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Besides, Wessely contributed to the German translation of the Bible, and to the commentary on the Bible, both, as mentioned before, works presided over by Mendelssohn, to whom he was attached by the tie of admiring friendship. Wessely's chief distinction, however, was his firm character and his love of truth.
Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn were inveterate thieves, and pilfered the choicest gems from old and forgotten writers without scruple. Beethoven seems to have been so fecund in great conceptions, so lifted on the wings of his tireless genius, so austere in artistic morality, that he stands for the most part above the reproach deservedly borne by his brother composers.
The overture was evidently calculated for a Parisian audience, and the astonishment Mendelssohn caused by appearing in such a connection was shown by Robert Schumann in his own ungainly fashion at its close. Approaching the musician in the orchestra, he blandly, and with a genial smile, expressed his admiration of the 'brilliant orchestral piece' just played..
Through the influence of his relatives and countrymen, Israel Moses Halevi and Daniel Jaffe, he was introduced to Mendelssohn, and was enabled to devote himself systematically to the study of German, the alphabet of which he had learned from Wolff's treatise on mathematics, and to French, Latin, physics, philosophy, and medicine. In a very short time he mastered them all, especially German.
It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the beautiful EPISODE of German music.
Mendelssohn found all the many worries of theatrical management the engagement of singers and musicians, the dissensions to be arranged, the many tastes to be conciliated too irksome, and he did not long retain this appointment; but the life among his friends at Düsseldorf was most delightful, and the letters written at this time are exceedingly lively and gay.
Things can't go on like this any longer. I've got to buckle down to work again. I've ... I...I haven't told you yet: Schwarz is letting me play the Mendelssohn."
Francis Xavier, Grotius, Thomasius, George Fox, Fenelon, the Wesleys, Moses Mendelssohn, Schleiermacher, Dr. Arnold, Channing, Phillips Brooks, and their like may well be our exemplars, despite all their limitations and imperfections. I grant that there are circumstances which may oblige a self-respecting man to withdraw from religious organizations and assemblages.
Spohr's ability as a composer of sacred music would have been more distinctly accepted, had it not been that Handel, Haydn, and, in more recent years, Mendelssohn, raised the ideal of the oratorio so high that only the very loftiest musical genius is considered fit to reign in this sphere.
I remember having read "an appeal to the German nation," by Berthold Auerbach, in which every sentence was un-German, distorted and false, and which, as a whole, resembled a soulless mosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. As to the disgracefully slipshod German with which Edward Devrient solemnised the death of Mendelssohn, I do not even wish to do more than refer to it.
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