7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7success, and the impecunious composer was at last able to
buy himself a piano. At the end of August he moved into
lodgings with his brother Ferdinand. Schubert’s health,
broken by the illness of 1823, had deteriorated, and his
ceaseless work had exhausted him. In October he devel-
oped typhoid fever, and his last days were spent in the
company of his brother and several close friends.
Felix Mendelssohn
(b. Feb. 3, 1809, Hamburg [Germany]—d. Nov. 4, 1847, Leipzig)
J
akob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy—or Felix
Mendelssohn—was a German composer, pianist,
musical conductor, and teacher who was among the most
celebrated figures of the early Romantic period. In his
music Mendelssohn largely observed Classical models and
practices while initiating key aspects of Romanticism—
the artistic movement that exalted feeling and the
imagination above rigid forms and traditions. Among his
most famous works are Overture to A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1826), Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto
(1844), two piano concerti (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah
(1846), and several pieces of chamber music.
Early Life and Works
Felix was born of Jewish parents, Abraham and Lea Salomon
Mendelssohn, from whom he took his first piano lessons.
Though the Mendelssohns were proud of their ancestry,
they considered it desirable, in accordance with 19th-
century liberal ideas, to mark their emancipation from the
ghetto by adopting the Christian faith. Accordingly Felix,
together with his brother and two sisters, was baptized in
his youth as a Lutheran Christian. The name Bartholdy, a