Of all the "non-Aryan" scapegoats of the Nazis, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) led the musical list. The Third Reich outlawed the playing of Mendelssohn's music, destroyed his statues and commissioned an "Aryan" to rewrite his Midsummer Night's Dream score.
His letters, published this week (Mendelssohn Letters, edited by G. Selden-Goth; Pantheon Books Inc., $4.50), prove that the light-hearted Felix was a curious target for so much Nazi venom. Hardly aware of his Jewish ancestry, Felix was a devout Christian. Some of his paragraphs were so passionately certain of the supremacy of German art that even...
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