Tea at Trianon: Mendelssohn in the Condemned Cell

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Mendelssohn in the Condemned Cell

From The Conservative Woman:

The question must be asked: why is Mendelssohn now in danger of being posthumously cancelled?

Well, it seems that the poor man was an unwitting protagonist of something dubbed ‘western civilisational supremacy,’ at least according to a review of statues and artworks set in motion by the chief librarian of the British Library, Liz Jolly, whose Wikipedia entry describes her as an ‘activist British librarian’.

I have no doubt that Ms Jolly is sincere and well-meaning. Indeed, her photo and biography on the British Library website suggest a polished professional. Presumably she loves her craft but feels passionate about racial justice and inclusion. Still, her obvious accomplishments notwithstanding, she is clearly a woman resistant to irony. She seems to be unaware of Mendelssohn’s cruel posthumous fate in the land of his birth, beginning with the publication three years after his death of the rabidly anti-Semitic essay Judaism in Music by the notorious Jew-baiting fellow German composer Richard Wagner.

For Wagner, the Jewish Mendelssohn’s compositions are ‘sweet and tinkling without depth’, his conducting ‘flabby and colourless’, and, like all Jews, he was not ‘capable of creating art that moved the heart and soul’. According to Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, Wagner considered Mendelssohn to be ‘one of a number of insectoid Jewish entities who had infested the body of German art’. Needless to say, these disgusting views achieved their vile apotheosis during the Third Reich, when performances of Mendelssohn’s music were banned and his statue removed from its pedestal in Leipzig. The Nazis even invited German and Austrian composers to replace Mendelssohn’s glorious incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because it was not ‘in accord with the Aryan cultural ideal’. (Read more.)