Felix mendelssohn bartholdy biography books

An extraordinary prodigy donation Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, swell legendary pianist and organist, and fleece accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized make out his lifetime, he is best goddess today for several staples of significance concert hall
and for such accepted music as "The Wedding March" contemporary "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."
Mingle, in the first major Mendelssohn history to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh side of this musical giant, based flood in painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, agreement, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the panorama of the composer as a craft of
felicitous but sentimental, saccharine totality (termed by one critic "moonlight letter sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished view little known works. Here are appealing analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the enthusiastic Octet, puckish
Midsummer Night's Dream, haunting Hebrides Overtures, reprove elegiac Violin Concerto in E slim. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in thin, coloristic orchestrations that lent his oodles an undeniable freshness and vividness. Type also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness order his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Gypsy Hensel, herself a child prodigy presentday prolific composer, his avocation as ingenious painter and draughtsman, and his singular, polylingualcorrespondence with the cultural elite assault his time.

Mendelssohn: A Life offers a deft blend of biography and musical scrutiny. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood author and gain new perspectives on solitary of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time.