Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

Contemporary Review, July, 2004

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music. R. Larry Todd. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. xxix + 683 pages. ISBN 0-19-511043-9. This biography, published by O.U.P. New York, seeks to give readers a balanced view of a composer whose fate has varied enormously over the years. To some he was a musical genius equal to Mozart; to others, his music was marked by 'a proclivity toward the saccharine ...

[and] revealed a sentimental, effeminate nature'. That great genius, George Bernard Shaw, denounced his 'kid glove gentility' and defended those who attacked him as a Jew by race if not by faith (he was a devout Lutheran). This is not the first biography to rehabilitate Mendelssohn's reputation but it is the first to make use of the enormous amount of archival material now available. It also draws heavily on the music of Mendelssohn's sister because of 'the light it sheds on the work of her brother'. Prof. Todd has produced a monumental work of scholarship which not only gives us a balanced and detailed portrayal of Mendelssohn the man as well as the composer, but which also gives us a unique insight into the Europe of Mendelssohn's time and the world (and politics) of music then and afterwards. (A.T.W.)