‘Seeking Mendelssohn Presents the Shanghai Quartet’

In 1850, Richard Wagner wrote, “Our antipathy against the Jewish
nature and all its inability to have intercourse with us is
intensified to a positively tragic conflict in the nature, life, and art of Felix Mendelssohn.” The besieged Mendelssohn was as prodigious as Chopin and more disciplined than virtually all of his contemporaries, yet for a hundred years, his music was mostly maligned in his native Germany. At the Met, a panel will discuss why hundreds of the composer’s works remain unpublished, followed by the U.S. debut of some of those pieces, courtesy of the Shanghai Quartet.

Sat., Jan. 23, 6 p.m., 2010