Mendelssohn and Droysen

Abstract

This chapter considers Felix Mendelssohn’s historicism—his cultural activities aimed at reviving the past in order to illuminate and improve the present—through the composer’s long-standing friendship with Johann Gustav Droysen. One of the most important and original of nineteenth-century historians, Droysen first entered Mendelssohn’s life as his tutor in the 1820s. Sharing a love of music as well as a veneration for the great achievements of the past, the two remained lifelong friends, and Mendelssohn would set several of Droysen’s poems. To compare their engagement with the past is to illuminate the relationship of practice to theory and of action to thought. At the same time, the comparison allows us to see two creative people grappling with the power and the insufficiency of the past in shaping the present.