R. Larry Todd – författare

When R. Larry Todd’s biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, appeared in 2003, it won acclaim from several critics as a definitive biography. In researching Mendelssohn’s life over the last two and a half decades, Todd uncovered much new information about the composer and his music, his family and his peers, and his complex reception history. Now, as we approach the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the author has chosen and compiled fifteen essays written between 1980 and 2005, including five previously unpublished, that examine several aspects of the composer whom Goethe and Heine likened to a second Mozart.

Mendelssohn Essays explores Mendelssohn’s precocity, his musical impressions of British culture, the role of the visual in his music, his compositional response to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and incomplete drafts from his musical estate of three instrumental works. In addition, a group of three essays focuses on the music of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel, perhaps the most gifted woman composer of the century, and a significant, complex figure in the formation of the Mendelssohnian style.

When R. Larry Todd’s biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, appeared in 2003, it won acclaim from several critics as a definitive biography. In researching Mendelssohn’s life over the last two and a half decades, Todd uncovered much new information about the composer and his music, his family and his peers, and his complex reception history. Now, as we approach the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the author has chosen and compiled fifteen essays written between 1980 and 2005, including five previously unpublished, that examine several aspects of the composer whom Goethe and Heine likened to a second Mozart.

Mendelssohn Essays explores Mendelssohn’s precocity, his musical impressions of British culture, the role of the visual in his music, his compositional response to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and incomplete drafts from his musical estate of three instrumental works. In addition, a group of three essays focuses on the music of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel, perhaps the most gifted woman composer of the century, and a significant, complex figure in the formation of the Mendelssohnian style.

During the 1830s and 1840s the remarkably versatile composer-pianist-organist-conductor Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy stood at the forefront of German and English musical life. Bringing together previously unpublished essays by historians and musicologists, reflections on Mendelssohn written by his contemporaries, the composer''s own letters, and early critical reviews of his music, this volume explores various facets of Mendelssohn''s music, his social and intellectual circles, and his career. The essays in Part I cover the nature of a Jewish identity in Mendelssohn''s music (Leon Botstein); his relationship to the Berlin Singakademie (William A. Little); the role of his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and accomplished composer (Nancy Reich); Mendelssohn''s compositional craft in the Italian Symphony and selected concert overtures (Claudio Spies); his oratorio Elijah (Martin Staehelin); his incidental music to Sophocles'' Antigone (Michael P. Steinberg); his anthem "Why, O Lord, delay forever?" (David Brodbeck); and an unfinished piano sonata (R. Larry Todd). Part II presents little-known memoirs by such contemporaries as J. C. Lobe, A. B. Marx, Julius Schubring, C. E. Horsley, Max Mller, and Betty Pistor. Mendelssohn''s letters are represented in Part III by his correspondence with Wilhelm von Boguslawski and Aloys Fuchs, here translated for the first time. Part IV contains late nineteenth-century critical reviews by Heinrich Heine, Franz Brendel, Friedrich Niecks, Otto Jahn, and Hans von Blow.