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Good Morning, Mr. Mendelssohn: Roman
»Es ging um nichts weniger als um Vollkommenheit.«
»Bist du auch fleißig, Felix?«, fragt Lea Mendelssohn häufig ihren Zweitgeborenen. Oh ja, das ist Felix und bleibt es sein nur 37 Jahre währendes Leben lang. Er wird einer der größten Musiker und Musikförderer der Romantik und trägt wesentlich zur Wiederentdeckung von Bach und Händel bei. Für die bezaubernde Betty Pistor komponiert der Jugendliche ein Streichquartett. Doch während diese erste große Liebe sich nie erfüllt, bleibt eine andere große Liebe ein Leben lang bestehen und eine gegenseitige: Als der zwanzigjährige Felix zum ersten Mal nach London reist, wird er dort enthusiastisch aufgenommen und so berühmt, dass ihn die Leute auf der Straße mit »Good morning, Mr. Mendelssohn« begrüßen.
Die aktuell einzige Romanbiografie über Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
Ein warmherziges, feinsinniges und facettenreiches Porträt der Mendelssohns und ihrer Zeit.
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Published March 10, 2017
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December 21, 2017
Klappentext
»Bist du auch fleißig, Felix?«, fragt Lea Mendelssohn häufig ihren Zweitgeborenen. Oh ja – das ist Felix und er bleibt es sein nur 38 Jahre währendes Leben lang. Er wird einer der größten Musiker und Musikförderer der Romantik und trägt wesentlich zur Wiederentdeckung von Bach und Händel bei. Für die bezaubernde Betty
Pistor komponiert der Jugendliche ein Streichquartett. Doch während diese erste große Liebe sich nie erfüllt, wird eine andere – die Liebe zu England – erwidert und bleibt bestehen: Als der zwanzigjährige Felix zum ersten Mal nach London reist, wird er dort enthusiastisch aufgenommen und so berühmt, dass ihn die Leute auf der Straße mit »Good Morning, Mr. Mendelssohn« begrüßen.
Die Autorin
Rosemarie Marschner, geb. in Österreich lebt seit 1973 in Deutschland und arbeitet als freie Journalistin und Hörspielautorin.
Meine Meinung
Story
Felix Mendelssohn ist einer der größten deutschen Komponisten, Lehrer und Förderer zeitgenössischer Musik. Felix wächst im gutbürgerlichen Verhältnissen auf, geht auf die besten Schulen. Schon früh wird sein Talent entdeckt und gefördert. Er führt ein Leben für die Musik durch die Musik. Seine Musikstücke haben epische Ausmaße und begeistern die Menschen nicht nur in Deutschland. Das Buch erzählt die Geschichte diese Genies. Ein Genie das viel für die Förderung der zeitgenössischen Musik getan hat ,dem aber nur ein kurzes Leben vergönnt war.
Charaktere
Neben Felix Mendelssohn spielen eine ganze Reihe Personen mit, da die Geschichte auf dem ausgiebigen Briefwechsel von Felix und seiner Schwester beruht, ist es klar dass sämtliche Charaktere reale historische Persönlichkeiten sind .
Mein Fazit
Ich habe das Buch vom dtv Verlag als Rezensionsexemplar bekommen. Ich gebe zu, ich hätte mir das Buch selber wohl nie gekauft, da ich eigentlich keinem großen Bezug zur klassischen Musik habe. Doch beim Lesen hat mir das Buch immer besser gefallen und ich muss sagen, dass das Buch nicht nur eine Autobiografie ist, auch gibt es einen Einblick in die damalige Zeit. Das Leben Felix Mendelssohn verläuft völlig reibungslos, gute Schulbildung, keine Geldsorgen, Erfolg mit allem was er macht. Es ist nicht die übliche Geschichte des Underdogs der sich nach Oben arbeiten muss. Gerade das macht das Buch so anders und keineswegs langweilig. Das Buch war ein tollen Leseerlebnis und ich kann der Geschichte nur die Höchstbewertung geben 5 von 5 Leseratten / Sternen, dazu eine Leseempfehlung nicht nur für Anhänger der klassischen Musik.
