In the 1840s, while Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was enjoying the years at the zenith of his fame, influence, and authority over the Central European music and cultural scene, there was a composer four years younger than he who had not yet reached the high plateau destined for him. This man was Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Mendelssohn and Wagner interacted several times during these years, and the experiences were less than favorable. Their respective visions as to the future course of German music differed greatly. Wagner, the opera composer, saw his medium as the new direction, and with it the ability to nurture and promote his belief in pan-Germanic nationalism. Mendelssohn, a loyal German, but not a nationalist, envisioned a music world led by chamber music, choral music and oratorios, and the symphony orchestra.
Mendelssohn succeeded in having Europe stay the course he envisioned. But soon after his death the German Revolution took place, and nationalism and racism came to the fore. Wagner suddenly had a voice to which the nation listened, and he used it to powerful effect in his operatic writing.
But he did more. In the early 1850s, Richard Wagner wrote a pamphlet entitled Judaism in Music, which would subsequently be published as a book after he expanded the text. The central focus for Wagner in this book was to explain the reasons why Jews were a detriment to the Germanic arts, and why they should not be accepted by the nation. " . . . Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.”
Felix Mendelssohn, still a towering musical figure in Europe a few years after his death, became a primary example used by Wagner in his argumentation against the Jewish people. It did not matter to Wagner that the Jewish-born Mendelssohn had been converted to Christianity as a child. He explained in detail why they were incapable of writing great music, and that their blood hindered it.
Wagner's book became the equivalent of a national best-seller, as it played right into the mindset of most Germans*. Within a matter of just a few years, Felix Mendelssohn went from being the most performed composer in Central Europe (by far the most performed), to almost not performed at all.
What Felix Mendelssohn meant to the world in the first half of the 19th Century, and almost everything he achieved, was brutally and systematically assailed, and ultimately destroyed by racism (and perhaps by Wagner’s jealousy as well).
The ebb and flow of the popularity of historical artistic figures takes its own natural course. This cannot, and should not, be tampered with. But in the case of Mendelssohn, Wagner created such extreme negative propaganda that the generations never had a chance to react. He literally exterminated the esteemed and worshiped reputation of Felix Mendelssohn – all in the matter of less than half a decade. It was a posthumous assassination of the greatest magnitude.
As is well documented in Wagner’s letters and other writings over the rest of his long life, the famous Germanic opera composer remained compulsively obsessed with continuing his denigration of the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn, even well after the fatal damage had been done, and all the way until his own death in 1883.
There have been a few Mendelssohn revivals over the decades, including one in the 1920s which was successful enough that the Nazis added Mendelssohn's name to the lists of forbidden artists in Germany in 1936. But the true Mendelssohn revival did not begin until the 1990s, and is a long process which will take many generations to rectify. The legacy of this towering composer still bears the deep scars of what Richard Wagner and his followers taught the world for decades in the late 19th-Century.
It is important to note that what we all learned in school about Mendelssohn still bears the fruits of Wagner’s negative PR campaign. It permeated the mindset of even the most profound and respected scholars. And despite the recent slow but steady awaking of the music world to what occurred, most people still take as fact much of the disinformation which diminished Mendelssohn’s reputation – disinformation which forcibly yanked him out of the elite group of the world’s greatest composers, and placed him somewhere, amorphously, lower down on the list.