Selected letters of Mendelssohn/Letter 25
FROM A LETTER TO MINISTER VON FALKENSTEIN (proposing the foundation of an Academy of Music in Leipsic).
……Music has long been peculiarly a native growth of this country, and it is just that tendency in it which lies nearest the heart of every thoughtful and receptive lover of art, the tendency, I mean, towards the expression of true and profound feeling, which has struck the deepest root among us from the beginning. This wide-spread sympathy in our nation is certainly no matter of accident, nor has it been without weighty result for our general culture. And thus music has been a most vital power among us, not only as affording momentary pleasures, but working for our higher and spiritual growth. Whoever is really interested in this art must also feel keenly the desire to see it established for the future on the firmest possible basis.
The dominant tendency of our time, however, is towards the positive and the mechanical; and in face of this the development and propagation of true artistic sense is doubly needful, but also doubly difficult. The attainment of this end seems only possible if we begin at the foundation. And good grounding is the surest method in every sort of education, certainly it is so in music. We need a good school of music which would include all the various branches of the art, subjecting each in turn to that higher aim towards which they all serve as means, and leading on its scholars as far as possible to that aim; such a school would be able to combat the practical or material tendency which, unhappily, has many influential adherents among artists themselves, and would, I believe, even yet be strong enough to overcome it.
Simple, private teaching, which in former days bore such admirable fruit, and that, too, for the community at large, is for many reasons no longer adequate to our needs. Masters capable of teaching any musical instrument were formerly to be found in all classes of society, but this has more and more declined in our day, and is now to a great extent confined to a single instrument—the piano.
The scholars who desire instruction in other directions are almost entirely limited to those who devote themselves to music as a profession, and to these people the means of paying for good private teaching are generally wanting. It is the fact that among these one often finds the most brilliant talents; but unfortunately teachers of music are on their side seldom in a position to devote their time to the development of even the greatest talent without remuneration, and thus scholars and teachers alike lose, the first the instruction they long for, the second the opportunity of spreading abroad their knowledge and making it live. Thus a public academy would at the present day be a great advantage to both masters and scholars. It would put within reach of the latter the means of developing capacities which without such help must often go to waste. And for teachers of music it would be most valuable to have a centre whence their energies could be directed from a single point of view, and to a single object, and thus be preserved from indifference and isolation, and from the resulting sterility of which we are too well aware….