Felix Mendelssohnb begins work in 1829 on…

Felix Mendelssohnb begins work in 1829 on two symphonies, composing the Reformation and sketching the elegiac Scotch.

The German composer and conductor, born in Hamburg to a notable Jewish family, being the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and a banker's son, he had written his (later famous) overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1826 at seventeen, by which time he had also written twelve symphonies for string orchestra.

Mendelssohn is greatly influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach had taught music to his great-aunt, Sarah Levy, who also had supported the widow of another son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach.

She had collected a number of Bach manuscripts.

J.S. Bach's music, which had fallen into relative obscurity by the turn of the nineteenth century, is also deeply respected by Mendelssohn's teacher in Berlin, Carl Friedrich Zelter.

In 1829, with the backing of Zelter and the assistance of a friend, the actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn arranges and conducts a performance in Berlin of Bach's “St. Matthew Passion.”

The Berlin Singakademie, of which Zelter is the principal conductor, provides the orchestra and choir.

The success of this performance (the first since Bach's death in 1750) is an important element in the revival of J.S. Bach's music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe.

It earns Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age of twenty.

It also leads to one of the very few references that Mendelssohn would ever make to his origins: 'To think that it took an actor and a Jew-boy (Judensohn) to revive the greatest Christian music for the world' (cited by Devrient in his memoirs of the composer).