Mendelssohn, Felix Books

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

R. Larry Todd

List Price: $45.00 By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $30.50

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Classical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

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works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works.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.

A Portrait of Mendelssohn

Clive Brown

Amazon Price: $50.00 List Price: $50.00 Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks By: Yale University Press Amazon Marketplace: 17 new & used starting at $24.84

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Classical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Since his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn’s music and personality have been both admired and denigrated to extraordinary degrees. In this valuable book Clive Brown weaves together a rich array of documents—letters, diaries, memoirs, reviews, news reports, and more—to present a balanced and fascinating picture of the composer and his work. Rejecting the received view of Mendelssohn as a facile, lightweight musician, Brown demonstrates that he was in fact an innovative and highly cerebral composer who exerted a powerful influence on musical thought into the twentieth century. Brown discusses Mendelssohn’s family background and education; the role of religion and race in his life and reputation; his experiences as practical musician (pianist, organist, string player, conductor) and as teacher and composer; the critical reception of his works; and the vicissitudes of his posthumous reputation. The book also includes a range of hitherto unpublished sketches made by ! Mendelssohn. The result is an unprecedented portrayal of the man and his achievements as viewed through his own words and those of his contempories.

The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition

Jeffrey S. Sposato

Amazon Price: $43.59 List Price: $50.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $38.57

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General AAS
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> History & Criticism

Editorial Review:

Most scholars since World War Two have assumed that composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) maintained a strong attachment to Judaism throughout his lifetime. As these commentators have rightly noted, Mendelssohn was born Jewish and not converted to Protestantism until age seven, his grandfather was the famous Jewish reformer and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and his music was banned by the Nazis, who clearly viewed him as a Jew. Such facts tell only part of the story, however. Through a mix of cultural analysis, biographical study, and a close examination of the libretto drafts of Mendelssohn's sacred works, The Price of Assimilation provides dramatic new answers to the so-called "Mendelssohn Jewish question." Sposato demonstrates how Mendelssohn's father, Abraham, worked to distance the family from its Jewish past, and how Mendelssohn's reputation as a composer of Christian sacred music was threatened by the reverence with which German Jews viewed his family name. In order to prove the sincerity of his Christian faith to both his father and his audiences, Mendelssohn aligned his early sacred works with a nineteenth-century anti-Semitic musical tradition, and did so more fervently than even his Christian collaborators required. With the death of Mendelssohn's father and the near simultaneous establishment of the composer's career in Leipzig in 1835, however, Mendelssohn's fear of his background began to dissipate, and he began to explore ways in which he could prove the sincerity of his faith without having to publicly disparage his Jewish heritage.

Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohns Revival of the St. Matthew Passion

Celia Applegate

Amazon Price: $31.00 List Price: $36.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cornell University Press Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $25.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> History & Criticism
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Classical -> Composers -> Mendelssohn, Felix
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Classical -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s supreme musical masterpieces, yet in the years after Bach’s death it was forgotten by all but a small number of his pupils and admirers. The public rediscovered it in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the work before a glittering audience of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Prussian royals, and civic notables. The concert soon became the stuff of legend, sparking a revival of interest in and performance of Bach that has continued to this day. Mendelssohn’s performance gave rise to the notion that recovering and performing Bach’s music was somehow "national work." In 1865 Wagner would claim that Bach embodied "the history of the German spirit’s inmost life." That the man most responsible for the revival of a masterwork of German Protestant culture was himself a converted Jew struck contemporaries as less remarkable than it does us today—a statement that embraces both the great achievements and the disasters of 150 years of German history.

In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans’ collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were "the people of music." Applegate assesses the impact on music’s cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself.

Mendelssohn Studies (Cambridge Composer Studies)

Amazon Price: $50.00 List Price: $50.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 27 new & used starting at $46.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> History & Criticism
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Classical -> Composers -> Mendelssohn, Felix
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> General

Editorial Review:

The life and works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy are enjoying a considerable resurgence of interest among musicologists, musicians, and music-lovers alike. This volume of ten essays presents the most recent trends in Mendelssohn research, covering three broad catagories--reception history, historical and critical essays, and case studies of particular compositions. Based on primary sources from the nineteenth century, including little known autograph manuscripts and letters of the composer, the volume examines Mendelssohn's historical reception, his relationships with such contemporaries as Franz Liszt, A.B. Marx, Eduard Devrient, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and such works as the Variations sérieuses, Preludes and Fugues Op. 35, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, and Reformation Symphony .

Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Marcia J. Citron

Amazon Price: $92.00 List Price: $92.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Pendragon Pr Amazon Marketplace: 1 new & used starting at $91.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Song without words,: The story of Felix Mendelssohn,

John Erskine

By: J. Messner Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $5.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Classical -> Composers -> Mendelssohn, Felix
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> General
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> General AAS

The Life of Mendelssohn (Musical Lives)

Peter Mercer-Taylor

Amazon Price: $33.00 List Price: $34.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $3.73

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Classical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An Extremely Enjoyable Experience 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

With a smooth and easy-to-read style that is brimming with factual details and emotive feelings, Mr. Mercer-Taylor's writing provides a concise and highly articulate story of Felix Mendelssohn's life. Mendelssohn's many significant contributions as a composer, musician, conductor, teacher and adminstrator are presented in an interesting collage of personalities and historical events of the times. In particular, the author's description of Mendelssohn's music captures its essence perfectly. An extremely enjoyable reading experience.

Editorial Review:

This biography of composer and pianist Felix Mendelssohn traces his development from musical child prodigy to a conductor whose influence as an advocate of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven is still felt to this day. A great deal of attention is paid to Mendelssohn's early nineteenth-century cultural surroundings and the book includes interpretation and discussion of major works, without use of musical examples or technical language, placing them within the context of his personal and public life. This is the first new biography of Mendelssohn to appear in some seventeen years.

The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn (Cambridge Companions to Music)

Amazon Price: $31.17 List Price: $32.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $18.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Classical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Authored by leading scholars in the field, this collection of fourteen essays surveys the life, work, and posthumous reception of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish composer. Sections cover aspects of biography as well as Felix Mendelssohn's expansive and multi-faceted musical output. Two closing essays confront the turbulent course of his posthumous reception and the challenges his music continues to pose for modern performers.

Mendelssohn (Master Musicians Series)

Philip Radcliffe

Amazon Price: $35.00 List Price: $35.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $6.79

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Classical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, this extraordinary series continues to amaze and captivate its readers with detailed insight into the lives and work of music's geniuses. Unlike other composer biographies that focus narrowly on the music, this series explores the personal history of each composer and the social context surrounding the music. In a precise, engaging, and authoritative manner, each volume combines a vivid portrait of the master musicians' inspirations, influences, life experiences, even their weaknesses, with an accessible discussion of their work-all in roughly 300 pages. Further, each volume offers superb reference material, including a detailed life and times chronology, a complete list of works, a personalia glossary highlighting the important people in the composer's life, and a select bibliography. Under the supervision of music expert and series general editor Stanley Sadie, Master Musicians will certainly proceed to delight music scholars, serious musicians, and all music lovers for another hundred years.