Few nineteenth-century musicians were as ideologically motivated in their artistic careers as Mendelssohn, although paradoxically he was notably reluctant to expound or discuss his aims and objectives. Comments on artistic matters in his letters, however, leave no doubt about the profound seriousness with which he engaged in all his musical activities. Towards theatrical music his attitude was ambivalent. On the one hand, he undoubtedly recognized that it was the arena in which a composer could most easily establish a reputation, and that the future of German opera was a burning issue; he will certainly have been aware of Spohr's exhortation in his ‘Aufruf an deutsche Componisten’ [Appeal to German composers], published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1823:

On the other hand, opera presented composers with potentially challenging conflicts between artistic refinement and the unsophisticated or fickle taste of the opera-going public, which were particularly problematic for a composer as fastidious as Mendelssohn. The reasons why he never went before the public with another opera after the abortive production of Camacho in 1827 are intimately bound up with his failure to resolve these tensions. During the last twenty years of his life the idea of writing an opera was never far from his mind; yet despite various commissions, beginning with one from Munich in 1831, it was not until 1847 that he made significant progress, with a setting of Geibel's Die Lorelei that remained unfinished at his death. Mendelssohn's equivocal attitude towards opera during his maturity is expressed in a letter, written from Paris in 1831.