Marx and Engels on the social functions of art

The problems posed by valuing a cultural heritage in a socialist society can be clarified by first briefly examining Marx's own theory of the social functions of artworks.Footnote ⁷ For although the surviving writings of Marx and Engels offer no systematic treatment of aesthetic issues, there does emerge – across various essays and letters – a fairly well-developed theory of the functions of artworks within the societies in which they were created. As Stefan Morawski explains, for Marx art operates ‘as a specific mode of the social consciousness’ that is conditioned by the subjectivity of the particular artist.Footnote ⁸ This social consciousness generally functions in one of two ways. On the one hand, the work of art can reinforce the ideology of the ruling class through the Verdinglichung (reification) – to use a Marxist–Leninist term – of predominant social relations in art objects.Footnote ⁹ In Marx's view this is a fate that seems to befall much art, since the art world is a superstructural entity fundamentally shaped (in large part, if not wholly) by the material conditions upheld by the ruling class, conditions that art, in turn, helps to maintain and legitimize. On the other hand, art can also have a progressive function, reflecting on the processes of alienation that constitute a given socio-economic order. This latter model of art's function was referred to by Marx and in East German Marxist–Leninist discourse as the Widerspiegelung model.Footnote ¹⁰ Widerspiegelung is inherently oppositional (at least in a pre-communist society) insofar as it requires art to operate counter to its society's alienating conditions by exposing those conditions or by identifying the seeds of a revolutionary socialism latent in an earlier social order.

Leaving aside the challenges in applying this bipartite model to an art form such as music that – in its abstraction – is often poorly suited to diagnosis of the economic and social ills of an age, the model presents other difficulties. First, while it explains the value of some artworks for an audience of their own time and place, it is less clear how this value might transfer to future audiences. One could argue that encounters with past works of progressive art could help future audiences understand earlier stages of material progress and alienation through the lens of cultural objects. This is consistent with the model, but seems out of step with the central significance East Germans accorded to the care and promotion of the musical heritage.

Second, although limited support for the value of a cultural heritage to a future society may be inferred from Marxian aesthetic theory, it offers little support for a national cultural heritage. Indeed, it can be deduced from discussions of particular works and artists that Marx and Engels each adopted a kind of (at least Western European) transnational orientation. In Engels's discussion of Balzac, for instance, the argument is made that the novelist's implicit and even subconscious critique of the nobility of Paris is as revelatory and valuable to a German or English reader as to a member of French society.Footnote ¹¹ Further, those artworks that Marx and Engels laud as capable of contributing to progressive socialist goals run the gamut from ancient Greek sculptureFootnote ¹² and the dramas of Shakespeare,Footnote ¹³ to the paintings of Raphael and the compositions of Paganini.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, the transnationalism of Marx and Engels's own thought and the cosmopolitan nature of their aesthetic tastes offered little support to an East German musical establishment concerned with justifying the value to the GDR of a particularly Germanic musical heritage.

Yet the roots of a more satisfying justification can be located in Marxian theory. Marx offers an additional explanation for art's value, one that lies outside the Widerspiegelung/Verdinglichung model: that art may contribute to the progress of humanity towards a communist goal through the expression of values fundamental to all human progress. Unfortunately, what neither Marx nor Engels explains is why exactly this kind of expression ought to matter. It can be inferred, however, that such expression may have a kind of educative effect on future audiences, perhaps by inspiring contemplation of those fundamental values, or providing a model for emulation, or even evoking an emotional response such as hope. What Marxian theory offers here is incomplete, but it does serve, as we will see, as a jumping-off point for East German musicians and scholars concerned with rooting their justification for the value of the musical heritage in Marx's thought. Further, what Marx and Engels offer is undefined enough to potentially apply even to works of more abstract art, including musical works both texted and untexted.

East German Marxism–Leninism and the cultural heritage

While the nationalist dimension of the project of preserving the Germanic cultural heritage finds no clear basis in the Marxian framework, its political significance to East Germany was unavoidable. Elaine Kelly argues that such projects of constructing a national history are commonly pursued during times of political upheaval, as a means of stabilizing and repairing fragmented social structures, and as a means of legitimizing nascent states via narratives that portray those states as inexorable and exceptional.Footnote ¹⁵ Laura Silverberg further argues that the GDR relied heavily on constructs linking East German culture to Germany's glorious literary and musical heritages because – in the wake of the Hallstein Doctrine – the nation struggled to claim legitimacy on both political and economic grounds.Footnote ¹⁶ The ‘mighty handful’ musicologist Ernst Hermann Meyer gives credence to this argument, claiming ‘a people that has no past, has no future’.Footnote ¹⁷ And he follows that sentiment with the claim that Pflege (care) for the national cultural heritage amounts to nationale Selbstbehauptung (national self-assertion), which is requisite for contemporary artistic creativity.Footnote ¹⁸ In tying this care to the political project of a nascent East Germany as well as to the vitality of artistic creativity in the GDR, he also begins to bridge the distance between pragmatic political reasons for preserving a national musical heritage and a justification for that task grounded in Marxist–Leninist, if not Marxian, theory.

Meyer argues that only through the recognition and pursuit of great national projects such as the preservation of the musical heritage ‘can the artist attain wide-ranging, world- and humanity-embracing concepts, and serve all of mankind’.Footnote ¹⁹ The cultivation of a national cultural heritage, then, is essential to socially progressive contemporary artistic creativity. But one might rightly ask why this should be so. And it is here that one can see Marxist–Leninist thinkers such as Meyer attempting to reconcile Marx's thought with their own political concerns. For East German musicologists, the national musical heritage was significant both because it brought contemporary composers into communion with the Volk and traditions of the past, and because true artistic internationalism (a Marxian goal) was best promoted through the cultivation of national traditions brought to their creative apexes by native artists. Such traditions were then meant to contribute to transnational socialist progress through intercultural creative exchange. Meyer claims, for instance, that the essence of a true artistic internationalism always involves the recognition of the artistic achievements of equal nations and supports this with Soviet ideologue Andrei Zhdanov's statement: ‘That is why internationalism in music developed here: to respect the creativity of other peoples on the basis of the enrichment and development of a national music, on the basis of a blossoming that allows us to contribute something to other peoples.’Footnote ²⁰

A second revealing statement regarding the significance of the musical heritage to the GDR comes from an article published in 1959 in Musik und Gesellschaft – the official publication of the Union of Composers and Musicologists (VdKM) and widely considered the central musicological journal of the GDR. The article, by Berlin-based music critic Karl Schönewolf, is aptly entitled’ ‘Erbe und Gegenwart’ (Heritage and the Present), and lays out a number of significant themes:

Schönewolf calls here for the necessity of democratizing art, which is tied to the development of a socialist (and, in the minds of East German Marxist–Leninist thinkers, humanist) state. There is additionally an excavational dimension to the project of caring for the musical heritage, which entails a reimagining of music history through the lens of materialist historiography, in order to reveal the truth-content of the canonical works of these significant Germanic musicians. This dimension also points us to what East German politicians and intellectuals valued in these earlier works. There is the sense of the Widerspiegelung model at work, of the Marxian notion of the artwork as revelatory of its social and political context, of having a truth-content that needs to be uncovered. But the invocation of the ‘humanist, future-pregnant, even revolutionary’ dimension of these works recalls Marx's further claim – that art can promote progress through the expression of fundamental human values.

