The Mendelssohn Statue in Leipzig


Let the language of music tell only of noble things
is incised on its backside, as if Leipzig 
almost felt ashamed of a sentiment 
too impersonal for an epitaph, 
too pompous for an apology.  
Most people miss it or aren’t sure what it means. 

Procrastination is the vector of pride and disgrace; 
inaction the stand-off of admiration’s 
tug-of-war with inbred hate.  Forget the 
father’s canny baptisms, the Christian 
upbringing, the hopefully appended 
Bartholdy.  Grandfather Moshe frowned on 
conversions, scorned the opportunism, 
perhaps foreseeing their futility.  
Abraham, son of a famous father, 
father of a famous son, implored Felix 
to drop the Mendelssohn from his programs. 
A Christian Mendelssohn is an impossibility. 
A Christian Mendelssohn the world will never recognize.  
On the pedestal the ersatz surname 
Felix didn’t like crawls underneath the 
one he kept, a dropped wig of Magyar hair. 
I should have discarded the name Mendelssohn, 
immediately, wrote father bitterly to son.  

The bronze effigy stands seven meters high 
across from Bach’s own Thomaskirche.  
A lyre-bearing muse, looking like a 
foot-sore tourist, rests on the steps below 
the Master.  On one side a pair of angels 
scrape a violin, blow a flute; on the other, 
a brace of cherubs work through a vocal score. 
Felix was the Queen of England’s favorite 
composer; he and Albert could chitchat in 
homely German.  This thing looks echt Victorian
though it’s not yet a decade old.  Here the 
musical city’s champion, renowned,
romantically dead before forty, 
takes his stand; still, it took the Leipzigers 
twenty-one years to appoint a committee, 
twenty-four more before they accomplished 
their work, thirty-eight more for the city to 
cleanse itself of the result, bearing out the
father’s prophecy:  There can no more 
be a Christian Mendelssohn than a Jewish
Confucius.  Easy to dismiss the Fifth, to proclaim
the mighty fortress someone else’s God.  

On November 9, 1936, Deputy Mayor
Rudolf Haake publicly declared the 
Jew Mendelssohn cannot be displayed as
an exponent of a German city
of music.  Nobody knows what became 
of Werner Stein’s original sculpture--
melted down, perhaps, and sent to Essen, to Krupp.  
Then nothing for sixty-seven years, a 
vacant rest, Mendelssohn still stubbornly 
world-famous yet statueless, neither  
Christian nor Confucian, until, with private funds 
and at a conductor’s urging, they erected this.
Now he stands on the Dittrichring under trees 
in greatcoat cum toga, with his receding
Yiddish curls, right forearm resting on a
music stand, left hand grasping a score, leaning 
slightly to the left, head held high.  His gaze 
is fixed. He could be looking back to the beloved 
Bach or forward to a quasi-Jewish Mahler.  
Only the noble proclaim the language of music.