MENDELSSOHN HOUSE – LEIPZIG
Composer’s Life, Death, Works and Music Museum
The Mendelssohn House in Leipzig is just one step of the trail of the music city of Germany, just a short walk from the Gewandhaus Concert Hall. Mendelssohn, along with Robert Schumann and Johann Sebastian Bach and is son Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach make up the musical lights of Leipzig, along with the musical instrument museum of the Leipzig University (see Grassi Musical Instrument Museum). Mendelssohn lived and worked in Leipzig with his family from 1835 until his early death in 1847 and it is here you can find the house in which the 19th Century Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy lived and died and explore his music.
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in 1809 in Hamburg, the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His family moved to Berlin when was 2,, and he and his siblings were baptised into the Christian Church. A musical prodigy, he made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of 9 and began his first composition album at 10. Well-traveled and educated in Berlin, England and Scotland.
He served as the music director of the Lower Rhine Music Festival conducting guest appearances in Leipzig, then appointed Director of Music of the Gewandhaus in 1833. He married the 16 year old daughter of a French Hugenot pastor, Cécile Jeanrenaud, in Frankfurt and was appointed Kapellmeister of the Royal Court of Prussia. He died in Leipzig at the age of 38 from an aneurysm after a trip to Switzerland. It was Mendelssohn who brought Johann Sebastian Bach (see Bach Museum) back to fame in Leipzig with the building of a monument to the home town composer who had fallen from favor for almost a century. He was also a friend of Goethe (see Auerbach's Keller Goethe’s Flying Devils).
The house where he lived in Leipzig until his death, has been painstakingly restored as the last private residence of the composer and the only house where he lived that can still be visited. On multiple floors, are information about Mendelssohn‘s life and his work, including his personal letters and music sheets, as well as art work demonstrating the composer’s hobby, water colors of landscape and architecture, with a favorite subject of the lakes of Lucerne which had attracted musicians and artists before him (see Wagner Museum Lucerne). The artifact room shows objects of Mendelssohn’s life in a rotating elevator sort of display, with a model of the original Gewandhaus Concert hall in its 19th Century form, along with authentic period furniture in his salon and music study, as well as his death mask.
On the second floor of the house is the apartment where the Mendelssohn family lived, furnished in the late Biedermeier style, as if the family had just steped out. While on the first floor is the most entertaining room of the museum where through the magic of computers and the digital library of Mendelssohn‘s music, the visitor can actually conduct an orchestra of tonal sounds divided by instrument section to a Mendelsson concerto score. For live versions of Mendelssohn, the music salon of the house is still used for morning concerts, held every Sunday at 11 am.
Visiting the Mendelssohn House in Leipzig
The house is located at Goldschmidtstraße 12, marked by the music trail of medallions in the pavement from the Gewandhaus Hall in the city center. The house is open every day from 10 am to 6 pm. © Bargain Travel Europe
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Mendelssohn Leipzig
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See Also:
TRADITIONAL COFFEE HOUSES OF LEIPZIG
YOUNG RICHARD WAGNER - LEIPZIG
BATTLE OF NATIONS MONUMENT - LEIPZIG
SAXONY CULTURAL HIGHLIGHTS 2017-2017
BACH HOUSE MUSIC MUSEUM - EISENACH
