Paul Hermann Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Life

Paul Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, one of four children of a banker, Abraham Mendelssohn (who later changed his surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and who was himself the son of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), and of Lea Salomon, a member of the Itzig family and the sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy. Paul was the family's third child: His brother was the famous composer Felix Mendelssohn and his oldest sister Fanny was also to display exceptional and precocious musical talent.

Paul grew up in an environment of intense intellectual ferment. The greatest minds of Germany were frequent visitors to his family's later home in Berlin, including Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt.

Abraham renounced the Jewish religion; his children were first brought up without religious education, and were baptised as Christians in 1816. (Abraham and his wife were not themselves baptised until 1822.) The name Bartholdy was assumed at the suggestion of Lea's brother, Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, who had inherited a property of this name and adopted it as his own surname. Abraham was later to explain this decision in a letter to his children as a means of showing a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses: "There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius".

The family moved to Berlin in 1811 and Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn sought to give his children (Fanny, Felix, Paul and Rebecca) the best education possible.

décédé le 17 juillet 1879 pour Judith Nathan Elam?