Appendix Gamma2: The Breslau Intellectual Line Connecting brothers of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University, tracing their fraternal Big Brother/Little Brother line to the tri-Founders and their Pledges . . .

Brother was in the Pledge Class of 1870.

. . . Carl Schurz was friends with Gottfriend . . . studied under Kinkel years . . .  Carl Friedrich Zelter . . . 

. . . was spouse to . . . Carl Friedrich Zelter studied under Carl . . .  Friedrich Christian Fasch . . . 

. . . Johanna Kinkel studied music under . . . Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach studied Jewish musician, under .  Felix Mendelssohn . . .

Below we present short biographies of the Breslau intellectual line of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University.

“Who defends the House.”

We begin with brother Carl Schurz (1870), tapped into Phi Kappa Psi at Cornell in the first class after the Founding:

 Carl Schurz (March 2, 1829 – May 14, 1906) was a German revolutionary, American statesman and reformer, and Union Army general in the American Civil War. He was also an accomplished author, newspaper editor and journalist, who in 1869 became the first German-born American elected to the Senate. His wife Margarethe Schurz and her sister Bertha von Ronge were instrumental in establishing the kindergarten system in the United States. During his later years, Schurz was perhaps the most prominent Independent The University of in American politics, noted for his high principles, his avoidance of political partisanship, and his moral conscience.

Brother Schurz is famous for saying: "Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." Many streets, schools, and parks are named in honor of him, including City's Carl Schurz Park.

Schurz was born in Liblar (now Erftstadt) on March 2, 1829, the son of a schoolteacher. He studied at the Jesuit Gymnasium of , and then entered the , where he became a revolutionary, partly through his friendship with Gottfried Kinkel, then a professor, and Johannes von Ronge.

In Bonn, he became a member of the nationalistic Studentenverbindung Burschenschaft Franconia Bonn, which informed the founding generation of New York Alpha of Phi Kappa Psi at Cornell. He assisted Kinkel in editing the Bonner Zeitung, and was active in the Revolution of 1848; but when Rastatt surrendered, he escaped to Zürich. In 1850, he returned secretly to , rescued Kinkel from prison at Spandau and helped him to escape to Scotland. Schurz went to , but the police forced him to leave France on the eve of the coup d'état, and he remained in London until August 1852, making his living by teaching the German language. He married Ronge's sister-in-law in July 1852 and moved to America, living for a time in Philadelphia. Schurz is probably the best-known of the Forty-Eighters, the German emigrants who moved to the United States after the failed liberal revolutions. In 1856, after a year in Europe, he settled in Watertown, Wisconsin, and immediately became prominent in the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In 1857, he was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for lieutenant-governor. In the Illinois campaign of the next year between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, he took part as a speaker — mostly in German — which raised Lincoln's popularity among German-American voters. Later, in 1858, he was admitted to the Wisconsin bar and began to practice law in Milwaukee. In the state campaign of 1859, he made a speech attacking the Fugitive Slave Law and arguing for state's rights, since Wisconsin's state Supreme Court had declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional -- although the stance injured his political standing in the southwestern part of Wisconsin, settled by Southerners. Outside of the state, in Faneuil Hall, Boston, on April 18, 1859, he delivered an oration on "True Americanism"— which, coming from an alien, was intended to clear the Republican party of the charge of "nativism". The Germans of Wisconsin unsuccessfully urged his nomination for governor by the Republican party in 1859. In the 1860 Republican National Convention, Schurz was spokesman of the delegation from Wisconsin, which voted for William H. Seward; he was on the committee which announced his nomination to Abraham Lincoln.

In spite of Seward's objection, grounded on Schurz's European record as a revolutionary, Lincoln sent him in 1861 as ambassador to Spain. He succeeded in quietly dissuading Spain from supporting the South and returned to America in January 1862, resigned his post, was commissioned brigadier general of Union volunteers in April, and in June took command of a division under John C. Frémont, and then in Franz Sigel's corps, with which he took part in the Second Battle of Bull Run. He was promoted major general of volunteers on March 14 and was a division commander in the XI Corps at the Battle of Chancellorsville, under General Oliver O. Howard, with whom he later had a bitter controversy over the battle and their humiliating defeat by Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. He was at Gettysburg (another humiliation for the corps) and at Chattanooga (a triumph). Later, he was put in command of a Corps of Instruction at Nashville, and saw no more active service except in the last months of the war when he was with Sherman's army in North Carolina. He resigned from the army as soon as the war ended.

In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson sent Schurz through the South to study conditions; they then quarrelled because Schurz approved General H.W. Slocum's order forbidding the organization of militia in Mississippi. Schurz's report, suggesting the readmission of the states with complete rights and the investigation of the need of further legislation by a Congressional committee, was ignored by the President. In 1866-1867, he was chief editor of the Detroit Post and then became editor and joint proprietor with Emil Praetorius of the Westliche Post (Western Post) of St. Louis. In the winter of 1867-1868, he travelled in Germany – the account of his interview with Otto von Bismarck is one of the most interesting chapters of his Reminiscences. He spoke against "repudiation" and for "honest money" during the Presidential campaign of 1868. From 1869 to 1875, he was United States Senator from Missouri. He gained political clout with Republicans from German-American support in the Midwest. He made a great reputation with his speeches urging financial responsibility. During this period, he broke with the administration: he started the Liberal Republican movement in Missouri, in 1870, which elected B. Gratz Brown governor; and, in 1872, he presided over the Liberal Republican convention which nominated Horace Greeley for President (Schurz's own choice was Charles Francis Adams or Lyman Trumbull). The convention did not represent Schurz's views on the tariff. He opposed Grant's Santo Domingo policy – after Fessenden's death, Schurz was a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs – his Southern policy, and the government's selling arms and making cartridges for the French army in the Franco-Prussian War. But, in 1875, he campaigned for Rutherford B. Hayes, as the representative of sound money, in the Ohio governor's campaign.

