Musical talent

When asked by his sister Rebecka whether his future wife was musical, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy answered, “No, not at all. That is what is so wonderful.”

Cécile Mendelssohn Bartholdy was given the education deemed appropriate for a daughter of a respectable upper-class family in Frankfurt. As well as German, she spoke French and Italian to the same standard as her mother tongue, and received singing and piano lessons. She sang well, and joined the St Cecilia Choir in Frankfurt as a soprano, but much to her regret her frail health  prevented her from pursuing singing as she would have liked. Her singing teacher predicted that by the time she was 18, she would develop “one of the most powerful of voices”. Cécile remarked laconically years later that, “My eighteenth birthday arrived, but not my voice.”

She regularly sang with her husband. As an experienced choral singer and choirmaster, he was able to give her lessons which they both greatly enjoyed and which resulted in her voice, in his estimation, becoming “much sweeter and more sonorous”. Both her husband and her sister-in-law Fanny Hensel wrote lieder for her. Other composers also admired Cécile’s voice. Thus in 1841 it was to her that Ignaz Moscheles dedicated his Six Lieder for a Vocalist and Piano, op. 97.

The fact that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy described her as not at all musical shortly after making her acquaintance is probably mainly because the shy and self-critical young woman did not dare to play the piano for such a distinguished and famous piano virtuoso as he was. The publisher Breitkopf & Härtel clearly fulfilled Cécile’s heart’s desire in January 1840 by presenting her with a pianino. “In the two days she has spent in her little room she has, I believe, played more music than in all the time we have been married, and what delights her the most is that I cannot hear a single note of it from my parlour”, Felix reported to his mother.

The longer he was married to her, the more Felix valued her musical judgment. When it came to her children too, she had an unerring instinct for recognising their various talents, and provided them with a well-judged level of support.