Such a Whirl!

Of all the "non-Aryan" scapegoats of the Nazis, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) led the musical list. The Third Reich outlawed the playing of Mendelssohn's music, destroyed his statues and commissioned an "Aryan" to rewrite his Midsummer Night's Dream score.

His letters, published this week (Mendelssohn Letters, edited by G. Selden-Goth; Pantheon Books Inc., $4.50), prove that the light-hearted Felix was a curious target for so much Nazi venom. Hardly aware of his Jewish ancestry, Felix was a devout Christian. Some of his paragraphs were so passionately certain of the supremacy of German art that even the shrill Dr. Goebbels might have applauded. He wrote his family: "There is surely no art like our German one!" And to Goethe:

"I appreciate . . . being born a German." A chronically happy German, Felix lacked any touch of Weltschmerz. In all his 38 carefree years, a political thought apparently never entered his head. He was born into a wealthy family, composed 60 pieces before he was eleven, was famed throughout Europe before he was 20. He became a musical Marco Polo who brought back from Scotland a Scotch Symphony, from the Hebrides Fingal's Cave, from Italy an Italian Symphony. His merits as a composer have been argued for a century. If his capricious music was not always profound, his mastery of technique sometimes concealed the fact. He was an organist who made Europe aware of Johann Sebastian Bach, and his position as a musicologist is still unchallenged. On the side he filled folios with hundreds of delicate water colors and pen sketches, and he was music's most prolific letter-writer. "This," he once wrote to his mother, "is my 35th letter since yesterday."

The Queen Was Off Key. In the present edition of letters (the most complete in 80 years) Felix' frivolity bubbles as brightly as it does in his music. In London the young man of fashion found "Such a whirl! It is mad! I am quite giddy and confused. . . . Lady Morgan was there, and Winterhalter, and Mrs. Jameson, and Duprez, who . . . sang a French romance. . . . Who can count them all!"

In Buckingham Palace, he was delighted at the way Queen Victoria sang his songs ". . . beautifully in tune . . . and with very nice expression. Only where ... it goes down to D and then comes up again . . . she sang D-sharp each time; and because the first two times I gave her the note, the last time, sure enough, she sang D--where it ought to have been D-sharp. But except for this ... it was really charming."

For her 365-page book, Editor-translator Gisella Selden-Goth finecombed the German shelves in New York libraries and the Library of Congress. Said she: "If I had been able to use the libraries in Germany there would have been a great deal more. [If the Mendelssohn correspondence] . . . shared the fate of other spiritual products of Jewish origin ... no complete edition of his letters can ever be published."

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