Without question, one of my favorite bits of classical musical trivia is that without the Mendelssohn family, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) might be virtually unknown. Bach was not well-known or celebrated in his time. In fact, much of his music was dismissed by the public as “wrote mathematical exercise.” After his death, many of his manuscripts were sold at auction because no copyist thought that anyone would ever want to perform Bach’s music again. Thankfully, this is where the Mendelssohn family intervened.

Felix Mendelssohn’s great-aunt, Sarah Levy, studied harpsichord with Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and had purchased a collection of keyboard and choral manuscripts at auction. These made their way through the family to Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), whose life changed forever when he discovered a copyist’s manuscript of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The score impressed him so much that he organized and conducted the work’s second performance since its 1727 premiere in 1829. This performance inspired a generation of Romantic composers and beyond to look to the masters of the past, including Schumann, Brahms, Reger, and many others. To put that gap in the work’s performance history in a different perspective, imagine if Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring had premiered in 1911 (infamously poorly) and then put on the shelf until 2013. Truly, we can be grateful for the work of music preserver and Bach superfan, Felix Mendelssohn.