Humanism and the protosocialist ideal

Thus far I have treated this concept of the Germanic musical heritage as an uncontested entity in the GDR. Yet there was no unproblematic notion of the heritage, and negotiations surrounding who and what came under the umbrella of that idea – and by what justification – are as interesting (and fraught) as general debates about the value of the heritage. There was continual debate (sometimes more, sometimes less public) about who should be included in the Germanic canon, especially surrounding festivals honouring composers of the past. During the first few years of the East German state, a set of techniques for justifying a composer's inclusion developed within these discussions, where one such technique involved arguing for a latent humanism in the composer's works and worldview.

The association in the GDR of socialism with the humanist tradition can be traced in large part, as Elaine Kelly observes, to the influential Hungarian Marxist–Leninist philosopher Georg Lukács's identification of two antithetical strands in German intellectual history.Footnote ²² For Lukács, the humanist intellectual tradition is associated with those thinkers who embraced Hegelian dialectical thought and ultimately a Marxian historical-materialist dialecticism – the final and most advanced form of dialectics.Footnote ²³ In contrast to this lineage, there also developed a reactionary intellectual tradition in Germany. Much (if not all) of this latter tradition can be described in Lukácsian terms as ‘irrationalism’, and he traces the lineage of this heritage in his 1954 monograph, The Destruction of Reason, examining the ways in which the decadent and reactionary philosophical thought of figures such as Schopenhauer paved the way for twentieth-century German fascism.Footnote ²⁴

As this dichotomy was mapped onto aesthetic discourse in the 1950s, the humanist–socialist tradition became associated both with a socialist realist – or in Lukács's case, critical realistFootnote ²⁵ – aesthetic and (especially in discourse surrounding the musical heritage) with the styles, practices, and aesthetic ideals of a broadly conceived classical era.Footnote ²⁶ In contrast, the reactionary strand of thought – marked by the embrace of intuition, mysticism, and myth – became associated during these first years of the GDR with the romantic aesthetic.Footnote ²⁷ This romanticism (as we will see in the discussions surrounding the Mendelssohn Festwoche) was linked in East German discourse variously with a kind of decadent bourgeois morality and culture, with the reactionary and nihilist tendencies traced by Lukács, and – especially in the discourse of the later 1950s – with Nazi fascism and Western (and West German) capitalism.

This association of fascism with capitalism was, as historian Dietrich Orlow claims, foundational to the GDR's own project of fashioning a national identity as the site of a new, anti-fascist Germany – established by socialists who had ‘spearheaded the German resistance’ to Hitler's regime during the war.Footnote ²⁸ By this logic, capitalism was the root cause of the rise of fascism in Germany, and the Western Allies were not the extinguishers of this fascism but its spiritual successors. The socialist East – with its purported rejections of capitalism, of spiritual and aesthetic decadence, and of regressivism – offered an antidote to Western imperialism.

Detecting traces of a protosocialist humanism in the lives of German masters became an essential project associated with the care of the Germanic musical heritage. Anne Shreffler points out that for Marxist intellectuals (including Marxist–Leninists) musical praxis is a fundamentally human activity, and musical works are not autonomous entities but concretizations of social practices.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, traces of humanism and humanist ideals were often sought out, not only in the musical works themselves, but also in the lives and activities of their creators. For this reason, a large part of the care of the Germanic musical heritage involved writing new biographies of significant composers, biographies that accounted for the social conditions under which the masters worked. These revisionist biographies were acts of excavation and salvation that aimed to identify politically progressive and broader humanist tendencies in the lives of these individuals and, in so doing, to challenge biographical orthodoxies of bourgeois scholars.Footnote ³⁰

It should not surprise us that the paradigmatic protosocialist composer was Beethoven. And values attributed to Beethoven's life and work were often applied with greater or lesser success to other composers. The protosocialist modelFootnote ³¹ emphasized the values of labour and struggle over those of virtuosity and inspiration. The protosocialist composer was also cast first and foremost as a member of his community, rather than as an individual apart. Certainly a composer's political affiliations were important if they were sufficiently progressive. But if these were lacking, then personal associations with the right circles of political progressives or other unimpeachable artists could be sufficient. Also significant was service to one's community, through participation in or (better yet) leadership of professional and amateur musical associations or other social organizations. Just as important, if at times a bit more difficult to substantiate, was an intimate relationship with the Volk. This was most often established by searching out a composer's knowledge and use of folk materials and styles in his compositions, or by simply identifying a certain Volkstümlichkeit (folkiness or popularity) in the music.

This protosocialist ideal – of a composer rooted in and labouring for his community, one intimately familiar with the Volk and their musical traditions, and engaged in politically progressive pursuits – ill-suited as it was to most composers of the Germanic heritage (Beethoven included), became an essential means of negotiating the value of particular composers to a socialist East German society. And we can see in scholarly analyses of discussions surrounding other festivals the creativity with which the ‘square pegs’ of these composers’ lives and works were contorted to fit into the ‘round hole’ of the protosocialist model.Footnote ³² Arguments made for Mendelssohn's inclusion in the canon sometimes echo those made on behalf of these other figures. Yet, as we will see, the Mendelssohn discourse departs from these other discussions due, in part, to the willingness of the central figures in East German musical life to abandon the paradigm altogether, and in such a way that called its efficacy into question.

