Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn began to make his mark as a composer at a breathtakingly early age

There’s a story that someone once handed the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche a pamphlet entitled ‘German Culture without the Jew’. Nietzsche turned it round and handed it back with the words, ‘What German culture without the Jew?’. He would no doubt have been thinking of Heinrich Heine, whose poetry was so popular that the Nazis were later forced to keep it in print even during the War, though of course omitting his name. But he would also have been thinking of Felix Mendelssohn, whose statue in his home city of Leipzig those same Nazis could only remove under cover of darkness, for fear of provoking a massed uprising. This was, after all, the same Mendelssohn who had been the target of an obscene vilification campaign by Nietzsche’s once loved, now detested former mentor Richard Wagner.

Why was Wagner so keen to trash Mendelssohn’s reputation? In