This book surveys the life, work, and posthumous reception of nineteenth-century German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Beginning several generations before Schubert, the Lied first appears as domestic entertainment. In the century that follows it becomes one of the primary modes of music-making. By the time German song comes to its presumed conclusion with Richard Strauss's 1948 Vier letzte Lieder, this rich repertoire has moved beyond the home and keyboard accompaniment to the symphony hall. This is a 2004 introductory chronicle of this fascinating genre. In essays by eminent scholars, this Companion places the Lied in its full context - at once musical, literary, and cultural - with chapters devoted to focal composers as well as important issues, such as the way in which the Lied influenced other musical genres, its use as a musical commodity, and issues of performance. The volume is framed by a detailed chronology of German music and poetry from the late 1730s to the present and also contains a comprehensive bibliography.

This Companion offers a concise and authoritative survey of the string quartet by eleven chamber music specialists. Its fifteen carefully structured chapters provide coverage of a stimulating range of perspectives previously unavailable in one volume. It focuses on four main areas: the social and musical background to the quartet's development; the most celebrated ensembles; string quartet playing, including aspects of contemporary and historical performing practice; and the mainstream repertory, including significant 'mixed ensemble' compositions involving string quartet. Various musical and pictorial illustrations and informative appendixes, including a chronology of the most significant works, complete this indispensable guide. Written for all string quartet enthusiasts, this Companion will enrich readers' understanding of the history of the genre, the context and significance of quartets as cultural phenomena, and the musical, technical and interpretative problems of chamber music performance. It will also enhance their experience of listening to quartets in performance and on recordings.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Research and Information Guide is a valuable tool for any scholar, performer, or music student interested in accessing the most pertinent resources on the life, works, and cultural context of the composer. It is an updated, annotated bibliography of resources on the biographical, musical, and religious aspects of Mendelssohn's life.

Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night is a book about tolerance and acceptance in the face of cultural, political, and religious strife. Its point of departure is the Walpurgis Night. The Night, also known as Beltane or May Eve, was supposedly an annual witches' Sabbath that centered around the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains. After exploring how a notoriously pagan celebration came to be named after the Christian missionary St. Walpurgis (ca. 710-79), John Michael Cooper discusses the Night's treatments in several closely interwoven works by Goethe and Mendelssohn. His book situates those works in their immediate personal and professional contexts, as well as among treatments by a wide array of other artists, philosophers, and political thinkers, including Voltaire, Lessing, Shelley, Heine, Delacroix, and Berlioz. In an age of decisive political and religious conflict, Walpurgis Night became a heathen muse: a source of inspiration that was neither specifically Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim. And Mendelssohn's and Goethe's engagements with it offer new insights into its role in European cultural history, as well as into issues of political, religious, and social identity -- and the relations between cultural groups -- in today's world. John Michael Cooper (Southwestern University) is the author of Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony (Oxford University Press).

A rare volume dedicated entirely to scholarship on the genre of the concerto.

If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn’s music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer’s life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.

This valuable book considers the reception of the composer, pianist, organist and conductor Felix Mendelssohn in nineteenth-century England, and his influence on English musical culture. Despite the composer's immense popularity in the nation during his lifetime and in the decades following his death, this is the first book to deal exclusively with the subject of Mendelssohn in England. Mendelssohn's highly successful ten trips to Britain, between 1829 and 1847, are documented and discussed in detail, as are his relationships with English musicians and a variety of prominent figures. An introductory chapter describes the musical life of England (especially London) at the time of Mendelssohn's arrival and the last two chapters deal with the composer's posthumous reception, to the end of the Victorian era. Eatock reveals Mendelssohn as a catalyst for the expansion of English musical culture in the nineteenth century. In taking this position, the author challenges much of the extant literature on the subject and provides an engaging story that brings Mendelssohn and his English experiences to life.

""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. ""--

This volume of essays brings together a selection of the most significant and representative writings on Mendelssohn from the last fifty years. Divided into four main subject areas, it makes available twenty-two essays which have transformed scholarly awareness of this crucial and ever-popular nineteenth-century composer and musician; it also includes a specially commissioned introductory chapter which offers a critical overview of the last half century of Mendelssohn scholarship and the direction of future research. The addition of new translations of two influential essays by Carl Dahlhaus, hitherto unavailable in English, adds to the value of this volume which brings back in to circulation important scholarly works and constitutes an indispensable reference work for Mendelssohn scholars.