands for his presence, performances and compositions overtaxed his constitution dramatically.

Three years later, after returning from the first London performance of Elijah, he was told of Fanny's death. The news literally felled him to the ground and he lay unconscious. By June he had recovered sufficiently to take a holiday break with his wife and family. However he was weakened both physically and psychologically from the death of his sister and the resulting depression. In October, a few months after her death, he suffered a seizure, rallied, relapsed and died on 4 November, passing away painlessly.

It was as though a sovereign had died. Mendelssohn was one of the first 'stars' in the musical firmament. An entire generation was inconsolable. He lay in state for two days.

Had Gluck, Handel, Haydn, Wagner or Verdi died so young, none of these composers would have been particularly great musical names were we to possess but those works written before the age at which Mendelssohn died. Had he lived to see fifty, he might well have grown to be another Handel or Haydn.

Vitality is essential to progress. Mendelssohn's was drained, not by his vices, but by his virtues. Where some of the famous composers were as men, less fine than their music, Mendelssohn reversed the order. He was the Romantic of Goodness and indescribably loved. Just as his friend and contemporary, Schumann, his music is beautiful and evocative, yet their critics bemoan an absence of strong passions, opinions, and depth. Because of this, Mendelssohn remains undervalued to this day.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings, which motivated it. -- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) French author, film maker reproduced in Collected Works vol 9 (1950). 'Le Coq et l'Arlequin', Le Rappel à L'Ordre (1926)

Would that Felix Mendelssohn had lived to know more of the inspiration of those magical moments in Scotland, which liberated his soul to fly, albeit much too briefly.