THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSICIANS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7

Mendelssohn as a composer whose influence on English
music equaled that of George Frideric Handel. Later
generations of English composers, enamoured of Richard
Wagner, Claude Debussy, or Igor Stravinsky, revolted
against the domination of Mendelssohn and condemned
the sentimentality of his lesser works.
In 1833 he was in London to conduct his Italian Symphony
(Symphony No. 4 in A Major–Minor), and in the same year he
became music director of Düsseldorf. At Düsseldorf, too,
he began his first oratorio, St. Paul. In 1835 he became con-
ductor of the celebrated Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig,
where he not only raised the standard of orchestral play-
ing but made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany.

Marriage and Maturity

In 1835 Mendelssohn was overcome by the death of his
father, Abraham, whose dearest wish had been that his son
should complete St. Paul. He accordingly plunged into this
work with renewed determination and the following year
conducted it at Düsseldorf. The same year at Frankfurt he
met Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French Protestant
clergyman. Though she was no more than 16, they became
engaged and were married on March 28, 1837. Mendelssohn’s
sister Fanny, the member of his family who remained closest
to him, spoke kindly of her sister-in-law. Indeed, Fanny
was not only a composer in her own right—she had herself
written some of the Songs Without Words attributed to her
brother—but she seems to have exercised, by her sisterly
companionship, a powerful influence on the development
of his inner musical nature.
Works written over the following years include the
Variations sérieuses (1841), for piano, the Lobgesang (1840;
Hymn of Praise), Psalm CXIV, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D