Marriage and Family Life

By traditional standards, Mendelssohn married rather late in life, at the age of thirty-two. Toward the middle of May, 1761, after his return from Hamburg, where he met Fromet Gugenheim, his future wife, he wrote to Lessing: “I visited the theater, I made the acquaintance of scholars, and (this will sound rather strange to you) I have committed the folly of falling in love in my thirtieth year. You laugh? By all means! Who knows what may still happen to you? Perhaps the thirtieth year is the most dangerous one-and you have not reached it yet. The female I am willing to marry has no means, is neither beautiful nor learned, and nevertheless I, a gallant lover, am so impressed by her that I believe myself to be able to live happily with her.” On July 4, 1762, shortly after his wedding, he reported to Thomas Abbt: “During the last few weeks I spoke to no friend, wrote to no friend, stopped thinking, reading, and writing, did nothing but dally, feast, observe holy customs … ; for the hour came, my dearest friend, that the Muse of Abaelardus Virbius had foretold me long ago. A blue-eyed girl, whom now I call my wife, has caused your friend's icy heart to melt, and has involved his mind in a thousand diversions from which he now seeks gradually to extricate himself.” The somewhat flippant tone of these letters to the two bachelor friends does not reflect Mendelssohn's deepest feelings. His true self is expressed in the sixty-six letters he wrote to his fiancee during their engagement, the first bearing the date May 15, 1761, the last dated May 25, 1762.

Mendelssohn had spent four weeks in Hamburg becoming acquainted with Fromet, as Doctor Gumpertz and also his employer, Isaac Bernhard, had urged him to do. The latter's daughter Sara, who lived in Hamburg as the wife of Asher Götting, was a friend of the young lady whose praises rang in Mendelssohn's ears. The Gugenheim family was a distinguished one. Abraham Gugenheim, Fromet's father, was a great-grandson of the court banker Samuel Oppenheimer of Vienna, a patron of Hebrew learning and a descendent of Jehuda Löb Oppenheim of Heidelberg, who died in about 1572. Fromet's late mother was descended from Samuel Jehuda, founder of the Altona community, who died in 1621.