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. Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works, and explores how the composer's personal life affected his work. Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar ...
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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. Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works, and explores how the composer's personal life affected his work. 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.
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Add this copy of Mendelssohn: A Life in Music to cart. $27.00, new condition, Sold by Ken's Collectibles rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Olmsted Falls, OH, UNITED STATES, published 2003 by Oxford University Press, USA.
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Yes, I would recommend it, but to those with a viable knowledge of musical theory. If you don't understand the ins and outs of composition, you may love Mendelssohn enough to persevere through this long, insightful, detailed account of everything he ever wrote. It will, however, take an amount of concentration, not to mention dedication. It seems to me that this remarkable study rescues the composer from the dust bin of superficial criticism that has buried his tremendous output under dismissals of his work as sweet and sentimental. It also gives you a very living sense of who he was, his background, his religious sensibilities as a profound Protestant interpreter of the Bible and a respectfully ethnic Jew. Mendelssohn seems never to have wound down. Only when seriously ill did he stop--temporarily. His wife, fortunately, seems to have been the calm and quiet type. It is fascinating to imagine him with the Schumanns, Paganini (who gave him the willies) and others of that magical time. You wonder about the further implications of the psychological interdependence between himself and his sister, and his unwillingness to let her publish her own music. One of those fantastic prodigies, in the line of Mozart and Saint Saens, he remained a Golden Boy during his lifetime, and died too early.