Planning the Festwoche

The organization of the Mendelssohn Festwoche provides a study in contrast with that of the far more elaborate festivities planned for the 200th anniversary of Handel's death (also in 1959), though we might question why the latter composer was treated as a less problematic case than Mendelssohn. Handel's life and works, after all, seem similarly resistant to protosocialist reading, and his claims to Germanness might appear more tenuous than those of Mendelssohn. Yet, as Pamela Potter has demonstrated, the issue of Handel's Germanness – complicated as it may be – had already been adjudicated during the Handel revival following the First World War so that by the 1920s the composer had been decisively declared an integral figure of the Germanic musical heritage.Footnote ³³ Indeed, the problems posed by Mendelssohn's biography (e.g., his Jewishness, his romanticism) were – as we shall see – deemed more profound. Further, the stakes in claiming Handel for the East were higher than for Mendelssohn, as there was more competition from the FRG to declare Handel its own; for, although the GDR could lay claim to Handel's birthplace of Halle, there was a long-standing and vibrant rival festival tradition in Göttingen.Footnote ³⁴ Third, and perhaps most significant, both Walther Siegmund-Schultze (a prominent musicologist based in Halle) and Hans Pischner (Deputy Minister for Culture and a trained musicologist and harpsichordist) were Handel specialists, and ‘mighty handful’ musicologist Ernst Hermann Meyer, an authority on early English music, was also keenly interested in the promotion of Handel. Neither Pischner nor Georg Knepler, who took on the most significant roles in the Mendelssohn discourse, were likewise committed to the promotion in East Germany of Mendelssohn's work.

As Potter discusses in her examination of Handel's reception in the GDR, planning for that 1959 festival began as early as 1957 with the organization of a party commission and task force centred in Berlin that was responsible for programming festival events and a scholarly conference and for publishing an article in the ruling party's newspaper, Neues Deutschland, setting out ‘the official Handel conception of the Central Committee of the SED’.Footnote ³⁵ Additionally, the Handel celebration involved the participation of international musicians as well as luminaries of East German musical life, such as ‘mighty handful’ musicologists and also some of the highest-ranking politicians in the SED. In contrast, the Mendelssohn Festwoche was a somewhat minor affair, with minimal participation by figures central to the political and musical establishments and with performance duties often relegated to student musicians – a decision criticized by more than one media outlet.Footnote ³⁶ Further, the events of the Mendelssohn festival were more hastily organized, and neither a scholarly conference nor a Stellungnahme (official statement) setting out the SED's position on Mendelssohn's significance to East German cultural life was planned. In fact, this lack of an official proclamation guiding the discourse set the Mendelssohn festivities apart, not only from the Handel celebrations, but also from both earlier and later Festwochen honouring Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner – an omission that led to a freer discourse surrounding the Mendelssohn festival.

Though fewer resources were allocated to the celebration of Mendelssohn's life and work, the GDR nevertheless sought to position itself (more through word than deed) as the German caretakers of the composer's legacy. Key to that effort was Mendelssohn's relationship with the city of Leipzig as both conductor and pedagogue. A number of scholars have noted the SED's tendency to capitalize on the coincidence that the ‘majority of Germany's greatest composers had been active in cities that fell within the GDR's borders’,Footnote ³⁷ and the political establishment in East Germany seized again on this fortuitous circumstance in organizing the Mendelssohn Festwoche. As early as May 1958, Dr Hans-Georg Uszkoreit of the music division of the Ministry for Culture (MfK) based in East Berlin was in contact with the culture division of the District Council of Leipzig regarding plans for a Mendelssohn celebration to take place in the city.Footnote ³⁸ And, by that summer the director of the Leipzig Conservatory was in touch with the Mendelssohn Society in Basel, attempting to obtain letters and other biographical and musical materials from the society's collections to be used in an exhibit that would form part of the 1959 celebrations.

That said, it was not until October of 1958 – a mere three months prior to the event – that plans began to form for the creation of a committee to spearhead the planning of the Festwoche, with the conservatory, Gewandhaus orchestra, and Leipzig District Council coordinating to make sure each was represented.Footnote ³⁹ Notably absent from the committee were representatives from prominent East Berlin-based institutions – the Composer's Union (VdKM), the Academy of Arts (AdK), and the MfK – that formed the backbone of musical life in the GDR.

The first meeting – led by Franz Konwitschny, general music director of the Gewandhaus, and Rudolf Fischer, president of the conservatory – hammered out the conceptual design of the festival. Interestingly, minutes from the meeting demonstrate that emphasis was placed first and foremost on the composer's service to the city as conductor – and therefore as custodian of the cultural heritage.Footnote ⁴⁰ Secondarily, the committee sought to emphasize both Mendelssohn's role as a pedagogue developing young talent at the conservatory and the treatment of his legacy by the Nazis. Mendelssohn's significance as a composer was only briefly mentioned at the meeting. This emphasis on Mendelssohn's non-compositional legacy explained, in part, why the organizers of the Festwoche chose to focus the celebration of the composer primarily in Leipzig, for it was that city that owed so much to Mendelssohn the conductor and pedagogue. And, of course, it was the composer's activities with the conservatory and Gewandhaus that shored up his protosocialist credentials. Thus Mendelssohn – born in Hamburg, educated in Berlin, and known for his extensive travels throughout Europe – by East German accounts only truly embraced his community and fully flourished in Leipzig.

The Festkonzert

The committee also proposed a series of events, beginning with an opening ceremony on 1 February 1959, featuring a keynote speech by Hans Pischner – the highest-ranking politician involved with the festival – that emphasized the socio-political context in which Mendelssohn lived and worked. The committee sought the participation of delegates from all of Germany and Europe, but – aside from the presence of the West German press – the ceremony appears to have ended up a wholly East German affair. Other proposed events, such as a Sunday concert featuring works by Mendelssohn alongside those by Wagner(!) and Handel, and a renovation and rededication of the Gewandhaus's Mendelssohn monument, did not materialize.Footnote ⁴¹

Mendelssohn's music was celebrated primarily via three symphonic concerts. The centrepiece of these was a Festkonzert performed by a Gewandhaus orchestra led by Konwitschny that took place on the evening of Mendelssohn's birthday. It followed a wreath-laying ceremony held at the monument in front of the Gewandhaus that involved a procession of Leipzig citizens from the conservatory to the concert hall.Footnote ⁴² The Ministry for Culture and the festival committee intended the Festkonzert to be the jewel in the crown of the GDR celebrations of Mendelssohn, to represent East Germany's commitment to the Germanic heritage, and to position the country as an anti-fascist state discontinuous with the Germany of the Third Reich. As such, arrangements were made to broadcast the concert, not only throughout the two Germanies – on East German Berliner Rundfunk and on West German Radio Cologne – but also throughout Europe and the world (e.g., on the BBC in London, Radio Italy in Rome, and in sixteen other countries). The concert was introduced with a short speech about the Festwoche in six different languages including English and French.Footnote ⁴³ The event was preceded by excerpts of Hans Pischner's keynote speech from the opening ceremony, which emphasized Georg Knepler's work on the composer. And – in keeping with the conventional (for the time) association of musical classicism with humanism and romanticism with decadent and degenerate bourgeois tendencies – Pischner clearly located Mendelssohn within the classical rather than the romantic tradition.Footnote ⁴⁴ Close attention was paid to the programming of the concert as well. A concerted attempt was made to present some of Mendelssohn's most popular works like the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and Violin Concerto in E minor (each numbering among the few works that had enjoyed continued popularity in East German concert halls), alongside less-performed works – with the most significant programming choice being the inclusion of the early Concerto for Two Pianos in E major.