»Bist du auch fleißig, Felix?«, fragt Lea Mendelssohn häufig ihren Zweitgeborenen. Oh ja – das ist Felix und er bleibt es sein nur 38 Jahre währendes Leben lang. Er wird einer der größten Musiker und Musikförderer der Romantik und trägt wesentlich zur Wiederentdeckung von Bach und Händel bei. Für die bezaubernde Betty
Pistor komponiert der Jugendliche ein Streichquartett. Doch während diese erste große Liebe sich nie erfüllt, wird eine andere – die Liebe zu England – erwidert und bleibt bestehen: Als der zwanzigjährige Felix zum ersten Mal nach London reist, wird er dort enthusiastisch aufgenommen und so berühmt, dass ihn die Leute auf der Straße mit »Good Morning, Mr. Mendelssohn« begrüßen.
Die Autorin
Rosemarie Marschner, geb. in Österreich lebt seit 1973 in Deutschland und arbeitet als freie Journalistin und Hörspielautorin.
Meine Meinung
Story
Felix Mendelssohn ist einer der größten deutschen Komponisten, Lehrer und Förderer zeitgenössischer Musik. Felix wächst im gutbürgerlichen Verhältnissen auf, geht auf die besten Schulen. Schon früh wird sein Talent entdeckt und gefördert. Er führt ein Leben für die Musik durch die Musik. Seine Musikstücke haben epische Ausmaße und begeistern die Menschen nicht nur in Deutschland. Das Buch erzählt die Geschichte diese Genies. Ein Genie das viel für die Förderung der zeitgenössischen Musik getan hat ,dem aber nur ein kurzes Leben vergönnt war.
Charaktere
Neben Felix Mendelssohn spielen eine ganze Reihe Personen mit, da die Geschichte auf dem ausgiebigen Briefwechsel von Felix und seiner Schwester beruht, ist es klar dass sämtliche Charaktere reale historische Persönlichkeiten sind .
Mein Fazit
Ich habe das Buch vom dtv Verlag als Rezensionsexemplar bekommen. Ich gebe zu, ich hätte mir das Buch selber wohl nie gekauft, da ich eigentlich keinem großen Bezug zur klassischen Musik habe. Doch beim Lesen hat mir das Buch immer besser gefallen und ich muss sagen, dass das Buch nicht nur eine Autobiografie ist, auch gibt es einen Einblick in die damalige Zeit. Das Leben Felix Mendelssohn verläuft völlig reibungslos, gute Schulbildung, keine Geldsorgen, Erfolg mit allem was er macht. Es ist nicht die übliche Geschichte des Underdogs der sich nach Oben arbeiten muss. Gerade das macht das Buch so anders und keineswegs langweilig. Das Buch war ein tollen Leseerlebnis und ich kann der Geschichte nur die Höchstbewertung geben 5 von 5 Leseratten / Sternen, dazu eine Leseempfehlung nicht nur für Anhänger der klassischen Musik.
August 13, 2021
In 1936, the mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, returned from a journey to find that the Nazis had removed the statue of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in the city centre. As a consequence, Goerdeler resigned, joined the German resistance and was later executed.
I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that a man like Goerdeler was able to overlook so much and then drew the line at destroying the memorial of a Romantic composer. Today, Mendelssohn’s music has largely disappeared off the radar of everyone but classical music lovers, with the exception of his wedding march which is played in every second Hollywood romcom. What then was so special about Mendelssohn that made him a star in 19th century Europe and caused people like Goerdeler to, almost literally, die for him?
In her Romanbiografie, Rosemarie Marschner tries to unravel the phenomenon Mendelssohn and turn his life into a semi-fictional piece of entertainment. This is rather difficult because most of Mendelssohn’s life wasn’t exactly blockbuster stuff. Born into a rich family, his talent was recognised early and his family supported him (unlike his sister) in his wish to become a career musician. He travelled a lot, became massively successful and never lacked employment, spending the defining years of his life as the star of the Leipzig musical scene and the most popular composer in Europe. The first major tragedy in his life was the death of his sister Fanny, followed by a series of strokes in the same year which left him dead aged 38. A short life, but not a particularly dramatic one.
Marschner’s style of writing doesn’t exactly help to make things more interesting. It’s easy to read, but her sentences feel stiff and some of her word choices are downright strange. Her detached way of narrating Mendelssohn’s life is also rather counterproductive because neither he nor anyone else in the story ever really emerges as a three-dimensional being. The book wants to be something between a historical novel and a biography, but the result reads like a fanfic with not enough dialogues.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Marschner doesn’t really convey why we should care about Mendelssohn. He was a genius, no doubt, but that alone doesn’t make him interesting. Marschner’s Felix is a blandly affable creature without any serious character flaws. She also dwells a lot on how good-looking he was which is just… weird. The less endearing sides of him – like his irritability or the whole Jenny Lind affair – are quickly brushed aside or left out entirely. Instead of a flawed but brilliant genius, we are left with the perfect model of the Victorian/Biedermeier family man, respectable but boring. Only rarely do Mendelssohn’s inimitable wit and humour shine through.
