Mendelssohn and His World
Mendelssohn and His World

Author: R. Larry Todd

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1991-08-13

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780691027159

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Bringing together previously unpublished essays by historians and musicologists, reflections on Mendelssohn written by his contemporaries, the composer's own letters, and early critical reviews of his music, this volume explores various facets of Mendelssohn's music, his social and intellectual circles, and his career. The essays in Part I cover the nature of a Jewish identity in Mendelssohn's music; his relationship to the Berlin Singakademie; the role of his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and accomplished composer; Mendelssohn's compositional craft in the Italian Symphony and selected concert overtures; his oratorio Elijah; his incidental music to Sophocles' Antigone; his anthem "Why, O Lord, delay forever?"; and an unfinished piano sonata. Part II presents little-known memoirs by such contemporaries as J.C. Lobe, A.B. Marx, Julius Schubring, C.E. Horsley, Max Mller, and Betty Pistor. Mendelssohn's letters are represented in Part III by his correspondence with Wilhelm von Boguslawski and Aloys Fuchs, here translated for the first time. Part IV contains late nineteenth-century critical reviews by Heinrich Heine, Franz Brendel, Friedrich Niecks, Otto Jahn, and Hans von Blow. --From publisher's description.

A Writer's Companion
A Writer's Companion

Author: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1995-09-01

Total Pages: 1064

ISBN-13: 9780807119921

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In A Writer’s Companion, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has drawn on his years of accumulated wisdom—as well as the advice of some fifty prominent writers from various fields—to put together in a single volume a vast array of information. Organized in such a way as to make it exceptionally easy to use, and enhanced by Rubin’s graceful and witty prose, A Writer’s Companion will merit a place on the desk of every serious wordsmith. It is also a book that will bring endless hours of pleasure to anyone who enjoys reading simply for the sake of gaining new knowledge. As Casey Stengel said, “You could look it up.”

Mendelssohn Perspectives
Mendelssohn Perspectives

Author: Nicole Grimes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1317097394

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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.

The Amadeus Book of the Violin
The Amadeus Book of the Violin

Author: Walter Kolneder

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 1493083376

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Available for the first time in English, this book has been considered the best single encyclopedia of the violin for 20 years. All aspects of the violin are covered: construction, history, and literature; violin playing and teaching; and violin virtuosos through the ages.

Mendelssohn
Mendelssohn

Author: R. Larry Todd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-10-23

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0199839379

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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.