Promoting early works

The inclusion of the concerto in the internationally broadcast concert was intended to demonstrate two important dimensions of the GDR's care of Mendelssohn's compositional legacy: a newly mounted effort to engage with the composer's repertoire beyond the small handful of widely performed works, and – more significantly – the care of many of Mendelssohn's often neglected (and in some cases newly rediscovered) youthful compositions. The piano piece in particular gained traction in 1959, helped along by critically lauded performances by Günther Koontz and Dieter Zechlin – the latter the GDR's premiere concert pianist – in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. A second early work also formed a centrepiece of the Festwoche celebrations, an early cantata by a 19-year-old Mendelssohn. The Humboldt Cantata had been unearthed by an East German musicologist and librarian at the State Library in Berlin, who had discovered it while researching materials in the lead-up to the 100th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt's death (also in 1959). It was deemed significant less for its aesthetic qualities than for the proof it offered of the young composer's close connection with the German humanist and scientist, a relationship exploited in East German discourse in order to substantiate Mendelssohn's humanist leanings.Footnote ⁴⁵ The cantata – written for an international gathering of naturalists and physicians organized by Humboldt in Berlin – was deemed significant enough to East German musical culture that the work was selected to open a 1959 festival concert celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the GDR.Footnote ⁴⁶

As mentioned, the revival of the Humboldt Cantata, as well as the embrace of the early Concerto for Two Pianos in E major, were both part of a concerted effort to revisit the early compositions. This was a project motivated in large part by the rediscovery of some manuscripts of previously unpublished works by the young Mendelssohn that had survived the bombings of Berlin in the vaults of the State Library. During the war seventeen of the fifty-six volumes of Mendelssohn's notebooks had been deemed valuable enough to be relocated to a safer location outside the city, while the remaining thirty-nine volumes (including sketches of all the composer's early compositions save his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture) remained. By a twist of fate, these latter volumes survived – and had been recently unearthed – while the seventeen volumes removed from the city remained lost until surfacing in the 1970s in Kraków.Footnote ⁴⁷ In order to enrich both concert programming and musicological research on the composer, the GDR's Deutschen Verlag für Musik in Leipzig, in conjunction with the Mendelssohn Society in Basel, made plans to publish editions of these thirty-nine volumes, with the first appearing in 1959. The initial volumes were to include pieces recently revived in performance, such as Sinfonias IX and X,Footnote ⁴⁸ and the Concerto for Two Pianos in E major, and were meant additionally to demonstrate the influence of classical masters such as Mozart and Bach on the young composer.Footnote ⁴⁹

Mendelssohn's East German critics

Just as the organization and programming of the Mendelssohn Festwoche demonstrates an ambivalence towards the composer's legacy – as a figure too intimately tied to the history of German fascism to be ignored, yet not protosocialist enough to be truly embraced – so too does the discourse surrounding the Festwoche. Before examining that discourse it is worth taking a moment to consider more generally both who participated in debates about Mendelssohn's value to East German audiences and where those discussions took place. As previously mentioned, few of those central to the political and musical establishments were involved in the planning of the Festwoche. This was true as well of the interlocutors in the accompanying discourse. There was no Stellungnahme produced by the SED addressing Mendelssohn's significance. And save for Pischner's keynote speech – which was published in its entirety in Kulturbund newspaper Sonntag – and a February 1959 article in Musik und Gesellschaft by Georg Knepler, those who participated in debates about Mendelssohn tended to be more minor figures in East German musical life – the B-team, if you will. Some of these individuals – such as Ernst Krause and Werner Wolf – were musicologists who were frequent and well-regarded contributors to scholarly journals such as Musik und Gesellschaft, but who did not hold the kind of leadership positions in musical establishments held by members of the ‘mighty handful’. Others – such as Wolf Dietrich and Edmund Volkmann – were journalists covering cultural matters for regional newspapers. Indeed, with the exception of Knepler's article and a critical essay by Richard Petzoldt in Musik in der Schule, all the Mendelssohn discourse took place outside of the scholarly press. It also primarily took place outside of nationally distributed newspapers such as Neues Deutschland and the Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) Neue Zeit. Rather, coverage of the Mendelssohn Festwoche was concentrated in the provinces, with much of the discussion appearing in regionally distributed newspapers such as the party-controlled Leipziger Volkszeitung, as well as Die Union and Sächsische Tageblatt – both widely considered two of the more oppositional publications in the GDR. This decentralization of the discourse and ceding of it to more marginal voices undoubtedly contributed to a debate about Mendelssohn that was both more diverse and freer than discussions typically surrounding these kinds of music celebrations in East Germany.

Indeed, not all music scholars in the GDR shared this renewed interest in caring for Mendelssohn's legacy. Even within the discourse leading up to and surrounding the Festwoche, one finds misgivings about the value of Mendelssohn's compositional legacy. Wolf Dietrich of Die Union claims, for instance, that ‘naturally one finds in Mendelssohn's creations too much dependence on a particular time, and one hardly does him a service to rediscover and perform these works’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such ambivalence was typical; yet a handful of writers went much further, launching ad hominem attacks on the composer in the press and in programme notes.Footnote ⁵¹

An article by Leipzig-based musicologist Richard Petzoldt, published in the pedagogical journal Musik in der Schule in January 1959 in anticipation of the anniversary, drew particular notice for its criticism of Mendelssohn – likely because it was in direct response to the upcoming Festwoche. Unlike a number of other participants in the discourse surrounding the festival, Petzoldt had demonstrated no communist sympathies prior to 1945, which left him vulnerable to censure by the SED. Nevertheless, after the Second World War he had become a well-regarded figure in the musico-political life of Leipzig – as a professor at the university, as a dramaturge at the Leipzig State Opera, and as editor-in-chief of Musik in der Schule (from 1949 until 1955).

