Mendelssohn Revives Bach

Written by John Daniel Federico  |  March 7, 2026

| Bach outdated! 

The notion is unimaginable to us, for whom Bach’s immortal music stands above the currents of time. And yet, there was a period when the great Johann Sebastian Bach was deemed outdated. Not long after his death, his memory was tucked away in a little corner, gathering dust, and there it might have remained had it not been for a fateful concert mounted on March 11, 1829, conducted by a youthful Felix Mendelssohn.

So what happened to Bach after he died? How did a composer of such stature come to be forgotten?

Even in  Bach’s lifetime, a new, leaner style of music began to emerge, one quite different from the counterpoint that dominated the 17th and early 18th centuries. The new fashion gained steam as Baroque gave way to Classical, and Bach, contrapuntist sans pareil, was dismissed as a mathematical composer whose ponderous polyphony had no place in the era of sleek, elegant style galant. So much had he been reduced to a historical sidenote that should you mention Bach in 1780, as Mozart did, your listeners would assume you meant his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was very  much a style galant composer.

The memory of the older Bach was kept alive by academics and those so-inclined. Among these were the members of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin–a musical society established in 1791, dedicated to the music of Baroque masters such as Handel and Allegri, but most especially, Bach. In 1800, it came under the leadership of Carl Friedrich Zelter–a self-taught composer and music teacher, whose love for Bach extended beyond the Akademie–and among its members were representatives from Berlin’s elite families, including the Mendelssohns.

| All roads lead to Felix

The Mendelssohns made their wealth in banking, and, spurred by the philosophy of patriarch Moses Mendelssohn, took an active part in cultural life. His son, Abraham, was one of the earliest members of the Akademie, joining in 1793. He, too, adored Bach beyond the confines of the group, and purchased a number of manuscripts by the composer.

Another prominent family represented in the Akademie were the Itzigs: sisters Sara Levy, who played the harpsichord, and Bella Salomon, who sang in the choir, and Bella’s daughter, Lea.

All these threads converged in 1804, when Abraham Mendelssohn married Lea. Their household was a deeply musical one–there were regular concerts, and all their children–Fanny, Rebecka, Paul, and, of course, Felix–received musical tuition from none other than Herr Zelter himself.

The powder, so to speak, was set: the young Felix Mendelssohn, already an immensely talented musician, was surrounded by people who loved Bach. It is also worth mentioning that his family converted to Reformed Protestantism in his youth, which only deepened Mendelssohn’s appreciation for the Lutheran composer. All he needed now was a spark.

That came on his fifteenth birthday, when his grandmother, Bella, gave him a score of one of Bach’s heftiest masterpieces: the St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244. Mendelssohn had already had glimpses of the work as a part of the Sing-Akademie’s chorus. Now, he could plumb its great depths. And what treasures did he discover! Rather than dry formulas and belabored melodies, he found dazzling harmonies and rich melodic lines. Far from being barren, Bach’s music was brimming with life and emotion. It was music that he had to resurrect.

| Resurrecting the Passion

Mendelssohn and his friends began rehearsing parts of the St. Matthew Passion three years later, in 1827. Mounting the entire work, however, was no easy feat. For one, many of the instruments and music-making techniques of Bach’s time had already been forgotten. Improvising a baseline, for example, was no longer common practice, and instruments such as the oboe da caccia and harpsichord had long fallen out of fashion. For these things, Mendelssohn sought substitutes–which was the easy part. 

Far more difficult was convincing an early 19th century audience to sit through an entire evening of music that it deemed stiff and badly outdated. Mendelssohn knew that Bach, in their time, was an acquired taste, and had to be administered in smaller, more palatable doses. Cutting out the more reflective arias and chorales, he pared the Passion’s three-hour span down to two, and intentionally contoured it, wherever he could, to suit his audience’s sensibilities. Among other things, he transposed  the violin solo up an octave, as he did the opposite for many of the higher notes sung by the Evangelist. He also leaned into the Romantic tendency to use larger forces, employing a choir of 158 singers–many times the size of the spare forces of Bach’s time. It was certainly not period performance, but work that required immense musical mastery, nonetheless.

In 1829, two years after they began rehearsals, one of Mendelssohn’s friends, baritone Eduard Devrient, convinced the composer to approach Zelter and ask him to lend them the Akademie for their endeavors. Zelter was initially reluctant–he, too, had wanted to conduct the St. Matthew Passion, but could not surmount the difficulties of period performance. Eventually, he acquiesced, and the Akademie’s board followed.

Rehearsals with the Akademie began, and soon enough, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was ready to be performed once more.

| Resurrexit!

On March 11, 1829, Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion rang out again, more than a century after it was composed. At the helm was Felix Mendelssohn, all of 20 years old. Thanks in part to a vigorous marketing campaign, the concert was quickly sold out, and saw the attendance of some of Prussia’s foremost citizens, including the poet Heine, the philosopher Hegel, the theologian Schleiermacher, and King Frederick William III. A second concert followed ten days later on Bach’s birthday, and a third, conducted by Zelter, on Good Friday. 

No words could possibly recapture that electrifying March 11 performance–so we will not make no attempt to do so. We will, however, quote music critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, who recognized the importance of the event: he likened it to “the first morning sun after the mists of the Great Flood” which “heralds a new, brighter day.” And herald a new, brighter day, it did. Mendelssohn’s resurrection of the St. Matthew Passion launched a reevaluation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works, and pushed him into the center of Western classical music. More than that, it showed the concert-going public that the works of past masters are worth revisiting, and so helped spark the now-common practice of performing the music of historical composers.

Personally, for Mendelssohn, the spirit of Bach never left. He conducted the St. Matthew Passion a third time in 1841 at its birthplace, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and this time in its entire length. Bach could be heard in the third movement of his Cello Sonata No. 2, Op. 58, and is almost bodily present in the Six Sonatas for Organ, Op. 65. His last great work, Elijah, Op. 70 of 1846, is a mighty oratorio composed very much in the spirit of Bach. Less than a year later, Mendelssohn passed away, having changed the way people listen to classical music.