There’s a decent case for Felix Mendelssohn being the most important figure in the history of Western classical music, though primarily for the music he programmed, rather than for the music he wrote. Answering the impassioned cry of Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel for an increased visibility of masterpieces if music wished to be taken seriously as an artform (rather than a hobby), Mendelssohn’s performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” with the Berlin Singakademie in 1829 (for the first time in almost 70 years) introduced the concept of revivalism to a nascent musical world, a germ from which a large organism of canons, legacies, memorials, and infrastructures grew exponentially.
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