7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7family property on the river Spree, was held by a wealthy
maternal uncle who had embraced Protestantism. When
the fortune of this relative passed to the Mendelssohns,
his name was adopted by them.
In 1811, during the French occupation of Hamburg, the
family had moved to Berlin, where Mendelssohn studied
the piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with K.F.
Zelter, who, as a composer and teacher, exerted an enor-
mous influence on his development. His personality was
nourished by a broad knowledge of the arts and was also
stimulated by learning and scholarship. He traveled with
his sister to Paris, where he took further piano lessons and
where he appears to have become acquainted with the
music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mendelssohn was an extremely precocious musical
composer. He wrote numerous compositions during his
boyhood, among them 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string
orchestra, concerti, sonatas, and fugues. He made his first
public appearance in 1818—at the age of nine—in Berlin.
In 1821 Mendelssohn was taken to Weimar to meet
J.W. von Goethe, for whom he played works of J.S. Bach
and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet
No. 3. in B Minor (1825). A remarkable friendship developed
between the aging poet and the 12-year-old musician. The
next year he reached his full stature as a composer with
the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Mendelssohn also became active as a conductor. On
March 11, 1829, at the Singakademie, Berlin, he conducted
the first performance since Bach’s death of the St. Matthew
Passion, thus inaugurating the Bach revival of the 19th and
20th centuries. Meanwhile he had visited Switzerland
and had met Carl Maria von Weber, whose opera Der
Freischütz encouraged him to develop a national character
in music. Mendelssohn’s great work of this period was