This month, Bella Salomon turns 275 years old. Never heard of her? You’re not alone. But you probably have heard of Felix Mendelssohn. And you may also know that in 1829, he conducted the first modern performance of J S Bach’s St Matthew Passion. That performance could not have taken place without Bella Salomon – because Bella Salomon was Felix’s grandmother, and had given him a rare copy of Bach’s work for his fifteenth birthday. 

On 30 November this year, as part of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra’s Bach-Mendelssohn Festival, we’ll be spending the day unpicking the story of this famous 1829 revival. The pithy version is quite simply that Felix Mendelssohn was the first person to conduct the piece in a century (it was first heard on Good Friday 1727) and rescued Bach’s music from historical oblivion. Great composer was thus rescued from obscurity and brought back into the prominent position he deserved by another great composer. But the real story is – of course – rather more complicated and involves many more people. 

The forebears of the Mendelssohn family were socially significant and intellectually enlightened many generations before the arrival of those brilliant musical siblings, Fanny and Felix, in the early 1800s. In particular, Bella Itzig and her sisters Franziska and Sara were particularly prominent and successful figures in the musical and literary worlds of the late eighteenth century. Franziska became a Baroness, Fanny von Arnstein (after whom Fanny Mendelssohn was named) and ran a flourishing salon in Vienna. Sara was a talented harpsichordist and studied with the J S Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, when she was a teenager. After her marriage to the banker Salomon Levy, Sara established one of the most famous salons in Berlin and held regular musical soirées. She also became a patron of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most important German composer of his generation, whose music was to influence Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart. For the Itzig family, the Bachs were friends and personal acquaintances, human connections to their eminent and late-lamented father.

Bella Salomon (1749-1824)

Bella Itzig took keyboard lessons with Johann Philipp Kirnberger, who had studied with J S Bach, and she later sang in the Sing-Akademie in Berlin. She married and had four children, among them Lea – who became the mother of Felix, Fanny, Rebekka and Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Granny Bella presented her talented grandson with a copy of the St Matthew Passion score in early 1824. She must have known that it would also be of interested to Felix’s older sister Fanny, who was an accomplished performer of Bach’s keyboard music. Works like The Well-Tempered Clavier were still in circulation among certain keen aficionados of historical music, but didn’t feature in public concerts.

Felix took the score to show his teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter – who had been appointed to the role of the Mendelssohn music tutor at the recommendation of Aunt Sara. Now the siblings pored over the score of the Passion together, and despite Zelter’s urging that Felix leave it alone, he found friends willing to encourage him in mounting a performance. Chief among them was Eduard Devrient, a singer and actor who ended up taking on the role of Christus. 

Although Fanny Mendelssohn’s father had already forbidden her a career as a professional musician, she remained passionately devoted to performance and composition and eventually established her own series of musical soirees at her home in Berlin. In that famous Bach performance in March 1829, she sang alto in the choir for Felix as he conducted from the keyboard. The concert was a tremendous success and a second performance was hurriedly laid on for Bach’s birthday ten days later. The St Matthew Passion became the symbolic beginning of the so-called ‘Bach revival’ in Germany, and performances eventually followed of Bach’s other choral pieces including the mighty Mass in B minor (which opens the Oxford Philharmonic’s festival season) in 1859. It also inspired Felix to write his own large-scale oratorios, most famously the wildly successful Elijah, premiered in Birmingham in 1846. You can hear Byrn Terfel take on this Biblical role in Oxford on 1 December. 

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Anyone involved in musical performance will know it takes a lot of people to make a concert happen, too – particularly if the music is new or unfamiliar. Who’s going to make the orchestral parts and chorus books? Organise rehearsals? Co-ordinate player lists and vocal forces? How do you play a work that’s supposed to feature harpsichords and a viola da gamba when you don’t have either of those things?! What about getting the audience to sing along in the chorales? (Should you even have the chorales if you’re not performing this in a church?) And that’s all on top of the standard performance questions of how loud or soft, how fast or slow, and so on. The piece performed in 1829 didn’t sound quite like the St Matthew Passion as we hear it today. The fact that it happened at all was thanks to the hard work of many individuals, not least the remarkable women whose own considerable musical abilities and personal connections to the Bach family led to Felix encountering the score at all. Want to know more? Join us on the 30 November to hear it from the historians, editors, librarians and performers who will be bringing this fascinating story to life. 

The Oxford Philharmonic’s Bach Mendelssohn Festival begins with a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass on 21st November followed by Mendelssohn’s Elijah with Bryn Terfel on 1 December and runs until 20 March 2025. The Oxford Philharmonic will perform Bach’s St Matthew Passion on 2 March. oxfordphil.com