In 1876, he supported Hayes for President, and after winning, Hayes named him Secretary of the Interior and followed much of his advice in other cabinet appointments and in his inaugural address. In this department, Schurz put in force his theories in regard to merit in the Civil Service, permitting no removals except for cause, and requiring competitive examinations for candidates for clerkships. His efforts to remove political patronage met with limited success. As an early conservationist, he prosecuted land thieves and attracted public attention to the necessity of forest preservation.

Schurz reformed the Office of Indian Affairs and successfully opposed a bill transferring it to the War Department. The Indian Office was the most corrupt of the Interior Department. Positions as agents, farmers, teachers, and other positions on Indian reservations were based on political patronage. The offices were seen as political reward and license to use the reservations for personal enrichment, with no work required. Restoration of the Indian Office to the War Department, which was based on rules and patriotic service, instead of politics, was thought by Indians and others to enable the Indian Office to do some good for Indians, instead of Bureau employees. However, political pressure and parochialism kept the Indian Office in the Department.

Upon his retirement in 1881, Schurz moved to , and from the summer of 1881 to the autumn of 1883 was editor-in-chief and one of the proprietors of the New York Evening Post. In 1884, he was a leader in the Independent (or Mugwump) movement against the nomination of James Blaine for president and for the election of Grover Cleveland. From 1888 to 1892, he was general American representative of the American Steamship Company. In 1892 he succeeded George William Curtis as president of the National Civil Service Reform League and held this office until 1901. He succeeded Curtis as editorial writer for Harper's Weekly in 1892–1898, actively supporting electoral reform. In 1895 he spoke for the Fusion anti-Tammany Hall ticket in New York City. He opposed William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896, speaking for sound money and not under the auspices of the Republican party; he supported Bryan four years later because of anti-imperialism beliefs, which also led to his membership in the American Anti-Imperialist League. In the 1904 election he supported Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate. Carl Schurz lived in a summer cottage in Northwest Bay on Lake George, New York which was built by his good friend Abraham Jacobi.

When a statuary tribute to German-language poet Heinrich Heine met with anti-Semitic controversy in Germany, Schurz's activism aided in its relocation across the Atlantic to New York.

Throughout his life, Schurz never hesitated to deliver his opinion, and was known by politicians as elevated as Presidents Lincoln and Johnson for his frequent, vitriolic letters. Because of his strongly worded speeches and editorials and his deeply held convictions, he was a hero to his supporters, but widely disliked by his critics. He had a strong connection to the immigrant community. He told a group of German immigrants at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 how he expected them to fit into American society:

I have always been in favor of a healthy Americanization, but that does not mean a complete disavowal of our German heritage. Our character should take on the best of that which is American, and combine it with the best of that which is German. By doing this, we can best serve the American people and their civilization.

Schurz published a number of writings, including a volume of speeches (1865), an excellent biography of Henry Clay (1887), essays on Abraham Lincoln (1899) and Charles Sumner (posthumous, 1951), and his Reminiscences (posthumous, 1907–09). In his later years he wrote his memoirs. Schurz died in New York City and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Brother Carl Schurz (1870) was a fellow revolutionary and friend of Johann Gottfried Kinkel:

 Johann Gottfried Kinkel (August 11, 1815 - November 13, 1882) was a German poet. He was born at Obercassel near Bonn. Having studied theology at Bonn and , he established himself at Bonn in 1836 as Privatdozent of theology, became master at the gymnasium there, and was for a short time assistant preacher in Cologne. Changing his religious opinions, he abandoned theology and delivered lectures on the history of art, in which he had become interested on a journey to Italy in 1837. In 1846 he was appointed extraordinary professor of the The University of Bonn history of art at the University of Bonn.

For his part in the revolution in the Palatinate in 1849, Kinkel was arrested and sentenced to penal servitude for life. He was interned in the fortress of Spandau. Brother Schurz is famous for saying: "Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." Many streets, schools, and parks are named in honor of him, including New York City's Carl Schurz Park.

His friend Carl Schurz helped him escape to in November 1850, and Kinkel went to the United States. Returning to London in 1853, he taught German and lectured on German literature, and in 1858 founded the German paper, Hermann. In 1866 he accepted a professorship of archaeology and the history of art at the Polytechnikum in Zürich, where he died sixteen years later.

Kinkel's popularity was hardly out of proportion to his talent; his poetry is of the sweetly sentimental type which was in vogue in Germany in the mid-19th century. His Gedichte first appeared in 1843, and went through several editions.

His best works were the verse romances, Otto der Schütz, eine rheinische Geschichte in zwölf Abenteuern (1846) which in 1896 had attained its 75th edition, and Der Grobschmied von Antwerpen (1868). Among his other works were the tragedy Nimrod (1857), and his history of art, Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den christichen Völkern (1845). Kinkel's first wife, Johanna, née Mockel (1810-1858), assisted her husband in his literary work, and was herself an author. Her autobiographical novel Hans Ibeles in London was not published until 1860, after her death. She also wrote on musical subjects. The poet Johann Gottfried Kinkel was friend and spouse to the feminist composer Johanna Mockel:

 The composer, pianist, choral director, poet, journalist, novelist, music teacher and historian Johanna Kinkel (Mockel), was born on 8 July 1810 in Bonn. Her father, a teacher at the French Gymnasium, and mother encouraged their daughter’s musical talents. They chose Franz Anton Ries (1755-1846), Beethoven’s childhood instructor, to be her piano and composition teacher. With Ries’ support, Johanna began a career as a coach, accompanist and choral director while still in her teens. He also helped her to publish Die The University of Bonn Vogelkantate, her Op. 1, in 1830.

