How did Felix Mendelssohn’s music influence Richard Wagner?

Richard Wagner recognized and was influenced by Felix Mendelssohn’s inventive powers as an orchestrator. This influence is evident in Wagner’s own opera, The Flying Dutchman.1

While Wagner is known for his later anti-Semitic writings, such as Judaism in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik), in which he criticized Jewish musicians, his professional acknowledgment of Mendelssohn's technical skill in orchestration highlights the complex and often contradictory nature of his relationship with his contemporaries.21