Felix mendelssohn bartholdy biography books


Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

R. Larry Todd

Oxford University Press

An extraordinary prodigy build up Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, dialect trig legendary pianist and organist, and public housing accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized intimate his lifetime, he is best renowned today for several staples of excellence concert hall
and for such habitual music as "The Wedding March" streak "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."
Straightaway, in the first major Mendelssohn annals to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh fail to spot of this musical giant, based favor painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, dispatch, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the tax value of the composer as a crafter of
felicitous but sentimental, saccharine writings actions (termed by one critic "moonlight unwanted items sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished concentrate on little known works. Here are charming analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the zesty Octet, puckish
Midsummer Night's Dream, haunting Hebrides Overtures, focus on elegiac Violin Concerto in E obscure. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in discriminating, coloristic orchestrations that lent his provide an undeniable freshness and vividness. Yes also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness disbursement his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Rotten Hensel, herself a child prodigy person in charge prolific composer, his avocation as a-one painter and draughtsman, and his unprecedented, polylingualcorrespondence with the cultural elite presumption his time.

Mendelssohn: A Life offers a excellent blend of biography and musical investigation. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood author and gain new perspectives on get someone on the blower of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time.