Johanna was highly esteemed because of her intelligence and extensive education, her exceptional musical talent and her humor, and by others she was considered as overeducated and, thus, looked down upon as unfeminine and as emancipated woman. Estranged from her perceived hypocrities of Catholicism, her turn to rationalism influenced her political emancipation; questioning religious was a presupposition for her questioning political authority.

In 1832, Johanna married the Cologne music merchant Johann Paul Mathieux, but she left the abusive relationship in less than six months. Divorce proceedings lasted for several years. She freed herself from the tyranny of her first and unhappy marriage by leaving her husband, thereby rejecting conventional beliefs to demanded fulfillment by exercising a right to pursue a career of her choice.

In Berlin (1836-1839) she proved her artistic independence as composer, holding her own in a man's domain despite prejudices against female composers. After a long period of debilitating depression, Johanna was able to resume her artistic career. Dorothea Schlegel arranged for her to meet Felix Mendelssohn in 1836. He strongly encouraged her to pursue a musical career. Following his advice, she moved to Berlin in November of that year and studied with Karl Böhmer and Wilhelm Taubert. Johanna financed her stay in Berlin by giving private piano lessons. Her pupils included the daughters of . She frequented the most elite literary circles and performed in Fanny Hensel’s Sunday Musicals. The most famous houses and salons were open to her. During these exciting years her Lieder, Op. 6 - 12 were published. Important critics, among them Ludwig Rellstab and Robert Schumann, wrote glowingly about her compositions.

Because of pending divorce proceedings, Johanna returned in 1839 to provincial Bonn. With sharp-tongued and satirical texts she mocked the narrow- minded bourgeois of Bonn as well as the situation in the Rhineland at the time in the magazine, the Maikäfer.

In the 1843 she married the Protestant theologian and professor Gottfried Kinkel from Bonn. During the next six years, while giving birth to four children and taking care of the daily housework, she financed a good part of their livelihood by giving music lessons. She was soon involved again as a conductor, performer, and composer with various and vocal ensembles in her home. Johanna’s Gesangverein was one of the first choral groups in Germany to be conducted by a woman. Together Gottfriend and Johanna had founded a literary group, the Maikäferbund (the Ladybug Society)., in 1840.

In March of 1848 three political groupings were organized at the public convention in Bonn. The conservatives tried to preserve the authority of the government, while the constitutionals advocated liberal demands for a constitution and for free press and freedom of assembly. The democrats advocated social reform.

Johanna Kinkel eventually joined the democrats, although she still supported a constitutional monarchy in March, 1848 because she feared anarchy, she soon evoled to support a democratic republic which it now seemed able to remedy social grievances. "Formally exiled" from the circle of professors in Bonn, they considered a supporter of "people" tantamount to an anarchism.

Johanna supported her husband, who became spokesman for the democrats in Bonn. Indeed many considered Johanna Kinkel the true driving force behind her husband's politics. Gottfried Kinkel, himself, attributed his political radicalism to his wife's influence;

"I feel so strangely that you were the one who made a man out of me who can hold his own at this time.... without you I should have become a pitiful representative in the Pauls Church, maybe like the other pack in Bonn, who do not have the strength to suport open rebellion."

In May 1849 Johanna Kinkel took over the editorship of the Neue Bonner Zeitung, the mouthpiece of the Bonn democrats. She saw it as her duty to maintain the newspaper as the "last free press in our region." She discussed the course of the revolution and commented on the political events, causing reactionary women in Bonn to slander her with false accusations and haras sing articles. Rather than allowing herself to be intimidated, she saw it as confirmation of the importance of her political struggle.

"I myself was actually given the understanding of the justification of the proletariat, and if I had not done it out of conviction, I now would safeguard interests with double-enthusiasm."

She dismissed the ideas of the ruling bourgeois ideas concerning womens' participation in politics. Turning her back on banishment to homes and a private domain, Johanna Kinkel published her political views. Beside her responsibilities as editor, she had to earn a living and take care of her home and family.

So Johanna Kinkel’s literary and musical circles collapsed in 1848, the year of revolutionary upheaval in Germany. Gottfried Kinkel was chosen by the democratic electorate to represent Bonn in the National Assembly in Berlin. There he was arrested and condemned to death for his political activities. Johanna, with the help of Bettina von Arnim and others, was able to have his death sentence overturned and changed to life imprisonment. Johanna and Phi Kappa Psi’s Carl Schurz organized Gottfried’s escape from Spandau prison and helped him to find exile in London in November, 1850.

Her problems multiplied when her husband was taken prisoner and sentenced to life in July 1849 for participation in the uprising in Baden. During this difficult time she received moral and material support from democratic women. Kathinka Zitz, founder of the club Humania in Mainz for persecuted female democrats and their families, campaigned for donations for the Kinkels. Malvida von Meysenbug gave Johanna Kinkel a written contact in October 1849 in demonstrate her solidarity.

Arriving early in 1851 in London, the Kinkels encountered difficult work- conditions. Gottfried Kinkel, believing a new revolution would break out soon in Germany, left his family to collect donations in America for a revolutionary invading army. Johanna Kinkel assumed the full responsibility to support the family in London by giving music lessons. In January 1852 she wrote him in America,

"Your men talk about glory, sacrificing the family for the fatherland. Have you also thought out all the consequences, and do you know what a sacrificed family looks like?"

