Mendelssohn perspectives

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. 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.

Cover; Contents; List of Figures, Plates and Illustrations; List of Tables; List of Musical Examples; List of Abbreviations; Notes on Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: Mendelssohn's Jewishness; 1 Never Perfectly Beautiful: Physiognomy, Jewishness, and Mendelssohn Portraiture; 2 Mendelssohn's 'Untergang': Reconsidering the Impact of Wagner's 'Judaism in Music'; 3 'Wordless Judaism, Like the Songs of Mendelssohn'? Hanslick, Mendelssohn and Cultural Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna; 4 Mendelssohn's Conversion to Judaism: An English Perspective.

Part II: Between Tradition and Innovation5 Norm and Deformation in Mendelssohn's Sonata Forms; 6 Mendelssohn and Berlioz: Selective Affinities; 7 Between Tradition and Innovation: Mendelssohn as Music Director; Part III: Mendelssohn and the Stage; 8 Converting the Pagans: Mendelssohn, Greek Tragedy, and the Christian Ethos; 9 The Phantom of Mendelssohn's Opera: Fictional Accounts and Posthumous Propaganda; Part IV: Style and Compositional Process; 10 Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte and the Limits of Musical Expression.

11 Improvisation, Elaboration, Composition: The Mendelssohns and the Classical Cadenza12 Cycli…