Petzoldt concludes his article by praising Mendelssohn's service to Leipzig as a conductor and pedagogue, and defends the composer against facile judgements about the formalist and sentimental dimensions of his work. But his overall assessment of Mendelssohn's compositional output is resoundingly negative. Attempting to adopt an orthodox Marxist–Leninist stance, he begins his critical assessment with the composer's life, basing aesthetic claims on biographical and socio-political ones. The crux of Petzoldt's critique of Mendelssohn can be seen in the following statement:

In Petzoldt's estimation, Mendelssohn's music – due to his intimate relationship with a declining bourgeois social system that was hostile to political and humanistic progress – took on regressive traits. Rather than embrace the dialectical tension and resolution of the ascendant nineteenth-century symphonic forms, Petzoldt interprets Mendelssohn's affinity for formal schemas of the earlier classical era as an expression of the impoverishment of a class already in decline.Footnote ⁵³

After disparaging Mendelssohn on aesthetic grounds, Petzoldt turns to a critique of the composer's character, painting him as spoiled and condescending, and contrasting this character with that of the ‘stormy, forward-urging young Wagner’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This latter comparison was singled out by Petzoldt's critics; for, although the programming of Wagner's operas and praise for his musical genius had continued mostly unabated after the war, it remained controversial to laud his character. Praising it in comparison to Mendelssohn's, which Wagner had disparaged in his repulsive ‘Judaism in Music’, was considered to be in especially poor taste.

The article received an immediate, if initially ineffective, response from AdK president Otto Nagel and academy member and composer Hanns Eisler. The two wrote first to Musik in der Schule and then to Neues Deutschland asking those publications to print a response to the article that would refute Petzoldt's claims and outline the significance of Mendelssohn's legacy to the GDR.Footnote ⁵⁵ Though their requests were denied by the publications’ respective editors, the Deputy Minister of Culture took up the cause. In his keynote speech excerpted in the broadcast of the Festkonzert, he attacks Petzoldt directly. While not naming him, Pischner claims that ‘the true image of Mendelssohn must again today be defended against old anti-Semitic attitudes, which, cloaked in vulgar sociology, even appeared in a journal of our republic’.Footnote ⁵⁶ He connects this ‘fresh defamation’ of Mendelssohn to Petzoldt's argument about the relationship between the composer's work and a declining bourgeoisie, using the musicologist's exact words, so that Petzoldt – and any other reader of Musik in der Schule – would know exactly whom Pischner was criticizing. Pischner also explicitly connects the Mendelssohn celebrations and the care of the composer's legacy to the GDR's disingenuous stance against fascism and anti-Semitism, concluding his speech by saying:

In addition to serving as a thinly veiled threat to Petzoldt, this passage also invokes an important aspect of the discourse surrounding Mendelssohn; namely, the need to rectify a wrong done to the composer and his legacy, and in so doing to position the GDR as the antipode of an imperialist West Germany deemed to be the spiritual descendant of the Third Reich.

Canonising Mendelssohn

Despite Pischner's rebuke, the very existence of Petzoldt's critique illustrates the way in which Mendelssohn – a composer whose work was sometimes performed in the GDR's concert halls, but whose biography resisted protosocialist revisions – occupied a precarious position in East German musical life. A January 1959 article in the Leipzig-based daily Sächsische Tageblatt sets out the issue explicitly: ‘The changing assessment of Mendelssohn's music over the last hundred years has not yet stabilized … the care of Mendelssohn … fluctuates because of changing opinions about the viability of much of Mendelssohn's work.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Part of the difficulty was that the stakes of Mendelssohn's inclusion in an East German canon were largely political rather than aesthetic. Certainly, the composer had his defenders among musicians and audiences, who found value in his tendency to well-proportioned form and smooth euphony,Footnote ⁵⁹ and musical conservatives who saw in Mendelssohn's classicism a defence against avant-garde notions of Western modernism.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet the political necessity of including Mendelssohn in the East German canon predominated the discourse, and this is evidenced by press coverage of the celebrations in Leipzig. Indeed, the first article regarding the Mendelssohn anniversary, appearing in the 27 January issue of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, focuses far less on the composer's accomplishments – with only a brief mention of his ‘great service to the Gewandhaus’ – and far more on the mistreatment of his legacy under the Nazis, the ‘Lichtscheues Gesindel’ (cowardly vermin) who desecrated the Mendelssohn monument in front of the Gewandhaus in 1936.Footnote ⁶¹ The article goes so far as to equate this desecration with far greater Nazi crimes such as the Kristallnacht. The unnamed author also draws a direct line between these atrocities and recent demonstrations of anti-Semitism in West Germany, and argues that West Germany is a place where ‘people of the same ilk as the fascist scum of 1936 crop up in the most pernicious ways’.Footnote ⁶²

Although no other article went quite so far in painting the West Germans as unrepentant Nazis, these notions – first, that reparations must be made for the Nazi crimes against Mendelssohn's legacy, and, second, that this could only be accomplished in a socialist state – ran throughout the discourse. During the Festwoche, musicologists and politicians sought to portray East Germany as ‘the representation of the true Germany, in which the infinite treasures of the great masters had found their Heimat [homeland]’.Footnote ⁶³ Mendelssohn was thus portrayed in the press as a victim first, and only secondarily as a composer and person worthy of admiration, and the Festwoche took on the tone of a battle cry for the GDR. This militant tone can be detected in Rudolf Fischer's speech at the wreath-laying ceremony, wherein he vowed ‘to deploy our entire strength as German patriots to fight for not only Mendelssohn but all of Germany and the half of Europe that has been defiled’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This militancy was accompanied not only by vague accusations of West German anti-Semitism, but also by the claim that the West German music establishment, in the guise of the Union of German Composers and Music Teachers (VDTM), was guilty with respect to Mendelssohn of the same crime of Totschweigen (silencing the dead) as had been the Nazis.Footnote ⁶⁵ An article in the CDU's Neuer Weg (reprinted in Musik und Gesellschaft) accuses the VDTM of silencing both Mendelssohn and Mahler by neglecting to honour them during their anniversary years, claiming, ‘Mendelssohn and Mahler shared the same fate, to be estimated by the board of the VDTM as not particularly worthy of honour. Both were ostracized in the years 1933 to 1945 because of their Jewish ancestry. Will the VDTM perpetuate this ostracism today?’Footnote ⁶⁶

Though the treatment of Mendelssohn's legacy by the Nazis – and, by extension, by their alleged spiritual heirs in West Germany – was central to the public discourse surrounding the Festwoche, any sustained discussion of Mendelssohn's Jewishness was noticeably absent, and this may seem surprising. We might expect the matter of the composer's Jewish identity to arise in the discourse either as a manifestation of the anti-Semitism that plagued East German politics and societyFootnote ⁶⁷ or, conversely, as part of the anti-fascistic rhetoric embraced by many members of the political and cultural establishments of the GDR. That it does not is worth a brief investigation.