Without losing hope for a republic in Germany, her sense of political realism made her see the emigrants' revolutionary conspiracies as pointless. "Now it is time to wait until those involved turn on one another. Every hint of revolution can cause only a quick appeasement at any price between the dynasties." She fully supported her husband in his political pursuits in their adopted country and the Kinkels soon became the center of the expatriate German community. To earn a livelihood Johanna, whose English was very good, gave piano lessons, taught singing to small children and published two books on music education. She again directed a choir and wrote music, , poetry and a two-volume novel. An article on Frédéric Chopin as Composer and another on the works of Felix Mendelssohn published after her death come from his period.

But it was also a time of depression and despair. Besides her many musical activities, she was almost solely responsible for the household and their children. Gottfried continued his political activities and was perhaps unfaithful.

On November 15, 1858, Johanna’s body was found in the garden of her home. She had either fallen or had jumped from the window of her third floor bedroom. While suicide was suspected, it could not be proven. Johanna was not forgotten in her native country. She lived in the memory of German intellectuals as an eccentric revolutionary and as a musician with a broad cultural background.

The words Freiheit, Liebe und Dichtung (Freedom, Love, and Poetry) were inscribed on her tombstone. The feminist composer Johanna Mockel was coached and encouraged by composer Felix Mendelssohn:

 Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, born and generally known as Felix Mendelssohn (February 3, 1809 – November 4, 1847) was a German composer, pianist and conductor of the early Romantic period. He was born to a notable Jewish family, being the grandson of the philosopher . His work includes symphonies, concerti, oratorios, piano and chamber music. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes and anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his creative originality is now being recognized and re-evaluated, and he is University of Berlin now among the most popular composers of the Romantic era.

Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, the son of a banker, Abraham Mendelssohn (who later changed his surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and who was himself the son of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), and of Lea Salomon, a member of the Itzig family and the sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy.

Felix grew up in an environment of intense intellectual ferment. The greatest minds of Germany were frequent visitors to his family's home in Berlin, including Wilhelm von Humboldt and . His sister Rebecka married the great German mathematician Lejeune Dirichlet.

Abraham sought to renounce the Jewish religion; his children were first brought up without religious education, and were baptised as Lutherans in 1816 (at which time Felix took the additional names Jakob Ludwig). (Abraham and his wife were not themselves baptised until 1822). The name Bartholdy was assumed at the suggestion of Lea's brother, Jakob, who had purchased a property of this name and adopted it as his own surname. Abraham was later to explain this decision in a letter to Felix as a means of showing a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses: "There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius". Although Felix continued to sign his letters as 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy' in obedience to his father's injunctions, he seems not to have objected to the use of 'Mendelssohn' alone. The family moved to Berlin in 1812. Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn sought to give Felix, his brother Paul, and sisters Fanny and Rebecka, the best education possible. His sister (later Fanny Hensel), became a well-known pianist and amateur composer; originally Abraham had thought that she, rather than her brother, might be the more musical. However, at that time, it was not considered proper (by either Abraham or Felix) for a woman to have a career in music, so Fanny remained an amateur musician. Six of her early songs were later published (with her consent) under Felix's name.

Mendelssohn is often regarded as the greatest musical child prodigy after . He began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six, and at seven was tutored by Marie Bigot in Paris. From 1817 he studied composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin. He probably made his first public concert appearance at the age of nine, when he participated in a chamber music concert. He was also a prolific composer as a child, and wrote his first published work, a piano quartet, by the time he was thirteen. Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his friend and correspondent, the elderly Goethe. He later took lessons from the composer and piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles who however confessed in his diaries that he had little to teach him. Moscheles became a close colleague and lifelong friend.

Besides music, Mendelssohn's education included art, literature, languages, and philosophy. He was a skilled artist in pencil and watercolour, he could speak (besides his native German) English, Italian, and Latin, and he had an interest in classical literature.

As an adolescent, his works were often performed at home with a private orchestra for the associates of his wealthy parents amongst the intellectual elite of Berlin. Mendelssohn wrote 12 string symphonies between 1821 and 1823, between the ages of 12 and 14. These works were ignored for over a century, but are now recorded and heard occasionally in concerts. In 1824, still aged only 15, he wrote his first symphony for full orchestra (in C minor, Op. 11). At the age of 16 he wrote his String in E Flat Major, the first work which showed the full power of his genius. The Octet and his to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he wrote a year later, are the best known of his early works. (He wrote incidental music for the play 16 years later in 1842, including the famous Wedding March.) 1827 saw the premiere—and sole performance in his lifetime—of his , . The failure of this production left him disinclined to venture into the genre again; he later toyed for a while in the 1840s with a by Eugene Scribe based on Shakespeare's , but rejected it as unsuitable.

From 1826 to 1829, Mendelssohn studied at the University of Berlin, where he attended lectures on aesthetics by Hegel, on history by Eduard Gans and on by Carl Ritter. In 1829 Mendelssohn paid his first visit to Britain, where Moscheles, already settled in London, introduced him to influential musical circles. He had a great success, conducting his First Symphony and playing in public and private concerts. In the summer he visited Edinburgh and became a friend of the composer John Thomson. On subsequent visits he met with and her musical husband Prince Albert, both of whom were great admirers of his music. In the course of ten visits to Britain during his life he won a strong following, and the country inspired two of his most famous works, the overture Fingal's Cave (also known as Overture) and the Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3). His oratorio was premiered in Birmingham at the Triennial Music Festival on 26 August 1846.

