Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy by Eduard Magnus, c. 1846
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was recognized early as a child prodigy, compared to the young Mozart by contemporary observers. His father was a well-to-do banker, and the family environment was cultured and intellectual. Felix began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six and played his first public concert at the age of nine. He began composing early, as well, and his compositions were performed in his parents' home by a private orchestra hired to play at their regular salons.
Mendelssohn's output eventually included symphonies, concertos, piano music, and chamber music, in addition to songs, oratorios, and church music. He is credited with "rediscovering" the music of J.S. Bach and bringing the major works of the hitherto forgotten master to the attention of his contemporaries. His oratorios, Elijah and St. Paul, are modeled more on the examples of Handel and Haydn than on Bach's masses and passions, but he clearly had Bach in mind while composing his many smaller choral motets.
Historian James Garratt writes that from his early career, "the view emerged that Mendelssohn's engagement with early music was a defining aspect of his creativity." In his composing, performing, and teaching, he sought to reinvigorate the musical legacy that had preceded him rather than replace it with new forms and styles.
The Leipzig Conservatory, which Mendelssohn founded in 1843, served as the bastion of conservative, traditional musical values throughout the 19th century. Mendelssohn's radical contemporaries Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, who constituted the "New German School," regarded the school and its founder as outmoded and unimaginative; Berlioz wrote of him that he had "perhaps studied the music of the dead too closely." Critical opinion of Mendelssohn has undergone revision in the 20th and 21st centuries; he is now universally acknowledged as one of the important figures of the Romantic period.
Mendelssohn composed his a cappella motet Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen, MWV B 53, in 1844, in response to an attempted assassination of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, adapted it, with orchestral accompaniment, as the seventh movement of his oratorio Elijah in 1846.