59: Thank you, Mendelssohn!
There’s a sense in which I would not be a musician without the work of Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn isn’t, outright, my favorite composer, but he did give the world renewed access to perhaps the greatest musical mind we have ever known, whose music I have been listening to literally since I was in utero. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach has been with me my entire life. And its very possible that, without the work of the very talented organist Felix Mendelssohn, someone like me (not born in Germany, to non-German parents, in 2001, just over 250 years after he died) would never have discovered Bach. Bach certainly would have had no idea that 250-plus years after he died, babies would be given ways to listen to his music as their first gifts from the hospitals where they were born, as I was.
Bach was basically paid by his employers— for most of his career, the Church in some place, which for the last 23 years of his 65-year life was Leipzig—to write something for some occasion to be performed on some date: a particular day on the Church calendar or the visit of the Prince-Elector-Bishop of some place several hours away on horseback, or the 200th anniversary of the dedication of the local Parochial School, or whatever the occasion was. When it was over, it was over.
Or, he wrote a lot of very small pieces aimed at teaching particular skills on the keyboard— quite literally, homework for his students designed to teach the fundamentals. And, as much as I dearly love my teachers, I graduated with my degree in May 2025, and there is zero chance I can, for example, produce a homework assignment from 2009 anymore.
I am, in that way, very much like Bach. 8-year-old me did not prove Fermat’s last theorem or have some other major breakthrough (maybe I was learning multiplication of one digit by one digit at that point— but that probably came later), so, once the assignment was over, I saw no sense in keeping the paper.
Scholars generally think that plenty of his material— for example, in the Mass in B minor—comes from some other composition which he reused or repurposed, but we don’t know what the original was in many cases, either because we had the original but we lost it somehow, or because the original existed when it was needed, but Bach treated his work (now considered one of humanity’s greatest treasures) most of the time like I treated my 3rd grade math homework: as not worthy of preservation beyond what was absolutely necessary, so it was lost to time as soon as the occasion for its performance (the thing Bach was commissioned to write it for) was over. (Fortunately for us, more than a thousand authentic works survive, but, because he didn’t put much stock into preserving his music, he may have written many more masterpieces lost to time.)
Bach died in 1750, and because of how he worked, his music stopped being performed after that point… until, in 1829 Mendelssohn found, programmed, and conducted the St. Matthew Passion. Other Passions and the Mass in B minor soon followed. The great Mass in B minor (which Bach basically wrote in fragments throughout his career, and compiled into one set in the last year of his life, filling in the gaps with some of the last things he ever wrote) was never performed while Bach was alive. Mendelssohn brought it to the forefront, as he did with so much more of Bach’s music, rediscovering what, until then had been nothing more than old math homework. Thus began a Bach Revival.
It is nearly entirely thanks to Mendelssohn that we know as much as we do about Bach, and that the musical community reveres him as much as we do— in high school theory, my teacher and orchestra director used to say “when you come into this classroom, other than your God, there is no one more important in the world than Johann Sebastian Bach”— for the genius that he was. It’s thanks to Mendelssohn that we’ve found, or rediscovered, much of Bach’s music. (It’s thanks to Pau Casals that we know about the Cello Suites, but that’s another story.)
Bach was basically paid by his employers— for most of his career, the Church in some place, which for the last 23 years of his 65-year life was Leipzig—to write something for some occasion to be performed on some date: a particular day on the Church calendar or the visit of the Prince-Elector-Bishop of some place several hours away on horseback, or the 200th anniversary of the dedication of the local Parochial School, or whatever the occasion was. When it was over, it was over.
Or, he wrote a lot of very small pieces aimed at teaching particular skills on the keyboard— quite literally, homework for his students designed to teach the fundamentals. And, as much as I dearly love my teachers, I graduated with my degree in May 2025, and there is zero chance I can, for example, produce a homework assignment from 2009 anymore.
I am, in that way, very much like Bach. 8-year-old me did not prove Fermat’s last theorem or have some other major breakthrough (maybe I was learning multiplication of one digit by one digit at that point— but that probably came later), so, once the assignment was over, I saw no sense in keeping the paper.
Scholars generally think that plenty of his material— for example, in the Mass in B minor—comes from some other composition which he reused or repurposed, but we don’t know what the original was in many cases, either because we had the original but we lost it somehow, or because the original existed when it was needed, but Bach treated his work (now considered one of humanity’s greatest treasures) most of the time like I treated my 3rd grade math homework: as not worthy of preservation beyond what was absolutely necessary, so it was lost to time as soon as the occasion for its performance (the thing Bach was commissioned to write it for) was over. (Fortunately for us, more than a thousand authentic works survive, but, because he didn’t put much stock into preserving his music, he may have written many more masterpieces lost to time.)
Bach died in 1750, and because of how he worked, his music stopped being performed after that point… until, in 1829 Mendelssohn found, programmed, and conducted the St. Matthew Passion. Other Passions and the Mass in B minor soon followed. The great Mass in B minor (which Bach basically wrote in fragments throughout his career, and compiled into one set in the last year of his life, filling in the gaps with some of the last things he ever wrote) was never performed while Bach was alive. Mendelssohn brought it to the forefront, as he did with so much more of Bach’s music, rediscovering what, until then had been nothing more than old math homework. Thus began a Bach Revival.
It is nearly entirely thanks to Mendelssohn that we know as much as we do about Bach, and that the musical community reveres him as much as we do— in high school theory, my teacher and orchestra director used to say “when you come into this classroom, other than your God, there is no one more important in the world than Johann Sebastian Bach”— for the genius that he was. It’s thanks to Mendelssohn that we’ve found, or rediscovered, much of Bach’s music. (It’s thanks to Pau Casals that we know about the Cello Suites, but that’s another story.)
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