Examines Mendelssohn's relationship to the past, shedding light on the construction of historical legacies that, in some cases, served to assert German cultural supremacy only two decades after the composer's death.

Mendelssohn and the Organ is the first comprehensive historical-critical study in any language to examine the role of the organ in Mendelssohn's personal and professional career. It examines his entire oeuvre for the instrument, including the Berlin-Krakow manuscripts, and presents for the first time Mendelssohn's complete correspondence with his English publisher, Charles Coventry.

""Rethinking Mendelssohn offers a new perspective on Mendelssohn's music and aesthetics, arguing for a fresh critical understanding of the composer, his music, and its central relationship to nineteenth-century culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, the present book sets a new tone for research on Mendelssohn, challenging the traditional modes of discourse about this composer in moving beyond rehabilitation and source studies to engage in rigorous criticism and analysis. In a word, it seeks to rethink the issues that shaped Mendelssohn, his music and its reception from his own day down to the present. This volume includes contributions from younger, emerging scholars as well as from some of the most prominent figures outside specialist Mendelssohn circles in order to open up new ways of understanding the composer and set out future directions in Mendelssohn studies. Particular attention is given here to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, the analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre and his historical importance in this field, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song tradition, besides offering new accounts of some of this composer's most familiar orchestral pieces. ""--

The greatest musical prodigy since Mozart (some would say he was even greater), Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) excelled in everything he did, musical or otherwise, and during his brief life became Europe’s most respected and beloved composer. Yet no musician suffered more drastic swings in his posthumous reputation, and as a result Mendelssohn’s music was obscured by a host of extra-musical factors: changes in taste, the rise of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and contempt for Victorian culture. This “owner’s manual” offers a guide to Mendelssohn’s musical output, major and minor, providing points of entry into a large body of work, much of which remains far too little known. There’s much more to Mendelssohn than the “Italian” Symphony and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Overture, and a whole creative world of vivid, expressive, and fantastical music is ready for exploration.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857.