On the death of Zelter, Mendelssohn had some hopes of becoming the conductor of the Berlin Singakademie with which he had revived 's St Matthew Passion (see below). However he was defeated for the post by Karl Rungenhagen. This may have been because of Mendelssohn's youth, and fear of possible innovations; it was also suspected by some (and possibly by Mendelssohn himself) to be on account of his Jewish origins.

Nonetheless, in 1835 he was appointed as conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. This appointment was extremely important for him; he felt himself to be a German and wished to play a leading part in his country's musical life. In its way it was a redress for his disappointment over the Singakademie appointment. Despite efforts by the king of Prussia to lure him to Berlin, Mendelssohn concentrated on developing the musical life of Leipzig and in 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory, where he successfully persuaded Ignaz Moscheles and Robert Schumann to join him.

Mendelssohn's personal life was conventional. His marriage to Cécile Jeanrenaud in March of 1837 was very happy and the couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Felix, and Lilli. Mendelssohn was an accomplished painter in watercolours, and his enormous correspondence shows that he could also be a witty writer in German and English—sometimes accompanied by humorous sketches and cartoons in the text.

Mendelssohn suffered from bad health in the final years of his life, probably aggravated by nervous problems and overwork, and he was greatly distressed by the death of his sister Fanny in May 1847. Felix Mendelssohn died later that same year after a series of strokes, on November 4, 1847, in Leipzig. His funeral was held at the Paulinerkirche and he is buried in the Trinity Cemetery in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Mendelssohn's own works show his study of Baroque and early classical music. His and chorales especially reflect a tonal clarity and use of counterpoint reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach, by whom he was deeply influenced. His great-aunt, Sarah Levy (née Itzig) was a pupil of Bach's son, , and had supported the widow of another son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. She had collected a number of Bach manuscripts. J.S. Bach's music, which had fallen into relative obscurity by the turn of the 19th century, was also deeply respected by Mendelssohn's teacher Zelter. In 1829, with the backing of Zelter and the assistance of a friend, the actor , Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance in Berlin of Bach's St Matthew Passion. The orchestra and choir were provided by the Berlin Singakademie of which Zelter was the principal conductor. The success of this performance (the first since Bach's death in 1750) was an important element in the revival of J.S. Bach's music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe. It earned Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age of twenty. It also led to one of the very few references which Mendelssohn ever made to his origins: 'To think that it took an actor and a man of Jewish heritage (Judensohn) to revive the greatest Christian music for the world' (cited by Devrient in his memoirs of the composer).

Mendelssohn also revived interest in the work of Franz Schubert. Schumann discovered the manuscript of Schubert's Ninth Symphony and sent it to Mendelssohn who promptly premiered it in Leipzig on 21 March 1839, more than a decade after the composer's death.

Throughout his life Mendelssohn was wary of the more radical musical developments undertaken by some of his contemporaries. He was generally on friendly, if somewhat cool, terms with the likes of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and , but in his letters expresses his frank disapproval of their works.

In particular, he seems to have regarded Paris and its music with the greatest of suspicion and an almost Puritanical distaste. Attempts made during his visit there to interest him in Saint-Simonianism ended in embarrassing scenes. He thought the Paris style of opera vulgar, and the works of Meyerbeer insincere. When Ferdinand Hiller suggested in conversation to Felix that he looked rather like Meyerbeer (they were distant cousins, both descendants of Rabbi Moses Isserlis), Mendelssohn was so upset that he immediately went to get a haircut to differentiate himself. It is significant that the only musician with whom he was a close personal friend, Moscheles, was of an older generation and equally conservative in outlook. Moscheles preserved this outlook at the Leipzig Conservatory until his own death in 1870.

This conservative strain in Mendelssohn, which set him apart from some of his more flamboyant contemporaries, bred a similar condescension on their part toward his music. His success, his popularity and his Jewish origins, irked sufficiently to damn Mendelssohn with faint praise, three years after his death, in an anti-Jewish pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik. This was the start of a movement to denigrate Mendelssohn's achievements which lasted almost a century, the remnants of which can still be discerned today amongst some writers. The Nazi regime was to cite Mendelssohn's Jewish origin in banning his works and destroying memorial statues. Such avowedly anti- Semitic political opposition to Mendelssohn should of course be differentiated from expressions of artistic or aesthetic disdain for Mendelssohn's music such as those found in Charles Rosen's essay, who disparages Mendelssohn's style for "religious kitsch"; but these opinions may also reflect a continuation of the aesthetic contempt of Wagner and his musical followers.

In England, Mendelssohn's reputation remained high for a long time; the adulatory (and today scarcely readable) novel Charles Auchester by the teenaged Sarah Sheppard, published in 1851, which features Mendelssohn as the "Chevalier Seraphael", remained in print for nearly eighty years. Queen Victoria demonstrated her enthusiasm by requesting, when The Crystal Palace was being re-built in 1854, that it include a statue of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn's Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream was first played as a piece of ceremonial music at the wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter, The Princess Victoria, The Princess Royal, to Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1858 and it is still popular today at marriage ceremonies. His sacred choral music, particularly the smaller-scale works, remain enduringly popular in the choral tradition of the Church of England. However many critics, including Bernard Shaw, began to condemn Mendelssohn's music for its association with Victorian cultural insularity.

Over the last fifty years a new appreciation of Mendelssohn's work has developed, which takes into account not only the popular 'war horses', such as the E minor Violin Concerto and the Italian Symphony, but has been able to remove the Victorian varnish from the oratorio Elijah, and has explored the frequently intense and dramatic world of the chamber works. Virtually all of Mendelssohn's published works are now available on CD.

