Mendelssohn: The Hebrides and Other Overtures
Mendelssohn: The Hebrides and Other Overtures

Author: R. Larry Todd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993-09-24

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9780521407649

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The concert overtures A Midsummer Night's Dream, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave), conceived by Mendelssohn before the age of twenty, have ranked amongst the most enduring of the nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. R. Larry Todd offers a historical, stylistic, and analytical guide to these three remarkable works which secured for Mendelssohn no small measure of his fame. After placing the overtures in the context of Mendelssohn's astonishing compositional development during the 1820s, the volume disentangles the complex history of their creation and considers in turn their style and formal structure, their contents as programme music, aspects of their orchestration and their reception and influence. All this is supported by a wealth of primary documents, including Mendelssohn's correspondence, memoirs of his friends, and nineteenth-century critical reviews.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

Author: John Michael Cooper

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780815315131

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This book offers an annotated reference guide to the life and works of this important German composer. It opens with a historical overview of Mendelssohn's reception by contemporary and posthumous audiences and scholars, tracing the interactions between his reception and political and cultural events. It contains a complete annotated bibliography of the literature about Mendelssohn, including biographies, reviews, scholarly articles and interpretations, and reference material. It also offers important information on the Mendelssohn family, including Fanny Hensel, Felix's sister who was also a composer and musician. Cooper's work is the most up-to-date and thorough resource for students of Mendelssohn and his times.

Mendelssohn
Mendelssohn

Author: R. Larry Todd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-10-23

Total Pages: 748

ISBN-13: 9780195110432

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An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor. Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant.

The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn
The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn

Author: Peter Mercer-Taylor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-10-21

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780521533423

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

Rethinking Mendelssohn
Rethinking Mendelssohn

Author: Benedict Taylor Ph.D.

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-15

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 0190611804

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As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.

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.

Mendelssohn in Performance
Mendelssohn in Performance

Author: Siegwart Reichwald

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2008-09-25

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0253002613

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Exploring many aspects of Felix Mendelssohn's multi-faceted career as musician and how it intersects with his work as composer, contributors discuss practical issues of music making such as performance space, instruments, tempo markings, dynamics, phrasings, articulations, fingerings, and instrument techniques. They present the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of Mendelssohn's approach to performance, interpretation, and composing through the contextualization of specific performance events and through the theoretic actualization of performances of specific works. Contributors rely on manuscripts, marked or edited scores, and performance parts to convey a deeper understanding of musical expression in 19th-century Germany. This study of Mendelssohn's work as conductor, pianist, organist, violist, accompanist, music director, and editor of old and new music offers valuable perspectives on 19th-century performance practice issues.

The Life of Mendelssohn
The Life of Mendelssohn

Author: Peter Mercer-Taylor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-09-28

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780521639729

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This biography traces Mendelssohn's development from dazzling child prodigy to renowned composer and conductor.