Word: mendelssohn
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...Felix Mendelssohn, the Nazi's No. 1 musical scapegoat, was back in open favor in Germany. In Munich his music led the program of the first symphony concert played in U.S.-occupied Germany. BBC reported meantime that records of both Mendelssohn and Offenbach (also blacklisted) had been found at Hitler's Berchtesgaden hideaway...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Father Finn had qualms about his two-hour concert of classic sacred music (Palestrina, Vittoria, Brahms, Mendelssohn); he thought it might be "a little on the gay side." To rehearse the sisters he had to modify the hardy rehearsal technique he had developed during 40 years with boys' choirs (stretching the singers out on table and piano tops for breathing exercises): "Of course, in the case of the sisters that just isn't done. . . . [They] are dedicated to an unworldly life. No Delilah business, you know...