Felix Mendelssohn in Pictures...

1. Felix Mendelssohn

3 February 1809 - Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born, in Hamburg to the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, the son of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and Lea Salomon, a member of the Itzig family and the sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy (a Prussian diplomat).

2. Napoleon Bonaparte

1811 - The family moved to Berlin, leaving Hamburg in disguise fearing French revenge for the Mendelssohn bank's role in breaking Napoleon's Continental System blockade. Here, Mendelssohn grew up among artists, musicians and scientists.

3. Lutheran Rose

 1816 - Abraham Mendelssohn renounced his family’s Jewish religion and baptised his children as Lutherans. Abraham and his wife Lea also formally adopted the surname Mendelssohn Bartholdy, with Abraham later explaining this in a letter to Felix as a means of showing a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses: "There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius".

4. Carl Friedrich Zelter

1819 - Felix (and his sister Fanny) began studying counterpoint and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin. His studies with Zelter would prove to be an extremely important influence on his future career and in forming his musical tastes, with his work during this period notable for its reminiscence of Johann Sebastian Bach, by whose music he was greatly inspired.

5. Title page - 1600

1826 – Mendelssohn wrote his Overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (which is perhaps the earliest example of a concert overture). This and his String Octet in E-flat major, which he had written the year before at just 16, are perhaps the best-known of his early works.

6. Fingal's Cave

1829 - Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance in Berlin of Bach's St Matthew Passion. The success of this performance – the first since Bach's death in 1750 – was an important element in the revival of J. S. Bach's music in Germany and across Europe. In the same year Mendelssohn also made his first visit to Britain. This would prove to be the first of ten visits to Britain during his lifetime and would inspire two of his most famous works: the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3).

7. George Frideric Handel

 1833 – Mendelssohn kick-started yet another revival. In the spring of that year Mendelssohn directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf, beginning with a performance of Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, which would precipitate a Handel revival in Germany, (similar to the reawakened interest in J. S. Bach following his performance of the St Matthew Passion 4 years before).

8. The Conversion of St. Paul - Michelangelo

1836 - Having been named conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835, the following year Mendelssohn premiered his oratorio St. Paul at the Lower Rhenish Festival in Düsseldorf in 1836. St. Paul seemed to many of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries to be his finest work and cemented his European reputation. 

9. Cécile Jeanrenaud

28 March 1837 - Mendelssohn married Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud (10 October 1817 – 25 September 1853), the daughter of a French Protestant clergyman. The couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Lilli and Felix.

10. The Leipzig Conservatory

 1843 - Mendelssohn founded a major music school – the Leipzig Conservatory, now the Hochschule für Musik und Theater "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy" (The Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre). This would become a bastion of musical conservatism; a tradition which, after his death in 1847, was continued when Moscheles succeeded him as head of the Conservatory.

11. Jenny Lind

1847 - In general Mendelssohn's personal life seems to have been fairly unexciting when compared to his contemporaries– except for his relationship with Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whom he met in October 1844. In 1847, Mendelssohn is said to have written a request for Lind to elope with him to America.  

12. Mendelssohn's grave

1847 – A final tour of England and the death of his sister Fanny had left Mendelssohn exhausted, ill and distressed. On 4 November, Mendelssohn himself died in Leipzig after a series of strokes. He was 38. Upon his death Jenny Lind wrote, "[He was] the only person who brought fulfilment to my spirit, and almost as soon as I found him I lost him again". In 1869 Lind erected a plaque in Mendelssohn's memory at his birthplace in Hamburg and in 1849 she established the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation, which makes an award to a British resident young composer every two years in Mendelssohn's memory.