This volume of essays brings together a selection of the most significant and representative writings on Mendelssohn from the last fifty years. Divided into four main subject areas, it makes available twenty-two essays which have transformed scholarly awareness of this crucial and ever-popular nineteenth-century composer and musician; it also includes a specially commissioned introductory chapter which offers a critical overview of the last half century of Mendelssohn scholarship and the direction of future research. The addition of new translations of two influential essays by Carl Dahlhaus, hitherto unavailable in English, adds to the value of this volume which brings back in to circulation important scholarly works and constitutes an indispensable reference work for Mendelssohn scholars.

    Contents: Introduction: The long Mendelssohn Renaissance, Benedict Taylor. Aesthetics: Vorwort and Mendelssohn und die musikalische Gattungstradition, Carl Dahlhaus; The aesthetics of assimilation and affirmation: reconstructing the career of Felix Mendelssohn, Leon Botstein; Felix culpa: Goethe and the image of Mendelssohn, Lawrence Kramer; Marxian programmatic music: a stage in Mendelssohn’s musical development, Judith Silber Ballan; The problem of the lyric persona in Mendelssohn’s songs, Douglas Seaton; Mendelssohn’s Babel: romanticism and the poetics of translation, James Garratt. Music and Source-Studies: Zur Kompositionsart Mendelssohn: Thesen am Beispiel der Streichquartette, Friedhelm Krummacher; Cyclic form and tonal relationships in Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ symphony, Rey M. Longyear; Mendelssohn the progressive, Gregory Vitercik; Mendelssohn: songs without words, William Rothstein; 'Aber eben dieser Zweifel’: A new look at Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ symphony, John Michael Cooper; The flight of Icarus: Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, Mark Evan Bonds. Context and Culture: Mendelssohn’s Ossianic manner, with a new source: On Lena’s gloomy heath, R. Larry Todd; Musical historicism and the transcendental foundation of community: Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang and the ‘Christian German’ cultural politics of Frederick William IV, John Edward Toews; Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music, Michael P. Steinberg; Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ symphony and the music of German memory, Peter Mercer-Taylor; Fingal’s Cave and Ossian’s dream: music, image, and phantasmagoric audition, Thomas Grey. Biography and Reception: 1848, anti-semitism, and the Mendelssohn reception, Donald M. Mintz; The hidden pathways of assimilation: Mendelssohn’s first visit to London, Paul Jourdan; Creative writing: the [self-] identification of Mendelssohn as Jew, Jeffrey S. Sposato; Just how ‘Scottish’ is the ‘Scottish’ symphony? Thoughts on form and poetic content in Mendelssohn’s Opus 56, Thomas Schmidt-Beste; The composer as other: gender and race in the biography of Felix Mendelssohn, Marian Wilson Kimber. Index.

    Biography

    Benedict Taylor is Chancellor’s Fellow at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh, UK