Here's a puzzle: Why did one of the most supremely gifted musicians of all time struggle for years to master the king of instruments? The image of Felix Mendelssohn as an individual who knew no difficulties, who conquered the musical world while still in his teens, and whose mouth was crammed with silver spoons, is firmly entrenched in our consciousness. He acquired a virtuoso piano technique by the age of thirteen, and his first masterpiece, the Octet, op. 20, was written when he was only sixteen. Yet, as Wm. A. Little illustrates in this major new study, the organ remained a challenge for Mendelssohn until his thirties. Even then, he never managed to learn more than a handful of large-scale works.

The initial sections of the book return repeatedly to the difficulties that Mendelssohn faced when learning the organ. In a series of observations that lead us perceptively into the world of the nineteenth-century organist, Little details some of the impediments. First, there was the problem of gaining access to suitable churches. As Mendelssohn's fame increased, this difficulty doubtless receded, though we should not forget that as late as 1837 a performance of J. S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in A minor in St Paul's Cathedral was abruptly cut short by a beadle who, keen to get home, restricted access to the bellows. And then there was winter: without heating and electric lighting, many organ lofts were far from welcoming for several months of the year. A further problem for a globetrotting musician like Mendelssohn was the non-standard nature of pedal-boards. The repertoire that most interested him, the organ music of J. S. Bach, requires a pedal-board of at least 27 notes; yet this was available only in certain regions of Germany. Much of Europe was effectively out of bounds for anyone wishing to play Bach on the organ.

All these factors doubtless contributed to Mendelssohn's slow progress as a performer. Yet he seems to have been fascinated by the organ from an early age, and letters from foreign towns are often enlivened by descriptions of the instruments he encountered along the way. Moreover, Mendelssohn's contributions to organ literature – principally, the Three Preludes and Fugues, op. 37, and the Six Sonatas, op. 65 – are among the most significant works composed for the instrument in the two and a half centuries since Bach's death. So why the slow progress? Was it a question of circumstance or a lack of will?

Little chooses to stress the problems that Mendelssohn encountered. In the book's blurb we read that the organ ‘played a uniquely important role in [Mendelssohn's] personal life’; indeed, it ‘seems to have been his instrument of choice’. These are bold claims, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, for all his interest, the organ was not central to Mendelssohn's life. After all, he gave only one recital in Germany throughout his entire career – notably, a concert in support of the Bach monument in Leipzig. In fact, as Little himself points out (p. 104), there is no documentary evidence that he ever played in public any repertoire other than by Bach or Mendelssohn himself. What is more, his library contained hardly any contemporary organ music beyond works in presentation copies or gifts. And there are significant periods in Mendelssohn's life – for example, the years 1823 to 1828 – when his engagement with the organ seems to have left virtually no trace. Five years is a huge span in terms of such a fast-burn career, and it is, of course, a period when Mendelssohn's engagement with Baroque music was reaching a peak. (The following year, 1829, saw the revival of the St Matthew Passion.) Mendelssohn's attitude to the organ was perhaps more complex than Little suggests.

One possible solution to the puzzle, which is touched on in the opening chapters but never fully explored, can be found in the composer's background. Little tells us (on p. 21) that ‘any consideration of Mendelssohn and the organ must proceed from the premise that, first and last, Mendelssohn was a secular musician’. Perhaps as a result of this, the issue of religion is not pursued with any vigour. It is telling that the name of Jeffrey S. Sposato, one of the most notable of younger Mendelssohn scholars, does not appear in the Bibliography.Footnote 1 Whatever one may think of the debates waged in recent years over the composer's Jewishness, it is regrettable that the topic is not raised here. Mendelssohn's Jewish heritage must surely have played some role in his decision not to take on a church job in his youth. In this context we might well recall that August Wilhelm Bach, Mendelssohn's only organ teacher, denied his pupil access to a J. S. Bach manuscript for reasons of anti-Semitism (spiked no doubt by jealousy): ‘Why does the Jew-boy have to have everything? He has enough as it is’ (p. 32). Does this help explain why Mendelssohn's professional engagement with the organ was so limited and, moreover, focussed primarily on England?

In the course of the volume Little charts Mendelssohn's involvement with the organ from a variety of perspectives. The book begins with an account of ‘the Berlin organ scene’. This is a curious upbeat. The long list of Berlin churches and organists, replete with details that might better have been placed in an appendix, has relatively little bearing on a career that was played out across Europe, largely away from the composer's home town. As Little admits, Mendelssohn probably never played many of the organs listed here.

