Monday, January 12, 2009

Mendelssohn's Liebestod?


Did Felix Mendelssohn nurse a fatal passion for the "Swedish nightingale," Jenny Lind?

So one British scholar, Curtis Price, suggests, citing an affidativ from Lind's husband mentioning his destruction of "an 1847 missive from the composer to the soprano declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused. Lind, one infers, did refuse. Several months later, Mendelssohn was dead," Jessica Duchen reports in The Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/conspiracy-of-silence-could-the-release-of-secret-documents-shatter-felix-mendelssohns-reputation-1300405.html