Why were interlocutors inhibited from addressing such a significant dimension of the reception of Mendelssohn's legacy? One reason pertains to the aforementioned origin myth of the GDR – that the nation was founded and led by the communistic resistance to the Nazi regime. This myth had a deleterious impact on Jewish citizens in East Germany, who were denied reparations on the grounds that the GDR ‘represented neither the legal nor the historical successor of the Third Reich’,Footnote ⁶⁸ and who were officially classified as mere passive victims under National Socialism (a classification that marginalized their suffering in relation to ‘active’ left-wing resistors).Footnote ⁶⁹ The fragility of this myth could not bear the close scrutiny threatened by any frank discussion of Mendelssohn's Jewishness and the role it had played – and continued to play – in his treatment by any and all Germans. To do so risked, on the one hand, bringing to light the prevalence of former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the GDR, many of whom were integral to East German political and cultural life; on the other hand, such frank discussion also raised uncomfortable questions about the Germanness of a number of other figures central to GDR musical life – including Knepler and three other of the ‘mighty handful’, who shared with Mendelssohn a Jewish heritage.

This points, as well, to a second obstacle to any open discussion of Mendelssohn's Jewish heritage: the SED's official recognition of Jewishness as a religious rather than ethnic designation,Footnote ⁷⁰ which paired with an uneasy tolerance of organized religion.Footnote ⁷¹ As historian Toby Thacker's work on the 1950 Bach Year has deftly demonstrated, even Christian composers needed to undergo a kind of conversion in East German music scholarship – from believers to protosocialist humanists.Footnote ⁷² It would be naïve, of course, to suppose that a composer's Jewishness would actually have been no more problematic in the post-war German imagination than his Christianity. Indeed, the insistence on including Mendelssohn's Christian family name – Bartholdy – in nearly all public discussions of the Festwoche speaks to a calculated if unspoken desire to Christianize him. Nevertheless, as a matter of socialist ideology neither Mendelssohn's Jewish identity nor his Christian one could be explicitly addressed.

The relative silence on this topic thus does not indicate that Mendelssohn's Jewishness was not highly significant in the GDR – far from it. It demonstrates rather the power of the ideological constraints that shaped public discourse around national identity, and the way in which those constraints pushed certain themes to the fore while suppressing others. It is a telling aspect of this history that the real significance of Mendelssohn's Jewishness could not be reconciled with the internal logic of the stories East Germany was learning to tell about itself.

As we have seen, the political desirability of Mendelssohn's rehabilitation was central to the discourse surrounding the composer. But the need to repair the damage done to his legacy by the Nazis was not on its own deemed a sufficient rationale for his inclusion in the East German canon. For that Mendelssohn needed to be fitted into the protosocialist model used to evaluate figures of the musical heritage. But casting Mendelssohn as a revolutionary, or even as especially politically engaged, was no easy task. A few scholars opted to embellish the composer's political credentials, relying on vague references to letters and documents from his contemporaries to back up their claims. One such was Werner Wolf, who claims that Mendelssohn

Wolf sidesteps linking Mendelssohn to any explicitly political organization or activity by instead emphasizing the composer's musical contributions to a democratic culture. Hans Pischner, in contrast, in his keynote speech paints Mendelssohn (perhaps more realistically if simplistically) as an individual sheltered from the morbid and fissured aspects of mid-nineteenth-century German life and culture, who knew little of the political revolutions of his time.Footnote ⁷⁴ Rather than laud Mendelssohn's political convictions, Pischner instead speaks more broadly about the activities and ideals of Mendelssohn's generation of composers, who believed that ‘music should help to bring humanity forward a step and to bring about friendship and peace between peoples’.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to Pischner – who clearly had not just Mendelssohn but also Schumann in mind – they aimed at this goal not only through composition, but also through writing about music and politics and founding music organizations and schools.

Indeed, rather than address Mendelssohn's political activities explicitly, a more frequently employed technique was to tie him implicitly to political progressivism through his personal and professional relationships. Almost every article and essay about Mendelssohn from this time does this, devoting attention to the composer's Kreis (circle) of associates and friends, the tacit argument being that he must have shared the humanist and political convictions of his colleagues if he was held in such high esteem by them. His contemporary Robert Schumann – whose political bona fides were more apparent – was often invoked, and Schumann's estimation of Mendelssohn as ‘the Mozart of the 19th century, the brightest musician’Footnote ⁷⁶ was often used to justify assessments of the composer's value. Reference was also frequently made to his relationship with the older Goethe and also to the close spiritual relationship between the composer and Alexander von Humboldt. Pischner claims, for instance, that ‘without a doubt something of this great man's spirit had transferred to Mendelssohn's compositions’.Footnote ⁷⁷ And East German scholars did not limit themselves to Mendelssohn's Kreis, resorting as well to the judgements of Mendelssohn's successors. The story of Richard Strauss's refusal to write substitute music for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream during the Nazi period – on the grounds that he could never compose something as perfect as Mendelssohn's overture – was held up on multiple occasions as evidence of the composer's worth.Footnote ⁷⁸

Ultimately, though, neither Mendelssohn's victimization by the Nazis nor his progressive and respected Kreis were deemed sufficient evidence for his canonization. Evidence for this had to be found in Mendelssohn's life and works. As previously discussed, humanism was a rich notion for East German intellectuals, intimately connected as it was to the political and philosophical ideals of the Aufklärung and to musical classicism. When it was invoked in the discourse surrounding Mendelssohn, it was done first and foremost to connect the composer to the figure of Goethe: in Pischner's estimation it was the humanistic ideals of Goethe that guided the creative career of the master.Footnote ⁷⁹ But humanism also became a catchall term in Mendelssohn discourse, coming to stand variably for the volkstümlich, naturalist, and classical dimensions of Mendelssohn's compositions. Much was made of the folk-song elements of some of Mendelssohn's lieder, for example, with more than one journalist commenting on the ‘unstudied folkish intonation’ of his songs.Footnote ⁸⁰

It was both the clarity and the simplicity of the volkstümlich elements in Mendelssohn's music and the classical elegance of his compositions that were invoked to demonstrate the composer's connection to the German Volk and humanist ideals. According to one article ‘no matter how much his highly cultivated spirit was surrounded by cosmopolitanism, he always heard the voice of the people’.Footnote ⁸¹ As Pischner declares, it is the composer's embrace of classical forms and styles (which renders his music understandable and accessible and connects it to the great classical heritage) that – far from indicating the regressiveness claimed by Petzoldt – demonstrates a rejection of romantic escapism and a conscious decision for the world, for humanity and ultimately for the people.Footnote ⁸² This embrace of the world was also evidenced, according to the discourse, by his attention to the natural world. The composer's extensive travels were recast, not as indicators of a certain bourgeois cosmopolitanism, but as evidence of Mendelssohn's exploration of the natural world and lands and peoples within and beyond Germany. Thus, pieces inspired by some of those travels – notably the Hebrides Overture and the Italian and Scottish Symphonies – were thought to demonstrate his communion with various Völker and their environs.Footnote ⁸³

