Mendlessohn And Noah Poem by gershon hepner

Mendlessohn And Noah



Reintroducing J.S. Bach
and Handel, Felix Mendlessohn preserved,
as Noah did with his great Ark,
two major species. Neither man observed
the Torah’s laws. In Noah’s time
they hadn’t been invented, eating shellfish
not legislated as a crime.
Some say that he was kind, some selfish,
but Mendlessohn, who also ate
all food the Torah tells us is unkosher,
despite his taste in music never
ate bagels with cream cheese and nova scotia.
Noah’s Bildung came from being
a tsaddik, but the music that he wrote
has been forgotten. More farseeing
was Felix who saved music in his boat.

Inspired by an article by Raphael Mostel in Forward, December 25,2009 on Felix Mendlessohn:
While posthumously criticized for maintaining classical ideals into what was to become the Romantic era, with even modernist admirers like Berlioz chiding him for being “too fond of the dead, ” Mendelssohn, more than anyone else, was responsible for the resurrection of the music of the near-forgotten Johann Sebastian Bach. He likewise reintroduced the music of Handel, who had been completely forgotten in Germany. He established both the Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Leipzig (now Mendelssohn) MusicConservatory.He became the worldwide symbol of the social appreciation of music through hundreds of Mendelssohn societies. The German concept of Bildung — an untranslatable word referring to the inner development of the individual — is what Mendelssohn, and indeed his entire family, represented….
It is well-known that Moses Mendelssohn’s family represented the highest form of Bildung. But so did Felix’s mother’s side of the family, which included music lovers who had nurtured two of Bach’s sons, but also Mozart and Haydn. Haydn in particular appreciated their encouragement so much that he gave them the manuscript of his “Heiligmesse.” Although both sets of grandparents remained traditionally observant Jews, and in their wills disowned any descendant who converted, most of the grandchildren were baptized. At age 7, Felix, along with all his siblings, was secretly baptized. The grandparents died without being aware of the conversion. We owe the information to Mendelssohn’s smarmy childhood teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, who wrote a letter to Goethe describing the young Felix as “his best student” and “the son of a Jew, to be sure, but no Jew. His father made the significant sacrifice of not having his sons circumcised and has raised them as is proper. It would be truly something rare [he put it in Yiddish: epes Rohres] if the son of a Jew became an artist.” Todd notes that this may explain why there is no record of the composer’s birth in the Jewish records of the time. There is, however, no reason to doubt the composer’s sincerity in living his life as a devout Lutheran. At the same time, he was keenly aware — as with the tale of the monkey — of his heritage. He insisted on seeing the world whole, and in the same rational spirit as his philosopher grandfather. Indeed, when his father tried to dropp the Mendelssohn name entirely and rename the whole family Bartholdy (from a family dairy property with title attached) , Felix insisted on being known as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Alongside that porcelain monkey, what Abraham wrote to his son on seeing that newspapers often dropped the Bartholdy part of the composer’s last name is perhaps the most sadly tortured epitaph to the challenge of the entire concept of Bildung: “a Christian Mendelssohn is as impossible as a Jewish Confucius.”


1/3/10

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success