Opera Chic

“A Christian Mendelssohn is as impossible as a Jewish Confucius.”

Raphael Mostel on Felix's Jewishness:

There is, however, no reason to doubt the composer’s sincerity in living his life as a devout Lutheran. At the same time, he was keenly aware — as with the tale of the monkey — of his heritage. He insisted on seeing the world whole, and in the same rational spirit as his philosopher grandfather. Indeed, when his father tried to drop the Mendelssohn name entirely and rename the whole family Bartholdy (from a family dairy property with title attached), Felix insisted on being known as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Alongside that porcelain monkey, what Abraham wrote to his son on seeing that newspapers often dropped the Bartholdy part of the composer’s last name is perhaps the most sadly tortured epitaph to the challenge of the entire concept of Bildung: “a Christian Mendelssohn is as impossible as a Jewish Confucius.”

Simone's And Felix's Day; And Sarah's, Too

The music of chance has determined that two famously misunderstood intellectuals, both Jewish converts to Christianity, celebrate today respectively their centennial and bicentennial. Simone Weil -- born 1909 -- and Felix Mendelssohn (hold the Bartholdy, please) -- born 1809.

Simone, for all her disturbing and disturbed behavior, her self-destructive, self-hating antisemitism, never fails to challenge and astonish us with the penetrating powers of her thinking -- whether she is writing about the Iliad or about the nature of evil -- she is a writer and a thinker that will always accompany us.

(Opera Chic couldn't escape last summer from checking out Kaija Saariaho's "La Passion de Simone")

About Felix, that misunderstood, tormented genius (whenever OC hears talk of Mendelssohn's alleged "serenity" she literally feels like crying), OC can only say that the superhuman precision of his writing -- and the sparkling beauty of works such as his Midsummer Night's Dream -- makes him, in OC's opinion,  a composer with a talent of the very first class -- think Haydn, Mozart, that really tiny club. Anything else, well, Jessica Duchen will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Mendelssohn and were afraid to ask.

But today, even if 38 is not really 100 or 200 and is not the stuff BBC special websites and newspaper special reports are made of, today Sarah Kane would have turned 38, had she not found the weight of the world too heavy. If you love art and you've never seen a Kane play on stage, at least you should read her work -- five plays of Sophoclean emotional impact. On February 20, she'll be dead for ten years already.

All respect to Weil's 100, and Mendelssohn's 200. But then February 3, in a smaller, not less important way, is Sarah's day, too. Her work is very much present in our lives for so many reasons -- as Simone wrote about Plato,

The cave is the world 

The fetters are the imagination