These attempts to associate Mendelssohn and his music with a (natural and social) world-embracing stance – with an earthiness even – were meant to counteract the assessment by some East German intellectuals that Mendelssohn was a spoiled and sheltered aesthete. But they also marked an attempt to position him as a true heir to the musical classicism of Haydn and Mozart. Only a few, such as Ernst Krause, openly embraced Mendelssohn's romanticism, with Krause going so far as to claim the composer as the undisputed musical authority of the Biedermeier period with his own unique sentimental-noble sound world and a pure commitment to the romantic.Footnote ⁸⁴ Owing to Lukács's influential dichotomy, such a positive assessment of the romantic (in the 1950s, at least) was rare, and any association at that time of canonical composers with romanticism was discouraged. Occasionally Mendelssohn's relation to romanticism was addressed by treating it as a competing (and largely negative) force in his life and music. Even journalist Edmund Volkmann – elsewhere less critical of the romantic features of Mendelssohn's music – portrays the composer's educational upbringing as a battle between two teachers of contradictory attitudes: the academic classicism of Zelter and the petty bourgeois romanticism of Berger.Footnote ⁸⁵

More often, any relationship between Mendelssohn's music and the aesthetics of romanticism was simply rejected. Musicologist Hellmuth Christian Wolff argues that Mendelssohn shared Goethe's opposition to romanticism, and that he used early music forms to combat exaggerated feelings and introduce restraint into the music of his era. It was this excavational work on Mendelssohn's part that allowed East German listeners to ‘discover something in his compositions that again has much more to say to us today than to previous generations’.Footnote ⁸⁶ This embrace of the classical aesthetic and early music forms, which set Mendelssohn to some degree out of step with his own time, was cast in the East German discourse as a militant stance. It was not perceived as regression as such, but rather a way to combat the hollow virtuosity of the years after the Vienna CongressFootnote ⁸⁷ and the escapism, disunity, and morbidity of romanticism.Footnote ⁸⁸

Although the most common response to the problem of romanticism was simply to deny any relationship between it and Mendelssohn's music, treating the composer instead as a full-fledged classicist courageously and militantly out of step with his own time, it was not the only one. Volkmann, who at times treats the classical and romantic impulses in Mendelssohn's life as antagonistic, gives a more nuanced reading later in his article, describing the composer as one who

Here, Volkmann paints Mendelssohn as a kind of dialectician, one who synthesized the power and sublimity associated with the aesthetic of his own era with the balance and control of his classical-era predecessors. And Volkmann's analysis, though brief, complicates the notion of Mendelssohn as a composer who rejected, for better or (as Petzoldt might claim) for worse, the aesthetic orientation embraced by his contemporaries. In arguing for Mendelssohn's value, Volkmann departs from conventional 1950s readings, choosing instead to portray the composer according to a different kind of ideal – as an artist who harmonizes in his creations the dialectical tensions between romanticism and classicism.

Knepler's Marxian analysis

Although Volkmann presents a more sophisticated reading of Mendelssohn's music and its influences than was typical in East German discourse, he does little to tease out the implications of his own reading. Musicologist Georg Knepler, in contrast, presents a much more developed portrait of Mendelssohn and his work in his Musik und Gesellschaft article for the composer's Festwoche – one that ultimately relies on a Marxian justification for the significance of Mendelssohn's work rather than depending on the conventional protosocialist model. The article is an abridged version of Knepler's twenty-three-page analysis of Mendelssohn's life and works from the second volume of his Musikgeschichte des XIX. Jahrhunderts, published in 1961 – a work that cemented Knepler's status as the premier musicologist in the GDR. In its somewhat abbreviated form it was the centrepiece of a special February 1959 issue of Musik und Gesellschaft devoted to Mendelssohn. In it Knepler signals his intended break with the conventional analysis of the composer's life and music almost immediately. After setting out the usual reading – emphasizing the composer's untroubled upbringing, his background and education, his Kreis (e.g., Goethe, the Schumanns) – Knepler claims that this image of Mendelssohn's life is deceptive in its superficiality, saying ‘the more closely we study Mendelssohn's life the more clearly we see shadows weighing him down. It is important to investigate their causes as they also lie in his work.’Footnote ⁹⁰

Yet after making such a bold claim, Knepler devotes the first two-thirds of his article to a reading of Mendelssohn and his music that – although more nuanced than other East German discussions – hews closely to the protosocialist model. His first statements about Mendelssohn, in fact, could have appeared in any of the treatments discussed above, and should sound quite familiar to us by now. He claims of the young Mendelssohn that he was deeply influenced by the art and ideas of Goethe, that his teachers Zelter and Berger instilled in him a love of folk-song in its simplicity and perceptiveness, and that the young boy was inspired above all by a desire to use his talent to help make the world more beautiful and humanity richer.Footnote ⁹¹ In this brief opening salvo, Knepler manages to touch upon almost all the hallmarks of the protosocialist composer – humanism, Volkstümlichkeit, the significance of a socially progressive Kreis – with only one small indication of a departure from the model, namely the invocation of the ‘Stempel des Genies’ (mark of genius), introducing a dissonance with the protosocialist model that Knepler would explore in later paragraphs of the article.

As with previous discussions of Mendelssohn, Knepler sees the composer's interest in the natural world as being related to a fundamental humanism. Unsurprisingly, Knepler also draws a connection between Mendelssohn's embrace of musical classicism and this humanism. But rather than appealing to Mendelssohn's penchant for classical forms and balance, Knepler addresses the composer's classicism in light of his embrace of fairy tales and fantastical subject matter, evidenced first and foremost by his Midsummer Night's Dream overture and suite. In so doing Knepler attacks an apparent (and often unmentioned) contradiction underlying East German discussions of Mendelssohn's work; namely that, while the romantic dimension of his music was often denied or derided, the Midsummer Night's Dream music (linked to romantic-era aesthetics through its subject matter at the very least) was upheld as one of Mendelssohn's greatest works.