Recent critical evaluations of Mendelssohn's work have stressed the subtlety of his compositional technique. For example, the Hebrides Overture has been interpreted as presenting a musical equivalent to the aesthetic subject in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. The first lyrical theme, in this interpretation, represents the person apprehending the landscape described by the music behind this theme. Similarly, the use of french horns in the opening movement of the Italian Symphony may represent a German presence in an Italian scene: Mendelssohn himself on tour.[citation needed]

The hymn tune "Mendelssohn"—an adaptation by William Hayman Cummings of a melody from Mendelssohn's —is the standard tune for Charles Wesley's popular hymn Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. This extract from an originally secular 1840s composition, which Mendelssohn felt unsuited to sacred music, is thus ubiquitous at Christmas. The young Mendelssohn was greatly influenced in his childhood by the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and these can all be seen, albeit often rather crudely, in the twelve early "symphonies", mainly written for performance in the Mendelssohn household and not published or publicly performed until long after his death.

His astounding capacities are, however, clearly revealed in a clutch of works of his early maturity: the (1825), the Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826) (which in its finished form owes much to the influence of , at the time a close friend of Mendelssohn), and the in A minor (listed as no. 2 but written before no. 1) of 1827. These show an intuitive grasp of form, harmony, counterpoint, colour and the compositional technique of Beethoven, which justify the claims often made that Mendelssohn's precocity exceeded even that of Mozart in its intellectual grasp.

Mendelssohn wrote 12 symphonies for string orchestra from 1821 to 1823 (between the ages of 12 and 14).

The numbering of his mature symphonies is approximately in order of publishing, rather than of composition. The order of composition is: 1, 5, 4, 2, 3. (Because he worked on it for over a decade, the placement of No. 3 in this sequence is problematic; he started sketches for it soon after the No. 5, but completed it following both Nos. 5 and 4.)

The Symphony No. 1 in C minor for full-scale orchestra was written in 1824, when Mendelssohn was aged 15. This work is experimental, showing the influence of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Mendelssohn conducted this symphony on his first visit to London in 1829 with the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. For the third movement he substituted an orchestration of the Scherzo from his Octet. In this form the piece was an outstanding success and laid the foundations of his British reputation.

During 1829 and 1830 Mendelssohn wrote his Symphony No. 5 in D Major, known as the Reformation. It celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Lutheran Church. Mendelssohn remained dissatisfied with the work and did not allow publication of the score.

The Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3 in A minor), was written and revised intermittently between 1830 and 1842. This piece evokes Scotland's atmosphere in the ethos of Romanticism, but does not employ actual Scottish folk melodies. Mendelssohn published the score of the symphony in 1842 in an arrangement for piano duet, and as a full orchestral score in 1843.

Mendelssohn's travels in Italy inspired him to write the Symphony No 4 in A major, known as the Italian. Mendelssohn conducted the premiere in 1833, but he did not allow this score to be published during his lifetime as he continually sought to rewrite it.

In 1840 Mendelssohn wrote the choral Symphony No. 2 in B flat Major, entitled (Hymn of Praise), and this score was published in 1841.

Mendelssohn wrote the concert overture The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave) in 1830, inspired by visits he made to Scotland around the end of the 1820s. He visited the cave, on the Hebridean isle of , as part of his Grand Tour of Europe, and was so impressed that he scribbled the opening theme of the overture on the spot, including it in a letter he wrote home the same evening.

Throughout his career he wrote a number of other concert . Those most frequently played today include Ruy Blas (written for the drama by ), Meerestille und Glückliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, inspired by the poem by Goethe), and The Fair Melusine.

The incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream (op. 61), including the well-known Wedding March, was written in 1843, seventeen years after the overture.

Mendelssohn wrote some for family performance in his youth. His opera "" was rehearsed for him on his fifteenth birthday. In 1827 he wrote a more sophisticated work, Die Hochzeit von Camacho, based on an episode in Don Quixote, for public consumption. It was produced in Berlin in 1827. Mendelssohn left the theatre before the conclusion of the first performance and subsequent performances were cancelled.

Although he never abandoned the idea of composing a full opera, and considered many subjects - including that of the Nibelung saga later adapted by Wagner - he never wrote more than a few pages of sketches for any project. In his last years the manager Benjamin Lumley tried to contract him to write an opera on The Tempest on a libretto by Eugène Scribe, and even announced it as forthcoming in the year of Mendelssohn's death. The libretto was eventually set by Fromental Halévy. At his death Mendelssohn left some sketches for an opera on the story of Lorelei.

Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, op. 64 (1844), written for Ferdinand David, has become one of the most popular of all of Mendelssohn's compositions. Many violinists have commenced their solo careers with a performance of this concerto, including Jascha Heifetz, who gave his first public performance of the piece at the age of seven.

Mendelssohn also wrote two piano concertos, a less well known, early, violin concerto (D Minor), two concertos for two pianos and orchestra and a double concerto for piano and violin. In addition, there are several works for soloist and orchestra in one movement. Those for piano are the Rondo Brillant, Op. 29 of 1834; the Capriccio Brillant, Op. 22 of 1832; and the Serenade and Allegro Giojoso Op. 43 of 1838. Opp. 113 and 114 are Konzertstücke (concerto movements, originally for , basset horn and piano, that were orchestrated and performed in that form in Mendelssohn's lifetime.

Mendelssohn's mature output contains many chamber works, many of which display an emotional intensity that some people think his larger works lack. In particular his String Quartet No. 6, his last string quartet and major work, written following the death of his sister Fanny, is both powerful and eloquent. Other works include two string quintets, sonatas for the clarinet, , and violin, two piano trios and three piano quartets. For the Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Mendelssohn unusually took the advice of a fellow-composer, (Ferdinand Hiller) and rewrote the piano part in a more romantic, 'Schumannesque' style, considerably heightening its effect.

