Mendelssohn stands as the best modern representative of sound, many-sided, conservative, and yet progressive musical culture. He was artist to the marrow. Gifted with original creative genius—a genius not so deep and absolute, so elemental, so Titanic as that of Bach and Handel and Beethoven, nor of so celestial temper as that of Mozart;—trained to consummate musicianship through earnest study and personal absorption of the world's great musical inheritance; compelling himself to daily exercise of his own productive faculty, he summed up in himself the rounded whole of musical art down to his own time. He was the ripe musical scholar. Haunted by original and beautiful ideas, he resisted all extravagant solicitations of the ambitious passion for sensation-making novelty. He kept within bounds of reason and good taste; he respected "Terminus, the god of bounds." Standing at the height of the musical culture of his age, he won all his triumphs without setting up new theories, new forms of art, without resorting to questionable ways. He was nothing if not sincere, frank, simple in his art. Within the approved forms and principles of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he found free air and scope for the expression of what was in him. He never dreamed of questioning the validity of absolute, pure music,—music in itself, without words or programme. On the contrary, he maintained that music is a language far more definite and less ambiguous than speech; that speech is the gainer by translation into music, but that music is the loser by any attempt to translate or "interpret" it in words.

Fac-simile autograph letter from Mendelssohn containing corrections of a four-hand arrangement of one of his symphonies

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Fac-simile autograph manuscript of Mendelssohn's most popular song for male voices, "Farewell to the Forest" Composed in 1840.

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