The Composer as Other: Gender and Race in the Biography of Felix Mendelssohn

Abstract In the mid-nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy personified the Victorian gentleman; evidence of his ‘manliness’ was found in his class status, his success, his family relations, and his music. George Grove described the composer as ‘one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined’. Critic Henry Chorley wrote, ‘[d]emanding as it does, execution without grimace; fancy, cheerful and excursive, but never morbid; and feeling under the control of a serene, not sluggish spirit—Mendelssohn’s is manly music; and looses [sic] effect beyond that of almost any other of his contemporaries, when attempted by female hands’.