He wasn’t just a great composer; he was a one-man cultural institution. At age 20 in 1829 he conducted the first performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s death, basically rescuing that name from obscurity and kicking off the Bach revival that defines to this day how we hear German classical composers. He alone, taking personal risk, championed other composers to make them more popular. He founded the Leipzig Conservatory. And his sister would have been world renowned as well, except for the misogyny. Europe’s leaders enjoyed her as a musical star while refusing to credit her. All of this, the entire authentic German history of classical music, then brutally was destroyed by that shithead antisemitic Wagner and even worse Orff.

Pfitzner, Egk, Müller all refused the Nazi commission to erase Mendelssohn; Richard Strauss had disdain for the project, and even the Nazi critic Fritz Stege wrote that Mendelssohn’s music belongs and it honors no arranger to touch it. Orff took it anyway. He was worse than any Nazi fanatic, the opportunist who took Hitler’s erasure commission when even all the committed Nazis wouldn’t touch it.

That’s https://echtorff.org