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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works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works.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. Professor Todd's imposing tome must surely be the last word on Felix Mendelssohn's life and music. It is a remarkable work of reserch and musical scholarship engagingly written and accessible even to a non-music specialist. * Classic FM, The Magazine * Professor Todd is our most distinguished authority on Mendelssohn ... His new volume gives not only a remarkably full and detailed picture of Mendelssohn's career, but also a rich and satisfying account of the European culture in which he lived out his short life. * Charles Rosen, Times Literary Supplement * "A highly readable and authoritative account of a brief but remarkably creative life, and an important contribution to Mendelssohn studies."-Hugh Canning, Sunday Times

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music