Amid the neo-Stalinist personality cult of Darwin's bicentennial jollifications, it is all too easy in 2009 to forget various anniversaries of those individuals who, by contrast, actually benefited mankind. Such as Mendelssohn--Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, to be exact--who was born exactly two centuries ago last February 3rd, and who ranks as the greatest musical prodigy of all time. Yes, greater than Mozart: for nothing in Mozart's early output is as quint-essentially awe-inspiring as the Octet and the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, both written when Mendelssohn had reached the ripe old age of sixteen. (This observation, a musicological cliche, is no less true for being a cliche.) No wonder that when the pianist-composer Ignaz Moscheles--himself no slouch--became Mendelssohn's teacher, he soon admitted that he had no more instruction left to supply. Where Moscheles led, fellow professionals over the next hundred years followed. Sibelius considered Mendelssohn one of die two finest orchestrators who ever lived; Ferruccio Busoni hailed Mendelssohn's "undisputed greatness"; while Schumann called Mendelssohn "the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant musician, who looks most clearly through the contradictions of the present, and who for the first time reconciles them." If the two Mendelssohn biographies under review--both of which were issued in 2008, as preludial responses to the bicentenary--had managed nothing else except to remind us of Mendelssohn's centrality to the art of his epoch, they would still be most valuable. In fact, both manage far more. Both demonstrate, above all, how singularly captious posterity has been in branding Mendelssohn (who lived only to the age of thirty-eight) as an under-achiever in adulthood: a real-life equivalent of Tom Wolfe's fictional protagonist, "The Man Who Peaked Too Soon." Neil Wenborn, whose study is the shorter and more approachable of the two, laments the standard misrepresentation of Mendelssohn "as a sort of Orson Welles of music, living his creative life in reverse, the Octet and the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream his Citizen Kane, the ubiquitous Songs Without Words his sherry advertisements," But this willful distortion of Mendelssohn's mature significance-- a distortion emerging from no more licit motive than simple public unawareness concerning most of his later works--is merely one aspect of a wider belittlement: namely, a pathological aversion toward all things "Victorian" and a particular hostility to any great artist who behaved like a gentleman instead of like a scoundrel.
