Sacred Sound and Secular Space in Mendelssohn’s Instrumental Music

Abstract

This chapter examines instances in Felix Mendelssohn’s oeuvre in which religious music arises in an otherwise secular context, specifically in the slow movement of the ‘Italian’ Symphony and the finale of the C minor Piano Trio. In Mary Douglas’s famous definition, dirt is matter out of place, but what is spirit out of place? Why, in these two movements by Mendelssohn, does it lose its place? The answer turns on the idea that each movement, in its own way, transfers the value of the sacred from its ‘own’ place to a foreign one—in one case, literally so, to an Italian landscape that even in its material form appears in nostalgic quotation marks, and in the other case, to the music (or a certain historically emergent music) itself. Both instances suggest an ecumenical change in the very category of the sacred, its absorption into a repertoire of expressive acts not limited to the articulation of creed.