Besides his fame as a scholar, he was a friend of both Robert Schumann, with whom he corresponded, and Felix Mendelssohn, who dedicated a song to him.

Mendelssohn soon won the confidence of Bernhard, who made the young student successively his bookkeeper and his partner.

Either Gumperz or Hess ( it is not known which ) introduced Mendelssohn to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1754, who became one of his greatest friends.

In the year following his marriage Mendelssohn won the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for an essay on the application of mathematical proofs to metaphysics, On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences ; among the competitors were Thomas Abbt and Immanuel Kant ( who came second ).

Several of his students attained a fair amount of fame for themselves: Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Therese Jansen Bartolozzi, Ludwig Berger ( who went on to teach Felix Mendelssohn ), and John Field ( who, in his turn, would become a major influence on Frédéric Chopin ).

He was one of the few German composers under the Nazi regime who responded to the official call to write new incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream after the music of Felix Mendelssohn had been banned – others refused to cooperate in this.

Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of Felix Mendelssohn, introduced the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach to Gounod, who came to revere Bach.

She was descended on both sides from distinguished Jewish families ; her parents were Abraham Mendelssohn ( who was the son of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and later changed the family surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy ), and Lea, née Salomon, a granddaughter of the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig.

He was the son of a banker Simon Veit and his wife Dorothea, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who subsequently left him to marry Friedrich Schlegel.

There he met C. F. Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he formed a close friendship, and who were instrumental in his forming his own views.

Busoni had a brief period of study in Graz with Wilhelm Mayer ( who used the pseudonym of W. A. Rémy and also taught Felix Weingartner ) and was also helped by Wilhelm Kienzl, who enabled him to conduct a performance of his own composition ' Stabat Mater ' when he was twelve years old, before leaving for Leipzig in 1886 where he studied with Carl Reinecke ( a former pupil of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann ).

Moses Mendelssohn criticized some aspects of Christianity, but depicted Jesus as a Torah-observant rabbi, who was loyal to traditional Judaism.

Others were passed on through his only known Berlin pupil, Sarah Itzig Levy, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family in Berlin and great-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn ; it was she who gave Mendelssohn the manuscript of the St. Matthew Passion, which she had received from Friedemann.

Among the competitors were Moses Mendelssohn, who won, and Immanuel Kant.

A debut with the Mendelssohn concerto aroused the interest of some wealthy patrons, who sent him to Vienna for further study under a scholarship.

He was acclaimed in all circles for his extensive knowledge, thus Moses Mendelssohn, founder of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, wrote to him as " your disciple, who thirsts for your words.

Mendelssohn originally composed the work to a German text by his friend Karl Klingemann, who earlier had provided him with the libretto for his comic operetta Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde.

Julius Schubring, one of the librettists who had earlier supplied the text for the oratorio Paulus ( St. Paul ), wanted to bring a Christian perspective to the end of the oratorio, but Mendelssohn insisted that the story of Elijah be presented faithfully and without revisionism.

Lessing also brought Mendelssohn to public attention for the first time: Mendelssohn had written an essay attacking Germans ' neglect of their native philosophers ( principally Gottfried Leibniz ), and lent the manuscript to Lessing.

Collection of the Judah L. Magnes MuseumSo far, Mendelssohn had devoted his talents to philosophy and criticism ; now, however, an incident turned the current of his life in the direction of the cause of Judaism.

They insisted on Mendelssohn telling them his views on Jesus and managed to get from him the statement, that, provided the historical Jesus had kept himself and his theology strictly within limits of orthodox Judaism, Mendelssohn " respected the morality of Jesus ' character ".

Six years later, in October 1769, Lavater sent Mendelssohn his German translation of Charles Bonnet's essay on Christian Evidences, with a preface where he publicly challenged Mendelssohn to refute Bonnet or if he could not then to " do what wisdom, the love of truth and honesty must bid him, what a Socrates would have done if he had read the book and found it unanswerable ".

After a short and restless sleep one evening, Mendelssohn found himself incapable of moving and had the feeling of something lashing his neck with fiery rods, his heart was palpitating and he was in an extreme anxiety, yet fully conscious.

" had composed a brilliant new score ( his most subtle yet ) to a scintillating libretto .... Iolanthe is the work in which Sullivan's operetta style takes a definite step forward, and metamorphosis of musical themes is its characteristic new feature .... By recurrence and metamorphosis of themes Sullivan made the score more fluid ...." Much of Sullivan's " fairy " music pays deliberate homage to the incidental music written by Felix Mendelssohn for a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

He had considerable admiration for other 19th-century masters such as Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Schubert.

In Leipzig he met Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, the latter of whom had written an enthusiastic article on the Symphonie fantastique.

After learning this, Berlioz burnt a large number of documents and other mementos which he had accumulated during his life, keeping only a conducting baton given to him by Mendelssohn and a guitar given to him by Paganini.

One Charlotte von Knobloch wrote Kant asking his opinion of Swedenborg ’ s psychic experiences Kant wrote a very affirmative reply, referring to Swedenborg's " miraculous " gift, and characterizing him as " reasonable, agreeable, remarkable and sincere " and " a scholar ", in one of his letters to Mendelssohn, and expressing regret that he ( Kant ) had never met Swedenborg.

Through his own concertos and his advocacy of the concertos of Beethoven ( he also played Beethoven's sonatas and string quartets ) and Mendelssohn, he added a more classical dimension to the violin repertoire which had tended towards technically brilliant but often shallow variations and fantasies on popular operatic themes.

* German composer Felix Mendelssohn began an opera in 1846 based on the legend of the Loreley Rhine maidens for Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, however, he died before he had the chance to finish it

Dirichlet, whose wife Rebecca came from the wealthy Mendelssohn family, had introduced Kronecker to the Berlin elite.

Müller knew Felix Mendelssohn and had Carl Maria von Weber as a godfather.

In 1829, Mendelssohn had organized the first performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion since the composer's death, and was instrumental in bringing this and other of Bach's works to widespread popularity.

After she heard him play the Mendelssohn C minor Trio in 1857, she wrote that " he so rattled it off that I did not know how to control myself ... and often he so annihilated fiddle and cello that I ... could hear nothing of them.

Goldmark's chamber music, in which the influences of Schumann and Mendelssohn are paramount, although critically well received in his lifetime, is now rarely heard.

Despite its popularity, Franz Liszt heard the piece at the Schumanns ' home and was distinctly unimpressed by it, dismissing it as being " too Leipzigerisch ", a reference to the conservative musical style of composers from Leipzig, especially Felix Mendelssohn.

One of the most frequently heard excerpts from the Mendelssohn music is titled " War March of the Priests " (" Kriegsmarsch der Priester ").

Mendelssohn had heard it performed in London and wrote the composer he " liked it very much ".

Balakirev attacked Rubinstein for his conservative musical tastes, especially for his leaning on German masters such as Mendelssohn and Beethoven, and for his insistence on professional musical training.

Four cylinders made in Russia in 1895 – 1896, with music by Mendelssohn, Louis Brassin and Rubinstein, have been recently discovered and issued on CD.

Throughout his life, he ( like many other musicians of Jewish origin ) remained close to the circles of other musicians of Jewish origin ( e. g. Felix Mendelssohn, Anton Rubinstein, Joseph Joachim, Ferdinand Hiller ), and patrons of Jewish origin ( the Eskeles family in Vienna, the Leo family in Paris, and the Rothschild banking family of England ).