Listen to The Warm Up: your audio introduction to the performance.

Programme Note

At the 2025 International Festival, we have commissioned a series of expert essays to help you Dive Deeper into your Festival experience.

This essay on Mendelssohn's Elijah explores how the critical reception of the initially acclaimed oratorio has changed in the centuries since the composer's death.

Resurrecting Elijah

Few pieces of music have experienced such wildly fluctuating reputations as Felix Mendelssohn’s powerfully dramatic oratorio Elijah.  At first, praised to the skies, the work subsequently fell heavily out of fashion, only gradually regaining some of its former popularity following the end of the Second World War.  

The earliest phase in its reception was unanimously positive. When Mendelssohn unveiled Elijah for the first time at the Birmingham Festival in 1846, it met with an ecstatic response. A review in The Times noted that “the last note of Elijah was drowned in a long continued unanimous volley of plaudits, vociferous and deafening”, and that “never was there a more complete triumph—never a more thorough and speedy recognition of a great work of art.”

Yet despite the overwhelming enthusiasm for Elijah from the Birmingham audience, the highly self-critical composer was not fully satisfied with what he had written. Over the next year, he subjected the oratorio to a comprehensive revision before returning to London for the last time in April 1847 to conduct four performances of the revised version in Exeter Hall.  The response in The Times to Mendelssohn’s revisions was, if anything, even more acclamatory, leading the anonymous critic to place Mendelssohn’s achievement on the same level as Handel’s perennially popular Messiah and Israel in Egypt:     

But what probably contributed more than anything to enhancing the long-term popularity of Elijah in nineteenth-century England was the endorsement of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, who were present at the second London performance. Overwhelmed by the impact of the music, Albert wrote a personal note of thanks to Mendelssohn, describing him as the “noble artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of false art, through genius and study has been able, like a second Elijah, to remain true to the service of true art.” 

Mendelssohn Attacked

Forty years after the Birmingham premiere, Elijah showed no signs of losing its initial esteem in England, and at least 25 separate professional performances of the work took place during the 1885/1886 season.  But the response to Mendelssohn’s oratorio in his native Germany was more mixed. Against a background of increasing cultural chauvinism and outright anti-Semitic prejudice, it became increasingly fashionable to disparage Mendelssohn’s achievement and question its enduring value. Leading the charge was Richard Wagner whose pernicious attacks on Mendelssohn, expounded in his essay ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’, blamed what he perceived to be the composer’s shallowness on his Jewish background.

It was perhaps inevitable that the anti-Mendelssohn cult, spurred on by Wagner and his supporters, would eventually take hold in England. Although Elijah continued to maintain its place in the repertoire, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, detractors such as George Bernard Shaw sought to demolish its previously unassailable position. In the late 1880s, Shaw lambasted Elijah for “its dreary fugue manufacture and its Sunday-school sentimentalities.” In time, many other writers took aim at Elijah. A good example was the distinguished critic Ernest Newman who felt that the popularity of Elijah merely satisfied the artistic needs of “a musically ignorant and unadventurous English public”. In a newspaper article, published in 1909, Newman went so far as to argue that Mendelssohn’s depiction of the priests of Baal inspired “no more terror in the audience than so many dear old Father Christmases.”

To his credit, Newman’s criticisms were based upon purely musical and aesthetic issues, and there is no intimation whatsoever of a racial bias. It was left to the Nazis to cynically exploit the racial card by not only banning all performance of Mendelssohn’s works in Germany, but also systematically attempting to write him out of musical history altogether.

Rediscovering the Masterpiece

The centenary of Mendelssohn’s death in 1947, two years after the demise of the Nazi regime, provided the perfect opportunity to clear the air, both in Germany and England. An editorial in the Musical Times argued that the charge of insipidness and sentimentality, so frequently aimed at the composer, had now gone too far. As for Elijah, it was time to halt the scorn attached to its presence in festival and choral society programmes, and cease debating whether the oratorio justified holding its place alongside choral works by Handel, Bach, Brahms and Verdi. What a new generation of critics had actually discovered was that “Elijah is after all a masterpiece, full of effective characterisation, assured in style and perfect in craftsmanship.” The critical reception of Elijah was indeed gradually turning full circle.

© Erik Levi, 2025