The two large biblical oratorios, 'St Paul' in 1836 and 'Elijah' in 1846, are greatly influenced by Bach. One of Mendelssohn's most frequently performed sacred pieces is "There Shall a Star Come out of Jacob", a chorus from the unfinished oratorio, '' (which together with the preceding recitative and male trio comprises all of the existing material from that work).

Strikingly different is the more overtly 'romantic' (The First Walpurgis Night), a setting for chorus and orchestra of a ballad by Goethe describing pagan rituals of the Druids in the Harz mountains in the early days of Christianity. This remarkable score has been seen by the scholar Heinz- Klaus Metzger as a "Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity".

Mendelssohn also wrote many smaller-scale sacred works for unaccompanied choir and for choir with organ. Some were written, and most have been translated into English, and remain highly popular. Perhaps the most famous is , with its second half containing 'O for the Wings of a Dove', which became extremely popular as a separate item. The piece is written for full choir, organ, and a treble/soprano soloist who has many challenging and extended solo passages. As such, it is a particular favourite for choirboys in churches and cathedrals, and has perhaps been recorded more than any other treble solo.

Mendelssohn wrote many songs, both for solo voice and for duet, with piano. Many of these are simple, or slightly modified, strophic settings. Such songs as Auf Flügeln des Gesanges ("On Wings of Song") became popular.

A number of songs written by Mendelssohn's sister Fanny originally appeared under her brother's name; this was partly due to the prejudice of the family, and partly to her own diffidence. Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte (), eight cycles each containing six lyric pieces (2 published posthumously), remain his most famous solo piano compositions. They became standard parlour recital items, and their overwhelming popularity has caused many critics to under-rate their musical value. Other composers who were inspired to produce similar pieces of their own included Charles Valentin Alkan (the five sets of Chants, each ending with a barcarolle), Anton Rubinstein, Ignaz Moscheles and Edvard Grieg.

Other notable piano pieces by Mendelssohn include his Variations sérieuses op. 54 (1841), the Seven Characteristic Pieces op. 7 (1827) and the set of six Preludes and Fugues op. 35 (written between 1832 and 1837).

Mendelssohn played the organ and composed for it from the age of 11 to his death. His primary organ works are the Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 37 (1837), and the Six Sonatas, Op. 65 (1845). The composer Felix Mendelssohn was taught by Carl Friedrick Zelter:

 Carl Friedrich Zelter (11 December 1758 – 15 May 1832) was a German composer, conductor and teacher of music. He was born in Berlin, and trained to become a mason like his father, but his musical talent showed through. He studied composition under Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, joining his Berlin Singakademie in 1791. When Fasch died in 1800, Zelter became director. He also started an orchestra to accompany the Singakademie, called the Ripienschule (1808). The following year, he became a faculty member of the Royal Academy of the Arts in Berlin and also founded the Liedertafel, for which he wrote choral music.

In 1822 he founded the Royal Institute for Church Music. Berlin Singakademie

Zelter became friendly with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and his works include settings of Goethe's poems. During his career, he composed about two hundred lieder, as well as , a viola concerto and piano music. Amongst Zelter's pupils (at different times) were Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Felix Mendelssohn was perhaps Zelter's favourite pupil and Zelter wrote to Goethe boasting of the 12-year old's abilities and adding 'wouldn't it be amazing if a Jew-boy [Judensohn] could become an artist?'

Zelter communicated his strong love of the music of Bach to Mendelssohn, one consequence of which was the latter's 1829 revival of J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion at the Singakademie under Zelter's auspices. This sparked a general re-evaluation and revival of Bach's works which by that time were largely forgotten and regarded as old-fashioned and beyond resuscitation. Mendelssohn had hoped to succeed Zelter on the latter's death as leader of the Singakademie, but the post went instead to Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen.

Zelter was married to Julie Pappritz in 1796, one year after his first wife, Sophie Eleonora Flöricke, née Kappel had died. Julie was a well-known singer at the Berlin Opera. The musician Carl Friedrick Zelter was taught by Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, founder of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin:

 Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch (18 November 1736 - August 3, 1800) was a German composer and harpsichordist. Born in , he was the son of the composer Johann Friedrich Fasch, a pupil of J.S. Bach. He was initially taught by his father. In 1756 he began service at the court of of Prussia, where he was deputised as Court harpsichordist to C.P.E. Bach, to whose post he succeeded when Bach left the court in 1774. In 1791 he founded the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin which quickly became an important centre of Berlin musical life. In its concerts Fasch promoted the music of J.S. Bach and other masters of the Baroque period, as well as contemporary music. The Akademie was visited by Beethoven in 1796. Fasch died in Berlin in 1800. He was succeeded as Berlin Singakademie head of the Akademie by Carl Friedrich Zelter.

Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, founder of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, was taught by Carl Philipp Emanual Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach:

 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (March 8, 1714 – December 14, 1788) was a German musician and composer, the second of five sons of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach. He was one of the founders of the Classical style, composing in the Rococo and Classical periods. When he was ten years old he entered the St. Thomas School at Leipzig, where his father had become cantor in 1723, and continued his education as a student of jurisprudence at the universities of Leipzig (1731) and of (Oder) (1735). In 1738, at the age of 24, he took his degree, but at once abandoned his prospects of a legal career and determined to devote himself to music. A few months University of Frankfurt am Oder later (armed with a recommendation by Sylvius Leopold Weiss) he obtained an appointment in the service of Frederick II, the Great of Prussia.

