The composer chosen for the 2008 Georgetown Festival of the Arts is Felix Mendelssohn who was born in 1809 in Hamburg. Mendelssohn's life was very different from that of last year's festival composer, Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Whereas Schubert continually struggled to make a living and died in poverty, never having had much success or recognition for his music, Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy family of great distinction and was treated as a musical genius all of his life. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was a celebrated Jewish philosopher and his father, Abraham, was an affluent banker who became a leading citizen of Berlin. Felix and his talented sister Fanny were given the best possible education, especially in music, art and languages. By the time he was 16 years old Felix had composed many works that are still regarded as masterpieces, including his Octet for strings.

Festival 2008 audiences will have the opportunity to hear this amazing composition when two of the premier string quartets in America - the Shanghai and the Miró Quartets - join forces here to perform it.

Elite young men often spent two to four years traveling around Europe to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography, and culture in an experience known as the Grand Tour. Felix's father provided him the opportunity to take the Grand Tour when he was 20, and his travel experiences inspired many of his finest works, such as the Hebrides Overture (“Fingal's Cave”} and the A Minor Symphony (Scotland), the A Major Symphony (Italy), and The First Walpurgis Night (the Harz Mountains in Germany). When his years of travel were over, he found himself in constant demand as a composer, a pianist, an orchestral conductor, and an educator - he was a founder of the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843. Much of his professional life was spent hurrying between Berlin and Leipzig to fulfill his responsibilities, with frequent visits to London and to Düsseldorf as well.

As a child, Felix was baptized into the Protestant Christian faith and the name Bartholdy was added to his surname. In 1829, when he was 20, he led a performance of J. S. Bach's Passion according to Saint Matthew, which had lain dormant for a hundred years. This work was the inspiration for Mendelssohn's two great oratorios, Saint Paul and Elijah. The Saint Paul oratorio will be performed during the Festival.

When Mendelssohn died in 1847, worn out from work, he was, unlike Schubert, honored as one of the greatest composers of his time. But while Schubert's reputation grew steadily after his death, Mendelssohn's music, when compared to the complexities of Richard Wagner and his followers, began to be seen as somewhat outdated, lacking the kinds of profundities that could be found in Der Ring des Nibelungen or Tristan und Isolde.

In recent years, however, his reputation has been growing strongly, and the fourth Georgetown Festival of the Arts will offer us the opportunity to experience the music of Mendelssohn at its best!