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works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works.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.

"A highly readable and authoritative account of a brief but remarkably creative life, and an important contribution to Mendelssohn studies."--Hugh Canning, Sunday Times (London)

"At long last a great, elegant, and monumental biography. It will take its rightful place as the standard and indispensable guide to Mendelssohn's life and music with a sensitive understanding of the complex historical currents and contexts surrounding the composer. Based on exemplary research this

book should put to rest the cliches and injustices that have plagued a great composer's work and reputation. A stunning achievement. A landmark in scholarship and writing on the history of music."--Leon Botstein, President, Bard College, Editor of The Musical Quarterly, and Music Director of The

American Symphony Orchestra

"Magisterial, exhaustively documented book likely to become the standard biography.... Throughout, Todd interweaves his subject's biographical journey with his performing and compositional activities on an almost daily schedule, exploring in-depth his studies of and dealings with the vagaries of

music publishing, conducting assignments, championing of the works of earlier masters such as Bach, and relations with other musicians. The author's musical analysis is clear to the layperson yet includes enough specifics to be useful to serious musicians, while his literate style helps to create

an organic whole."--Library Journal (starred review)

"A valuable book for those who like a graceful biography, and those who are curious about composers beyond the familiar 'Three Bs.'"--Seattle Times

"So full and frantic was the short life of the 'Mozart of the nineteenth century' it would make breathless reading in lesser hands than Professor Todd's. Here not only the music but the pressures of life that created it, the constant travel, the correspondence with friends and family, the witty

asides, and even a synoptic and sympathetic view of critical opinion on his main works from his own time until the present day are digested within this much-needed survey, and presented with accuracy, intelligence and insight. A Bible for Mendelssohn's growing and hungry supporters!" --Christopher

Hogwood, Honorary Professor of Music, Cambridge University

"R. Larry Todd makes a fine contribution to biography and to 19th-century music history in this detailed survey of Mendelssohn's life. From this book we get not just a new portrait of Mendelssohn as man and artist, but valuable perspectives on his celebrated family, on religious and social issues

in Germany in his time, on his contemporaries, and on the state of music in the Biedermeier and early Victorian worlds. Through this study of a single, immensely gifted musician Todd outlines important trends in musical style in the Romantic era, both those that Mendelssohn inherited and those to

which he made lasting contributions, from the miraculous Octet written at age sixteen to the Violin Concerto and the late oratorios."--Lewis Lockwood, author of Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Ledbetter, Orchestralist