Mendelssohn, Francesco von, 1901-1972

Francesco von Mendelssohn (born Franz von Mendelssohn; 6 September 1901 – 22 September 1972) was a German cellist and art collector. He also became known during the 1920s as a stage actor and theater director.[1][2] He acquired additional notability with a lifestyle that some found eccentric.[2][3]

He was born in Berlin. His great x 3 grandfather, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), had become the ancestor of a prominent dynasty of bankers and musicians, notably Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn, who were thereby Franz's first cousins three times removed (generationally).[4]

Franz von Mendelssohn, who later Italianised his first name, was the son of the banker Robert von Mendelssohn [de] and his young wife Giulietta. She was a daughter of the fashionable Florentine portraitist Michele Gordigiani. After her husband died in 1917 she moved in with the cellist Gaspar Cassadó, who was 26 years younger than she was, and moved back to Italy, leaving her teenage children, Eleonora [de] and Francesco to look after the large family home at Königsallee 16 in Berlin's Grunewald quarter.[5] They evidently had little reason to feel abandoned, there being a very large number of Mendelssohn cousins in Berlin.[5] The house contained numerous antiquities and, most notably, the large art collection that Robert von Mendelssohn had built up. This included works by Guardi, Goya and Rubens. There were also two paintings attributed at that time to Rembrandt: a self-portrait and a portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (after Mendelssohn's death re-attributed to the "school of Rembrandt"). From 1910 Robert von Mendelssohn had aggressively and presciently expanded the collection, selecting works by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Max Slevogt, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet.

Francesco showed a similarly sure touch in his selection, buying works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Segantini and Camille Corot. His greater love was for music and the theatre, however. As a pupil of Pablo Casals and Arthur Williams[6] he became a professional cellist.[7] He became a solo performer, and was also, at different rimes, a member of the Busch quartet and of the Klingler quartet.[7] Reflecting the large social network of which the Mendelssohns were at the heart, members of Berlin's intellectual elite with whom he played chamber music in private included Albert Einstein.[8]

He also wrote a book about Eleonora Duse, who was a friend of his mother's and his sister's God mother. He translated the plays of Luigi Pirandello from Italian, at the same time working as a movie actor and as a theatre director. Co-stars included Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Fritz Kortner, Theo Lingen, Heinz Rühmann and Paul Hörbiger.[9]

Among social commentators Francesco von Mendelssohn became known as an eccentric. He drove a white Lancia cabriolet in which the seat covers were made of ermine,[2] and often appeared in public wearing a red leather suit[2] or a yellow silk dressing gown.[10] With his friend Ruth Landshoff he like to turn up wearing an evening dress, while she, as his partner, wore his suit.[3] In his parents' house in Grunewald he held high-profile social events at which leading figures from the arts and politics mingled with men from the gay community. His close friends included Harald Kreutzberg, Vladimir Horowitz und Gustaf Gründgens. His various lovers are believed to have included Ruth Landshoff.[11]

Emigration
The Mendelssohns were baptised as Christians but, as racist awareness increased, widely perceived as Jewish. After the Nazis came to power in January 1933, the Mendelssohns were persecuted as Jews.[12] It became apparent that the antisemitism which had underpinned the populist rhetoric of the Nazis in opposition was no mere empty threat, even though a Christian baptism might be regarded by some as sufficient protection against the rising threat of state persecution. The von Mendelssohn siblings emigrated. While Eleonora, who at this point was married to an Austrian, moved back to Castle Kammer [de], in Upper Austria, and not far from Salzburg. Francesco von Mendelssohn stayed away from German speaking central Europe, spending most of the time between 1933 and 1935 in Paris. He also took the opportunity to extend and deepen his contacts in the United States.[7] As early as April 1933 he staged Brecht's Threepenny Opera at the Empire Theater on Broadway. It was the work's US premier, but the production was not a success, closing after twelve nights.[7]

Francesco von Mendelssohn spent the summer of 1935 in Venice and then, travelling with Eleonora, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill and the impresario Meyer Weisgal, set sail in September from Cherbourg aboard the Majestic, in order to start a new life in New York City.[7] Here he worked as a production assistant with Max Reinhardt.[13] Initially he lived in hotels in New York. Later he acquired a house in 83rd Street where he resumed his habit of throwing lavish parties for members of the artistic elite. He moved briefly to Hollywood, but by 1937 was back in New York.[7] His work on a production of The Eternal Road by Franz Werfel and Kurt Weill led to a falling out with Reinhardt in 1937.[14]The massive fortune that the von Mendelssohn siblings had inherited from their banker father was greatly diminished by the anti-semitic measures imposed by Nazis that accompanied in their emigration, but they remained wealthy by most standards and were able to provide financial support to other refugees.[14] Eleanora had been able to take part of the art collection to Austria when she moved there, and they had also managed to convey the two supposed Rembrandt paintings to Christoph Bernoulli, the Basel art dealer, leaving at the Mendelssohn Bank in Berlin some copies that their grandfather had had made. However, fearing government reprisals if the switch was noticed, a cousin persuaded them to have the real pictures returned to Germany where Alfred Hentzen [de] arranged for them to be lodged with the central bank in order to prevent their sale abroad. Ownership of the works, at this point, rested with Francesco's mother, Giulietta von Mendelssohn. In the end she decided to have them sold, entrusting the transaction to the family's agent, Aldo Cima. He arranged for the sale of most of the Mendelssohn art collection through the Austrian dealer, Otto Schatzker [de].

Francesco von Mendelssohn had been in no position to appear at that hearing on his own behalf. He spent a period as an inmate at a psychiatric clinic in White Plains,. There are contemporary reports that he may have undergone a lobotomy, possibly in order to protect him from the further clutches of the justice system.[5] His central nervous system and intellectual faculties had apparently been damaged by his chronic alcoholism.[5] In 1957 he came under the care of Lilly Wittels, widow of the psychiatrist Fritz Wittels.[5] He visited Vienna in 1960: friends from former times found him utterly transformed and uninterested. In his final years he broke of contact with former friends. In 1972 he was found to be suffering from an advanced case of cancer, and he died on 22 September 1972. Only a few people attended his burial. As Alice Bernoulli wrote in a letter to her friend Salka Viertel on 10 October 1972, "No wonder, that ... most of his old friends found him too dull after his total character change, and left him alone. A sad end. But what a chapter in our lives!!"[5][17]