Mendelssohn

An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor a legendary pianist and organist and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as The Wedding March and Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Now in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts correspondence diaries and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental saccharine works (termed by one critic moonlight with sugar water) Todd reexamines the composer''s entire oeuvre including many unpublished and little known works. Here are engaging analyses of Mendelssohn''s distinctive masterpieces--the zestful Octet puckish Midsummer Night''s Dream haunting Hebrides Overtures and elegiac Violin Concerto in E minor. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance in subtle coloristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. He also explores Mendelssohn''s changing awareness of his religious heritage Wagner''s virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn''s music the composer''s complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel herself a child prodigy and prolific composer his avocation as a painter and draughtsman and his remarkable polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time. Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood composer and gain new perspectives on one of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time.