Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
Leipzig, April 30, 1843.
My dear Friend,—Our last letters crossed on the road. A thousand thanks for yours that I received a few days ago. You know what heartfelt pleasure it gives me every time I see that well-known handwriting of yours on the address, and how grateful I am to you for writing to me, overwhelmed as you are by every kind of claim on your time. It would certainly be better if we need never correspond, and could exchange ideas verbally from one end of the year to the other, and that in Germany too! That is a prospect I am less than ever inclined to give up; only, I don’t quite see my way to the where and the how. So, in the mean while, accept my thanks for the letter. The terms at our music school are two hundred thalers per annum; the cost of living here, at all decently, would amount at least to two hundred thalers. Young Englishmen, who usually live rather better, would probably require from two hundred and fifty to three hundred thalers,—say fifty or sixty pounds per annum.
The school has made a fair start; new pupils are almost daily joining, and the number of lessons and of teachers has had to be considerably increased. There are already thirty odd pupils, twelve of whom are instructed free of charge, and some of them are very promising.
We are afflicted, however, with two veritable maladies, which I mean to fight with all my might as long as I have anything to do with the institution. First, the Directors want to enlarge and to expand,—build houses and hire rooms,—whilst I maintain that for the next ten years the two large rooms that we have, and in which instruction can be given simultaneously, are quite sufficient. And then the pupils all want to compose and to theorize, whilst I believe that the principal thing that can and ought to be taught is sound practical work,—sound playing and keeping time, sound knowledge of sound music, etc. Out of that, all other knowledge grows of itself; and what is beyond is not a matter of teaching, but must come as a gift from above. Don’t you agree with me? That I am not the man to turn art into mere mechanism, I need not say. But whither am I wandering? I have got into chatting instead of writing the two lines I intended. So now good-by.
Yours ever,
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
In a letter of the 5th of April, 1844, Moscheles communicates to Mendelssohn the desire of the Handel Society, that Mendelssohn should prepare a new edition of the “Messiah.” Moscheles had announced a concert for the 1st of June; and, in view of Mendelssohn’s expected visit to England, he writes to ask him whether he is inclined to play on that occasion some new piece of his own composition for two performers. “Have you got anything of that kind amongst your manuscripts,” he says; “or, if not, might not Jupiter evolve something Minerva-like from his fertile brain?”