We might presume that the Midsummer Night's Dream music escaped attention in much of the Mendelssohn discourse – while continuing to be programmed in the GDR – because it represented a problematic case: a piece both too popular to be excised from concert life and one that appeared to undermine the GDR's project of casting Mendelssohn as an unflinching classicist and protosocialist. Knepler, however, argues that the romantic school at best provided the material for Mendelssohn's musical exploration of Shakespeare's comedy, and that, like Shakespeare and Goethe, Mendelssohn engages with the klassische Helle (classical brightness) of the source material rather than mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht (magic moonlit night) of romanticism.Footnote ⁹² What Knepler means by this is that Mendelssohn refuses to explore the escapist, lebenabgewandte (life-denying) dimension of fairy tale: ‘For Mendelssohn the fairytale is not a contradiction to life, but rather a poetic, profound interpretation of the freundlich-hellen [friendly bright] aspects of life. The past, as descended from the old myths, is a valuable piece of Heimat, not a model for the present.’Footnote ⁹³ Knepler is careful to distance Mendelssohn not only from the life-denying aspects of romanticism – associating him with affirmational language meant to resonate with the socialist realist prescription for militantly optimistic composition – but also from Nazi cultural conservativism. Knepler casts Heimat here in historical rather than utopian terms. This homeland is one of collective memory: of the myths, practices, and beliefs of a people. But Heimat is not a lost ideal to be resurrected, an earlier Germany to be regained in the future, as the Nazis desired. Mendelssohn – perhaps protosocialist in his denial of this Nazi ideal – recognizes in the fairy tale (here, an admittedly non-Germanic one) a connection to the real and imagined past of a people, while denying that the fairy tale could act as a model for a present (and future, socialist) society. In understanding the appropriate life- and Volk-affirming relationship between a people and its stories, Mendelssohn aligns himself in Knepler's estimation with the great classicists Goethe and Herder.

In a departure from conventional Marxist–Leninist musicology, Knepler addresses Mendelssohn's musical creativity in the article before tackling the composer's biography in any depth. But after discussing the naturalism and classicism said to motivate much of Mendelssohn's compositional activity, Knepler does eventually turn to the issue of the composer's political attitudes. He says of Mendelssohn that, ‘although he rejected the revolution, he wanted to work towards the future of the “cut-off braid”, as he once called it. He had definite ideas about how this should be done. Political reforms should bring about gradual change while retaining all that is positive.’Footnote ⁹⁴ And Knepler points to other documentary evidence of Mendelssohn's political ideals, citing documentation that he was critical of his father's moderate political stance, and that he described himself as a radical. Yet Knepler also freely admits that Mendelssohn never embraced the notion of revolution. He did not grasp the significance of the political storm that swelled in the 1840s, and he knew nothing of the proletariat. And, ultimately, the political crisis that engulfed Prussia during the last decade of his life pushed him towards political conservatism.Footnote ⁹⁵ This leads Knepler to conclude, as we might expect, that

This passage marks a rare criticism of the composer by a figure central to East German musical culture, and one that shares quite a bit with Petzoldt's much-derided critique.

This is already a radical departure from the Marxist–Leninist reading of Mendelssohn, but Knepler's next move is even more interesting. He goes on to paint a portrait of a deeply conflicted artist, arguing that there is ample musical evidence that Mendelssohn did seek in some of his later works to contend with the political and spiritual crisis facing his homeland. Knepler claims that this is evidenced both by a melancholic strain that permeates some of the mature works and by Mendelssohn's turn to works of a religious nature. Knepler asserts that ‘the more worthless the world appeared to him, the more spiritual his mood became’.Footnote ⁹⁷ This could easily be read as an indictment of Mendelssohn, especially in East Germany where organized religion was only uneasily tolerated. But Knepler is quick to argue that with Elijah – completed only a year before Mendelssohn's death – ‘he held a mirror up to the world, and indicated a way out of the turmoil of the time’, and that Mendelssohn saw in religion not an escape from life but a moral law, a commandment for moral action.Footnote ⁹⁸ Rather than deriding the composer's embrace of religious subject matter as a turn from the world, Knepler finds in this music a humanist (if not political) progressivism and sees it serving a Marxian Widerspiegelung function. Elijah, rather than marking a regression in Mendelssohn's musical and spiritual development and a rejection of his world, returns that world to us – revealing its cracks and crevices – and demands from humanity something better.

Knepler also sees this Widerspiegelung function at work in a few more of Mendelssohn's mature works, including the Scottish Symphony, completed in 1842, and the String Quartet in F minor, op. 80, from the year the composer died. In Knepler's judgement, these works lack the commandment for moral action present in the religious pieces, but they introduce a facet of Mendelssohn's creativity he finds equally fascinating and valuable: doubt. In contrast to the Italian Symphony, an elegant, rounded-off piece of music, Knepler hears in the Scottish ‘traits of darkness, deeply pensive and then combating, colliding passages that remind us that in the twelve years since the composer had begun writing the piece much had changed around him and in him’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rather than displaying the clarity and ease of a composer comfortable in his own skin and in his world, these later works, in Knepler's estimation, express the contradictions and turmoil inherent in mid-nineteenth-century German life.

Further, Knepler hears in the string quartet – written in the immediate aftermath of the composer's beloved sister's death – the most stormy and painfully broken, the most nervous and restless music Mendelssohn ever wrote, music containing all the struggle and dynamism often attributed to Beethoven's music but lacking only the triumph of Beethoven's final resolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Knepler reads in this absence not just the devastated response to a personal tragedy. In it, he says: ‘A whole world collapses. It is a shockingly honest confession given by Mendelssohn. In one of his final works Mendelssohn makes a tragic departure from the classical forms that meant so much to him: their optimistic foundational character is lost.’Footnote ¹⁰¹

For Knepler, Mendelssohn ultimately becomes neither a romantic nor a classicist, but a true Marxian. The string quartet expresses absence, a call to what is lost. But the work also represents a revelation of (and not a flight from) Mendelssohn's world in all its bourgeois, anti-humanist tragedy. Thus Knepler ingeniously rehabilitates Mendelssohn in a Marxian fashion without, in the final estimation, relying on the protosocialist model. Knepler's Mendelssohn is uniquely positioned to reveal the true nature of his world, not despite his at times problematic political and aesthetic orientations, but precisely because of the tensions and contradictions expressed in his person and music. According to Knepler, socialist scholars, in omitting aspects of the composer's life and music from the Mendelssohn discourse in the GDR, could not fully grasp the composer's significance.

More generally, Knepler's argument has radical implications for the importance of biography in evaluating the worth of composers. Much like Engels's Balzac, Knepler's Mendelssohn need not espouse the revolutionary political stance of his own time in order to be especially adept at revealing the nature of his era's political and social reality. Thus, mining biography for political bona fides seems at best unnecessary, if we take Knepler's argument seriously. In positioning Mendelssohn as a figure whose music is capable of revelation regardless of its creator's political orientation and affiliations, Knepler interestingly – if only implicitly – aligns himself more closely with a Marxian explanation for the value of past works than with the Marxist–Leninist theory that he and his contemporaries explicitly espoused.Footnote ¹⁰²