Upon Frederick's accession in 1740, Carl Philipp became a member of the royal orchestra. He was by this time one of the foremost clavier-players in Europe, and his compositions, which date from 1731, include about thirty sonatas and concert pieces for harpsichord and clavichord.

In Berlin he continued to write numerous musical pieces for solo keyboard, including a series of character pieces- the so-called "Berlin Portraits" including La Caroline.

His reputation was established by the two sets of sonatas which he dedicated respectively to Frederick the Great and to the grand duke of Württemberg; in 1746 he was promoted to the post of chamber musician, and for twenty-two years shared with Carl Heinrich Graun, , and Johann Gottlieb Naumann the continued favour of the king.

During his residence in Berlin, he wrote a fine setting of the Magnificat (1749), in which he shows more traces than usual of his father's influence; an Easter cantata (1756); several symphonies and concerted works; at least three volumes of songs; and a few secular cantatas and other occasional pieces. But his main work was concentrated on the clavier, for which he composed, at this time, nearly two hundred sonatas and other solos, including the set Mit veränderten Reprisen (1760-1768) and a few of those für Kenner und Liebhaber. Meanwhile he placed himself in the forefront of European critics by his Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, a systematic and masterly treatise which by 1780 had reached its third edition, and which laid the foundation for the methods of Muzio Clementi and Johann Baptist Cramer.

In 1768 Bach succeeded as Kapellmeister at Hamburg, and in consequence of his new office began to turn his attention more towards church music. The next year he produced his oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste (The Israelites in the Desert), a composition remarkable not only for its great beauty but for the resemblance of its plan to that of Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah, and between 1768 and 1788 wrote twenty-one settings of the Passion, and some seventy cantatas, litanies, motets, and other liturgical pieces. At the same time, his genius for instrumental composition was further stimulated by the career of Joseph Haydn. He died in Hamburg on December 14, 1788.

Through the latter half of the 18th century, the reputation of C.P.E. Bach stood very high. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart said of him, "He is the father, we are the children." The best part of Joseph Haydn's training was derived from a study of his work. expressed for his genius the most cordial admiration and regard. This position he owes mainly to his keyboard sonatas, which mark an important epoch in the history of musical form. Lucid in style, delicate and tender in expression, they are even more notable for the freedom and variety of their structural design; they break away altogether from both the Italian and the Viennese schools, moving instead toward the cyclical and improvisatory forms that would become common several generations later.

The content of his work is full of invention and, most importantly, extreme unpredictability, and wide emotional range even within a single work. It is not less sincere in thought than polished and felicitous in phrase. He was probably the first composer of eminence who made free use of harmonic colour for its own sake since the time of Lassus, Monteverdi, and Gesualdo. In this way, he compares well with the most important representatives of the First Viennese School. In fact he exerted enormous influence on the North German School of composers, in particular Georg Anton Benda, , Ernst Wilhelm Wolff, Johann Gottfried Müthel, Friedrich and many others. His influence was not limited to his contemporaries, and extended to Felix Mendelssohn and .

His name fell into neglect during the 19th century, with Robert Schumann notoriously opining that "as a creative musician he remained very far behind his father"; in contrast, Johannes Brahms held him in high regard and edited some of his music. The revival of C.P.E. Bach's works has been underway since Helmuth Koch's rediscovery and recording of his symphonies in 1960s, and Hugo Ruf's recordings of his keyboard sonatas. There is an ongoing effort to record his complete works, led by Miklos Spanyi on the Swedish record label BIS. Carl Philipp Emanual Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was mentored by Silvius Leopold Weiss

 Silvius Leopold Weiss (October 12, 1687 – October 16, 1750) was a German composer and lutenist. Born in Grottkau near Breslau, the son of Johann Jacob Weiss, also a lutenist, he served at courts in Breslau, Rome, and , where he died. Until recently, he was thought to have been born in 1686, but recent evidence suggests that he was in fact born the following year. Weiss was the most important and the most prolific composer of music in history and one of the best-known and most technically accomplished lutenists of his day. He wrote around 600 pieces for lute, most of them grouped into 'sonatas' (not to be The Royal Court of : confused with the later classical sonata, Weiss, the Lutenist based on sonata form) or suites, which consist mostly of baroque dance pieces.

Weiss also wrote chamber pieces and concertos, but only the solo parts have survived. In later life, Weiss became a friend of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and met J.S. Bach through him. J.S.Bach and Weiss were said to have competed in improvisation, as the following account by Johann Friedrich Reichardt describes:

"Anyone who knows how difficult it is to play harmonic modulations and good counterpoint on the lute will be surprised and full of disbelief to hear from eyewitnesses that Weiss, the great lutenist, challenged J. S. Bach, the great harpsichordist and organist, at playing fantasies and fugues."

Sylvius Weiss' son Johann Adolph Faustinus Weiss succeeded him as a Saxon court lutenist. Conclusion of the Breslau intellectual line

So what is the lesson of the Breslau line’s intellectual legacy within New York Alpha?

The Breslau intellectual line reminds us that Jewish Americans were welcomed at Cornell and in New York Alpha during the opening years of the University’s operation, and were then subsequently discriminated against by not only fraternities, but also University administrators. Brother Carl Schurz steadfastly rejected the rise of anti-Semitism in both Europe and the United States. The line in which he is mustered not only reinforces the rejection of anti- Semitism by New York Alpha’s founding generation, but also provides ties to the German research university system preferred by Andrew Dickson White and the audio arts.

The Breslau intellectual line is part of New York Alpha’s local Chapter lore, first recorded by brother Cadwalader E. Linthicum (1885)(1889) and preserved by Walter Sheppard (’29)(’32) and Fred E. Hartzch (’28)(’31).

“To know the lore, is to tend the Tree.”