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. He acquired additional notability with a lifestyle that some found eccentric.
Biography
Family provenance and early years
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).
Franz von Mendelssohn, who later Italianised his first name, was the son of the banker and his young wife Giulietta Gordigiani. She was a daughter of the fashionable Florentine portraitist Michele Gordigiani. After her husband died in 1917 and her daughter married pianist Edwin Fischer, she moved to Italy with her daughter Angelica von Mendelssohn. In 1923 she met the cellist Gaspar Cassadó, who was 26 years younger than she was, with whom she lived for more than 30 years. Francesco stayed in the large family home at Königsallee 16 in Berlin's Grunewald quarter, next to a very large number of Mendelssohn cousins in Berlin. 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" and with doubts about its attribution). 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 he became a professional cellist. He became a solo performer, and was also, at different rimes, a member of the Busch quartet and of the Klingler quartet. 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.
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.
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, and often appeared in public wearing a red leather suit or a yellow silk dressing gown. With his friend Ruth Landshoff he like to turn up wearing an evening dress, while she, as his partner, wore his suit. 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.
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. 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 , 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. 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.