The opening chapter is followed by two that bring together all the main biographical material; this is woven together into a very engaging account. Subsequent chapters home in on individual aspects of Mendelssohn and the organ. Inevitably, the majority of them deal in one way or another with Mendelssohn's interest in early music. The chapter on editing demonstrates persuasively the central role that he played in the dissemination of J. S. Bach's organ works; here Little brings to light significant new material, pointing out that Mendelssohn (in collaboration with A.B. Marx) was the first to publish some of Bach's most significant organ works, not least the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) and the Orgelbüchlein. Little also stresses Mendelssohn's credentials as an editor. Mendelssohn constantly strove to deliver a text without editorial intrusions; where this was not possible, he insisted on distinguishing clearly between editor's’ interventions and the composer's own markings. Though he could flout composers’ intentions in performance – often for perfectly understandable reasons – Mendelssohn's insistence on principles similar to those of an Urtext edition remained firm, leading on several occasions to rows with publishers. The claim that Mendelssohn deserves to be recognized ‘as one of the nineteenth century's most distinguished and far-sighted editors’ (p. 138) surely stands scrutiny. Indeed, throughout the chapters on Mendelssohn and early music Little powerfully reinforces the argument put forward some years ago by Susanna Grossmann-Vendrey that espousing the cause of early music in the first half of the nineteenth century was the mark of an innovator, not of a conservative.Footnote 2 History has, of course, tended to take an opposing view.

The central part of the book consists of commentaries on all the surviving organ music, including early versions of published pieces. Here Little comes into his own. His command of the sources, as one might expect from a scholar who has edited the complete organ works, is magisterial; and his descriptions of individual pieces reveal a writer with deep empathy for the music. Throughout this section the text flows elegantly, with occasional flashes of humour. However, there are also some misjudgements. For instance, to describe the join from framing material to fugue in the finale of the B-flat Sonata as ‘not particularly felicitous’ (p. 311) is to miss the point; by overlapping frame and fugue Mendelssohn was creating the sort of effortless transition that we know he prized in musical prose. It might have been noted here that the framing material, typically of the composer, is linked thematically to the fugue subject (see the repeated D to B-flat progression in the pedals). A motivic analysis would also have revealed why Mendelssohn, with ‘no rational explanation’ (p. 313), used the lower octave in bar 84: the theme is made up of two four-note cells whose integrity is preserved in Mendelssohn's version.

Those who have grown up with Mendelssohn's organ works will be delighted at many turns by the unexpected details presented here. However, the book is perhaps best read as a series of separate studies, rather than as continuous narrative. There is a considerable amount of repetition between sections, and anyone reading from cover to cover might feel the absence of a strong editorial hand. At times one has the impression of various pieces of material thrown together with little thought for the overall picture. For example, Chapter 10, while valuable and at times intriguing, is curiously one-sided. Little simply lists some German organists that Mendelssohn may (or may not) have known, amplifying the list with brief biographical sketches. However, there is no equivalent section on England where Mendelssohn, as noted above, was probably more active as organist.

As will be clear by now, Mendelssohn and the Organ contains a huge amount of material, and it is hard to see it being replaced as the standard reference book for many years to come. Given this, it is a shame that questions must hang over some aspects of its scholarly integrity. The author's (or editor's) attention to detail can, on occasion, be slack. One English-language source quoted in Appendix A (p. 365) is also cited in the main body of the text (p. 76). Yet there are no fewer than twelve discrepancies between the two versions, and neither accurately represents the source (Henry Chorley's recollections of Mendelssohn's last visit to Switzerland). Admittedly, most of the divergences are of no great import. However, errors on such a scale – and this is far from an isolated example – inevitably leave one questioning the accuracy of quotations that are harder to check.

What is more, not all the slips are trivial. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – not ‘Carl Phillip Emmanuel’ (p. 5), or ‘Carl Philip Emmanuel’ (p. 14), or ‘Carl Phillip Emanuel’ (p. 395) – composed six sonatas for Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, not four (p. 14). The early Mendelssohn opera is Die Hochzeit des Camacho, not Die Hochzeit des Camachio. The D major prelude that caused so much amazement when realised on the organ with pedals was almost certainly from Book I of Das Wohltemperirte Clavier, not Book II, as stated on p. 41.Footnote 3 And so on.

The various appendices are a treasure-trove of information about Mendelssohn and the organ. Through a summary of the different editions of the major collections, for example, we are given fascinating glimpses into the changing fortunes of the composer over the years. This survey supplements the material in the final chapter of the book proper. Particularly tantalising are the sections on Mendelssohn in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic. However, the reception history remains a partial account: the name of Richard Wagner, for example, does not once feature here. It is odd, too, that there is no mention of Schumann's Six Fugues on BACH, op. 60, in the survey of works that followed the Six Sonatas, op. 65. The BACH Fugues were written in the immediate wake of Mendelssohn's Sonatas, and the two collections share an obvious concern to create ‘a higher echo of the past’.Footnote 4

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This is by far the most significant book to have appeared on Mendelssohn and the organ. It is also a highly enjoyable read. As such, it ought to find its way onto the bookshelves of every organist and every scholar of the organ. However, it very much represents musicology of the old school, a musicology that springs from a fundamentally positivistic outlook and that is largely immune to considerations of broader context. While applauding the considerable merits of the book I, for one, would have welcomed a more discursive and, above all, a more synthetic approach.