elix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was revered in England throughout the nineteenth century. His aesthetic, which epitomized respectability and moral restraint, became synonymous with Victorian musical identity throughout the century, turning this foreign composer into an wholly-British musician (Schonberg 219-20). Mendelssohn’s visits to England, which resulted in his friendship with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, influenced musical aesthetics, performance practices, and composition, and a nation formerly thought to be without music developed its musical identity during the reign of Victoria. As the Britain sought its own musical identity amidst the burgeoning musical nationalism that took root in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn’s visits to the British isles inspired composers and musicologists to develop a methodology and aesthetic that produced a wholly-British form of music.
During Mendelssohn’s first English tour, which began in April 1829, he was embraced by the British aristocracy, and his first visit was followed by subsequent trips throughout the 1830s and 1840s, during which he debuted new compositions, dazzled audiences with his performances, and became an established English institution. The composer’s letters from his first visit to England chronicle the various parties, balls, soirées, and performances he both attended and given in London. In his letter on 1 May 1829, the composer advises his father, “you would not be all that fascinated to learn where I was yesterday (at Count Münster’s), or where I will be on Tuesday (at Count Bülow’s), or on Sunday (at Goldsmith’s, where Mühlenfels is to introduce me)…but the worst thing is that I was asked to go to the Duke of Devonshire’s ball tonight, and cannot go on account of some complications too long to explain to you” (60-61). Mendelssohn’s early letters are full of references to the British gentry, as he makes his way around the nineteenth-century aristocratic circuit. Mendelssohn himself remarks that “they treat me with great kindness and generosity. Sillem also received me quite cordially. I haven’t met the Duke of Montrose, nor the Viscount of Sandown, who is out in the country. Later today I shall visit Bute, Lansdowne, and Johnston, and then I’ll be through” (1 May 1829, 61). As the composer notes, he is welcomed among England’s upper classes, as his demeanor and respectability endeared him to his British hosts. Mendelssohn’s visits among the who’s who of English society establish him within the social institutions that dictated his popularity within England’s concert-going public.
However, it was Mendelssohn’s soirées with the royal family that established him as a musical savior for the nation, which didn’t have, as he pointed out, “much in the way of music” (9 May 1829, 67). In his letters, Mendelssohn comments on his time with the Royal Family, making music in the English palaces and performing the quiet parlor music that became a middle class domestic institution. He speaks of “Buckingham Palace…[as] the only friendly home in England, really cozy, one feels at one’s ease in it. Joking aside, Prince Albert had sent word asking me to go to him on Saturday at half past one, so that I might try out his organ before I left” (19 July 1842, 371-72). According to Mendelssohn, the two enjoyed playing duets, and when the Queen arrived in the parlor “in her house dress,” the Prince invited her to sing for the composer (373). Mendelssohn paints a portrait of the Royal Family, making them at once human and yet an institutional force in England’s musical scene. Mendelssohn tells that the Queen
sang ‘Leave Off Those Vain Regrets’ really quite faultlessly and with wonderfully pleasant feeling and expression. One ought not to pay too many compliments on such occasions, though I to myself, and merely thanked her very much indeed; but when she said, ‘Oh, if only I had not been so frightened; I usually have quite a long breath,’ I praised her thoroughly and with the best conscience in the world; for the passage with the long C, at the end, is exactly what she had done so well, and she had joined the next three notes to it all in the same breath, as you seldom hear it done, and so I was especially amused that she should have carried on about that. [373]
It is worth noting that here the traditional roles of performer and patron are inverted, as the Queen and the Prince do their best to impress their musical guest. Mendelssohn is specific in describing the Queen’s singing abilities, as he exclaims his surprise at the monarch’s ability to hold a high C, at once providing an insight into the private music-making that was to dominate the parlor culture of the Victorian home while advocating for the domestic musical amateur. This anecdote illustrates the extent to which Mendelssohn impressed his English audiences, who were quick to adopt him as one of England’s artistic sons. The composer’s closeness with the royal family translated into popular appeal among concert audiences in Victorian England.
Bibliography
Burton, Nigel.The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: Volume 5: The Romantic Age, 1800-1914. Ed. Nicholas Temperley.London: Blackwell Reference, 1988.
Felix Mendelssohn: A Life in Letters. Ed. Rudolf Elvers. Trans. Craig Tomlinson. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1986.
Schonberg, Harold. The Lives of the Great Composers. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Last modified 9 May 2025