On Wings Of Love By Death Made Free Poem by gershon hepner

“Almost as soon as I found him, I
lost him, ” so said Jenny Lind
Most passionate love, but ready to die
for her was Felix, Wunderkind,
who asked her if she would elope
with him to the United States.
When she refused, he gave up hope,
and maybe killed himself. Their fates
were intertwined, but she was married
and would not change her life for Felix,
who wished, by his emotions carried,
to make with her a double helix.

Because he failed to win her heart,
it may be that his final chord
came when he chose with life to part
with Lindless life in Liebestod,
depicting thus his inner
torment in hyperminor key,
of Lind a loser, not a winner
on wings of love by death made free.
Inspired by Felix Mendlessohn’s son “Auf Flugeln des Gesanges’ (Wings of Song”) , and the report that Mendlessohn may have committed suicide after Jenny Lind refused to elope with him to the United States. Jessica Duchen (“Conspiracy of silence: Could the release of secret documents shatter Felix Mendelssohn's reputation? ”) reports in the Independent, January 12,2009) :
Until now, Mendelssohn has been deemed the happiest of composers. Did Felix Mendelssohn's passion for the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind lead to his early death? If reports of a document buried in the bowels of the Royal Academy of Music are to be believed, a potentially devastating new light is waiting to be shed on the composer's life, his death and his music, on the eve of his bicentenary, which is sparking worldwide celebrations in 2009. In 1896, Lind's husband, Otto Goldschmidt, allegedly placed in the archive of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation (housed at the RAM) an affidavit in which – according to Professor Curtis Price, former principal of the RAM – he declares that he'd destroyed a letter that would have been deeply injurious to the reputations of his wife and Mendelssohn: an 1847 missive from the composer to the soprano declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused. Lind, one infers, did refuse. Several months later, Mendelssohn was dead…
The cellist Steven Isserlis is related to Mendelssohn: they share an ancestor in R Moses Isserlis of 16th-century Krakow, the grandfather of Moses Mendelssohn. The cellist alerted me to the existence of the mysterious papers, adding: 'If he had committed suicide, the family would have covered it up.' For him, it's obvious that his eminent ancestor was not all sweetness and light: 'You can hear it in the music. His F minor String Quartet, for example, is extremely tormented.' The quartet was Mendelssohn's last major work. 'The trouble is, people can't forgive him for being too much of a genius too young, ' Isserlis says. 'Everyone loves to think of him as the happy, fulfilled composer. But there's a tragic side to his late works. I think he experienced a fundamental shift of personality in that last year.' The nature of Mendelssohn's music could be a giveaway even earlier. Its emotional content is high-impact, driven, with deeply romantic sensibilities, but almost always within contained classical forms. But it packs such an intense punch in terms of nervous energy, something probably had to give. Maybe Mendelssohn's greatest tragedy is that his music has been denigrated as shallow – mainly by anti-Semitic commentators such as Wagner – with his happy life cited as a pathetic excuse. Yet it's possible that his passionate, oversensitive nature drove him to what would have been a nervous breakdown, had he survived it.


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