The real Mendelssohn was a much more complex figure. He grew up in Berlin in an influential bourgeoise family who were nevertheless constantly discriminated against for being Jewish. To secure a better future for their children, Mendelssohn’s parents converted to Christianity and had their children baptised. Mendelssohn’s true feelings about this aren’t known. He was very passionate about Christian ecclesiastical music and composed an oratorio about St Paul, but it is rather telling that he preferred to be called by his original last name Mendelssohn when abroad in England rather than by his new Christian family name Bartholdy. In any case, converting didn't save him from antisemitical harassment, nor did it stop the radical right-wing forces in Germany from destroying his reputation shortly after he'd died.
From his letters and family reports, Mendelssohn emerges as a self-assured but slightly eccentric character. He loved Shakespeare and poetry and was very fond of Britain which he regarded as a kind of second home. A skilled painter, he liked to draw little cartoons on the margins of his letters. He also had a habit of switching from German to English whenever his family annoyed him and only became his old self again after taking a long nap, which I find rather amusing (and relatable). In short, he was a complex human being with strenghts, flaws and quirks, none of which really emerge in this novel. Marschner wants so much to make us care about the human being Felix Mendelssohn, but leaves out most of what made him human in the first place. Then again, a novelised biography is a rather strange genre, neither fish nor fowl.
In the end, that brings us back to Goerdeler and the question of what made Mendelssohn such an outstanding person. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply that someone has to be extraordinary to not have their memory violated by the Nazis. Imho, much of the insistence on Mendelssohn being such a perfect moral paragon is linked to the notion that a German-Jewish musical genius wasn’t allowed the same eccentricities that someone like Wagner, for example, could indulge in. To be respected, both in life and afterwards, Mendelssohn had to be perfect in his private life as well as in his musical output – and even the technical perfection of his works was then described as a kind of “soulless artificiality” when his antisemitic critics ran out of faults to criticise.
The reason why people still care about Mendelssohn, and why he deserves to have a huge memorial in the middle of Leipzig, is that he wrote incredibly beautiful music. His works are among the most stunning pieces of art humanity has ever created and even the Nazis couldn’t completely eradicate them from cultural memory. They are too powerful for that.
Sadly, music cannot be conveyed in writing, even by a more skilful writer than Marschner. It has to be experienced to truly understand the genius of the man who composed it. But even if people cannot stand classical music or have never listened to a violin concerto in their lives, they should be able to read a book about Mendelssohn and feel sympathy for him if Marschner had done him justice. Not just because his life was exemplary for the disgusting antisemitism that Jewish-born Germans had to experience in the 19th century, but also because he was an interesting man in his own right, maybe not as fascinating as some other artists of his time, but then again, people insist on writing novels about Shakespeare and we know virtually nothing about him.
In a different genre (and the hands of a better writer), Mendelssohn’s life could have made for either an interesting biography or an engaging historical novel. This book is unsuccessful because it is neither, and because it fails to express in words the two things that make Mendelssohn interesting: His music, and his humanity. As things stand, we’ll have to rely on the former for a lasting memorial of the man who created it.
I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that a man like Goerdeler was able to overlook so much and then drew the line at destroying the memorial of a Romantic composer. Today, Mendelssohn’s music has largely disappeared off the radar of everyone but classical music lovers, with the exception of his wedding march which is played in every second Hollywood romcom. What then was so special about Mendelssohn that made him a star in 19th century Europe and caused people like Goerdeler to, almost literally, die for him?
In her Romanbiografie, Rosemarie Marschner tries to unravel the phenomenon Mendelssohn and turn his life into a semi-fictional piece of entertainment. This is rather difficult because most of Mendelssohn’s life wasn’t exactly blockbuster stuff. Born into a rich family, his talent was recognised early and his family supported him (unlike his sister) in his wish to become a career musician. He travelled a lot, became massively successful and never lacked employment, spending the defining years of his life as the star of the Leipzig musical scene and the most popular composer in Europe. The first major tragedy in his life was the death of his sister Fanny, followed by a series of strokes in the same year which left him dead aged 38. A short life, but not a particularly dramatic one.
