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.
This volume of ten essays presents the most recent trends in Mendelssohn research, covering three broad categories - reception history, historical and critical essays and case studies of particular compositions.
This book is a study and critical edition of Mendelssohn's composition exercise book from his early period of study with Carl Friedrich Zelter (1819-1821). The workbook illustrates in considerable detail the young musician's struggle to master the rules of part writing and principles of counterpoint. Much of Zelter's systematic teaching method is grounded in the eighteenth-century theoretical tradition of Berlin; not surprisingly, the exercises bear the stamp of the music of J. S. Bach, which heavily influenced such Berlin musicians as C. P. E. Bach, C. F. C. Fasch, Marpurg, Kirnberger, Zelter and Mendelssohn. There is little doubt that the historicist attitude of the mature Mendelssohn - as seen in his efforts to revive the works of Bach and Handel and in his propensity toward strict contrapuntal techniques in his own music - was conditioned by these studies with Zelter. The publication of the workbook sheds new light on the early development of one ofthe most important nineteenth-century composers who, though affected by the new wave of romanticism that swept over Europe, never lost his respect for the past. No less important, the manuscript includes several previously unpublished pieces which rank among Mendelssohn's earliest compositions.
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.
When R. Larry Todd’s biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, appeared in 2003, it won acclaim from several critics as a definitive biography. In researching Mendelssohn’s life over the last two and a half decades, Todd uncovered much new information about the composer and his music, his family and his peers, and his complex reception history. Now, as we approach the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the author has chosen and compiled fifteen essays written between 1980 and 2005, including five previously unpublished, that examine several aspects of the composer whom Goethe and Heine likened to a second Mozart. Mendelssohn Essays explores Mendelssohn’s precocity, his musical impressions of British culture, the role of the visual in his music, his compositional response to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and incomplete drafts from his musical estate of three instrumental works. In addition, a group of three essays focuses on the music of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel, perhaps the most gifted woman composer of the century, and a significant, complex figure in the formation of the Mendelssohnian style.
The last work published by Moses Mendelssohn during his lifetime, Morning Hours (1785) is also the most sustained presentation of his mature epistemological and metaphysical views, all elaborated in the service of presenting proofs for the existence of God. But Morning Hours is much more than a theoretical treatise. It also plays a central role in the drama of the Pantheismusstreit, Mendelssohn's "dispute" with F. H. Jacobi over the nature and scope of Lessing's attitude toward Spinoza and "pantheism". As the latest salvo in a war of texts with Jacobi, Morning Hours is also Mendelssohn's attempt to set the record straight regarding his beloved Lessing in this connection, not least by demonstrating the absence of any practical (i.e., religious or moral) difference between theism and a "purified pantheism".
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an accessible and fascinating biography of Moses Mendelssohn, the seminal Jewish philosopher "A fascinating portrait of an important Enlightenment figure."—Library Journal The “German Socrates,” Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for generations of Jews to master the language of the larger culture. Feiner’s book is the first that offers a full, human portrait of this fascinating man—uncommonly modest, acutely aware of his task as an intellectual pioneer, shrewd, traditionally Jewish, yet thoroughly conversant with the world around him—providing a vivid sense of Mendelssohn’s daily life as well as of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a leading scholar of Jewish intellectual history, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a friend (Mendelssohn’s long-standing friendship with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was seen as a model for Jews and non-Jews worldwide), as a tireless advocate for his people, and as an equally indefatigable spokesman for the paramount importance of intellectual independence.
This study of the composition, reception, extramusical implications and stylistic eclecticism of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony devotes extensive attention to the differences between the posthumously published familiar version of the work and the composer's revision, which remained unpublised until 2001.
Packed with new evidence, Making Oscar Wilde tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michèle Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.
