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The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition.

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The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition. By Jeffrey S. Sposato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xi, 228 p. ISBN-10: 0-19514-974-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-19514-974-6. $39.95.] Bibliographic references, index, illustrations.

The latter-day flourishing of scholarly and general interest in the music and life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy gained its initial impulse after World War II, as the musical world began to recognize the injustices propagated on grounds of politics but in the name of art during the century's volatile early decades. Building on new momentum that emerged at the 1959 sesquicentennial of the composer's birth, the early 1960s witnessed the publication of Eric Werner's Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), the first book-length biography to acknowledge the cultural import of the composer's Jewish heritage substantively rather than polemically, and to portray his career and output as having been crucially informed by that heritage. Having adduced many unpublished documents and offering an overall perspective largely consistent with postwar sympathies and interests, Werner's biography and its revised and expanded German edition (Mendelssohn: Leben und Werk in neuer Sicht [Zurich: Atlantis, 1980]) remained for the rest of the twentieth century the essential starting-points for scholars and general readers alike in surveys, biographical inquiries, musical analysis, and documentary and reception-historical studies.

Unfortunately, a great deal of the scholarly effort expended in building on Werner's studies had to be corrective in nature, for Mendelssohn specialists quickly began to realize that many of the documents and musical sources that underlay his "new image" were either misrepresented or untraceable; some were demonstrably fabricated or falsified. The result, unfortunately, was widespread confusion. On the one hand, Mendelssohn scholarship gained many insights through indirect follow-ups on Werner's research--either corrections of points made in his contributions, or more detailed explorations of issues that were of necessity dealt with briefly in them. But in the meantime general studies continued to cite Werner's work chapter and verse, perpetuating his errors as well as his insights. Some headway toward raising awareness...

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