Felix Mendelssohn passed through Salzburg in 1831 on his celebrated Italian journey and wrote to his family about the city in terms of real delight. He was 22 years old, already the composer of the A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, and the alpine landscape of Salzburg clearly struck him. He died seventeen years later, at 38, having changed German musical life permanently.
The Story
Mendelssohn's 1831 Italian journey was one of the great creative voyages of the Romantic era. He left Berlin in May 1830 and travelled south through Munich and the Alps, passing through Salzburg on his way to Italy. His letters from this journey, addressed to his family, are among the most vivid travel writing of any composer: he described landscapes, cities, people, and music with a sharp, warm eye. Salzburg and the surrounding mountains feature among his enthusiastic observations of this alpine world he was crossing for the first time.
His Salzburg connection is that of the attentive visitor rather than a resident or long-term collaborator. But it places him in a distinguished procession. The city had something that drew the greatest musicians of Europe to pause and respond to it. Mendelssohn was twenty-two when he passed through. He had already composed the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream at seventeen, a piece of startling originality. He had conducted the revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829, an event that redirected the course of musical history. He was already someone.
His career centred on Leipzig, where he became the dominant figure in German musical life: principal conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, founder of the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843, and one of the great champions of both Bach and Handel in an age when their music was largely forgotten. He composed his Violin Concerto in E minor, the oratorio Elijah, and the Scottish and Italian symphonies before his death at 38 in November 1847.
The Salzburg Festival has performed his work across its history, including a Cathedral Concert in 1951 and the continuing Salzburg Philharmonic programmes that place his music alongside Mozart and Brahms. His influence on the concert culture that the Festival embodies, above all the tradition of the public orchestral concert as a serious event for a broad audience, is as real as his 1831 passage through the alpine landscape he found so striking.