Marschner’s style of writing doesn’t exactly help to make things more interesting. It’s easy to read, but her sentences feel stiff and some of her word choices are downright strange. Her detached way of narrating Mendelssohn’s life is also rather counterproductive because neither he nor anyone else in the story ever really emerges as a three-dimensional being. The book wants to be something between a historical novel and a biography, but the result reads like a fanfic with not enough dialogues.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Marschner doesn’t really convey why we should care about Mendelssohn. He was a genius, no doubt, but that alone doesn’t make him interesting. Marschner’s Felix is a blandly affable creature without any serious character flaws. She also dwells a lot on how good-looking he was which is just… weird. The less endearing sides of him – like his irritability or the whole Jenny Lind affair – are quickly brushed aside or left out entirely. Instead of a flawed but brilliant genius, we are left with the perfect model of the Victorian/Biedermeier family man, respectable but boring. Only rarely do Mendelssohn’s inimitable wit and humour shine through.
The real Mendelssohn was a much more complex figure. He grew up in Berlin in an influential bourgeoise family who were nevertheless constantly discriminated against for being Jewish. To secure a better future for their children, Mendelssohn’s parents converted to Christianity and had their children baptised. Mendelssohn’s true feelings about this aren’t known. He was very passionate about Christian ecclesiastical music and composed an oratorio about St Paul, but it is rather telling that he preferred to be called by his original last name Mendelssohn when abroad in England rather than by his new Christian family name Bartholdy. In any case, converting didn't save him from antisemitical harassment, nor did it stop the radical right-wing forces in Germany from destroying his reputation shortly after he'd died.
From his letters and family reports, Mendelssohn emerges as a self-assured but slightly eccentric character. He loved Shakespeare and poetry and was very fond of Britain which he regarded as a kind of second home. A skilled painter, he liked to draw little cartoons on the margins of his letters. He also had a habit of switching from German to English whenever his family annoyed him and only became his old self again after taking a long nap, which I find rather amusing (and relatable). In short, he was a complex human being with strenghts, flaws and quirks, none of which really emerge in this novel. Marschner wants so much to make us care about the human being Felix Mendelssohn, but leaves out most of what made him human in the first place. Then again, a novelised biography is a rather strange genre, neither fish nor fowl.
In the end, that brings us back to Goerdeler and the question of what made Mendelssohn such an outstanding person. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply that someone has to be extraordinary to not have their memory violated by the Nazis. Imho, much of the insistence on Mendelssohn being such a perfect moral paragon is linked to the notion that a German-Jewish musical genius wasn’t allowed the same eccentricities that someone like Wagner, for example, could indulge in. To be respected, both in life and afterwards, Mendelssohn had to be perfect in his private life as well as in his musical output – and even the technical perfection of his works was then described as a kind of “soulless artificiality” when his antisemitic critics ran out of faults to criticise.
The reason why people still care about Mendelssohn, and why he deserves to have a huge memorial in the middle of Leipzig, is that he wrote incredibly beautiful music. His works are among the most stunning pieces of art humanity has ever created and even the Nazis couldn’t completely eradicate them from cultural memory. They are too powerful for that.
Sadly, music cannot be conveyed in writing, even by a more skilful writer than Marschner. It has to be experienced to truly understand the genius of the man who composed it. But even if people cannot stand classical music or have never listened to a violin concerto in their lives, they should be able to read a book about Mendelssohn and feel sympathy for him if Marschner had done him justice. Not just because his life was exemplary for the disgusting antisemitism that Jewish-born Germans had to experience in the 19th century, but also because he was an interesting man in his own right, maybe not as fascinating as some other artists of his time, but then again, people insist on writing novels about Shakespeare and we know virtually nothing about him.
In a different genre (and the hands of a better writer), Mendelssohn’s life could have made for either an interesting biography or an engaging historical novel. This book is unsuccessful because it is neither, and because it fails to express in words the two things that make Mendelssohn interesting: His music, and his humanity. As things stand, we’ll have to rely on the former for a lasting memorial of the man who created it.
July 4, 2017
Geschafft! It was, perhaps, 100 pages longer than it needed to be, but I still enjoyed it. The German was not overly difficult. I had wanted to learn more about Mendelssohn after visiting the museum dedicated to him in Leipzig, which is one of the best museums I have ever been to.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews