mendelssohn under the gun

Yesterday, Felix Mendelssohn, the pioneering composer, would have turned 200. I have always found there to be an unconscious irony in the fact that Mendelssohn and Richard Wagner have found themselves, or at least their works, serving as quite traditional cultural bookends. It is after all Wagner's bridal chorus from "Lohengrin" that we know as "Here Comes the Bride" and Mendelssohn's "Wedding March", an incidental piece accompanying Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream", which are so often the core of the processional/recessional dialectic at weddings.
Sadly for Mendelssohn, the rabid old anti-semite Wagner wasted little time in trying to dismantle the late composer's reputation as part of an 1850 screed called "Judaism in Music". Perhaps being damned with only faint praise from a man like Wagner is getting off easy in the scheme of things. Wagner calls Mendelssohn's music "sweet and tinkling without depth", a snipe at what he felt was a lack of emotion and true content behind Mendelssohn's compositional method.
Later, the temperamental Teuton snarls "What issues from the Jews' attempts at making art must necessarily therefore bear attributes of coldness and indifference, even to triviality and absurdity."
Whether or not this kind of poisonous prose directly correlated with Mendelssohn's posthumous fall from favor, it is clear that in six years of the article's publication, Mendelssohn's works went from being some of the most popularly performed in central Europe to the least performed.
Of course a lot transpires in 200 years and thankfully on the occasion of his bicentennial, Felix Mendelssohn's place in the gallery of great composers is rightfully ensured. Some 13 lost works of the man have been unearthed and are being performed in conjunction with his birthday celebration. Wagner meanwhile continues to occupy a strange corner of history; his genius undeniable, his music as grand and oppressive as any in the Western classical canon, and his nationalist and racist dribble thankfully receding into the cracks, though they no doubt inspired some of the greatest evil of the 20th century.