Special offer. Rethinking Mendelssohn
- Editor: Taylor, Benedict
With its wide range of topics, this volume suggests a positive direction for the future of Mendelssohn scholarship; it is a welcome model for 19th-century musicology in general
Special offer. Rethinking Mendelssohn
- Editor: Taylor, Benedict
Purchase product
With its wide range of topics, this volume suggests a positive direction for the future of Mendelssohn scholarship; it is a welcome model for 19th-century musicology in general
About
As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.
Contents
- Biographies of Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Rethinking Mendelssohn
- Benedict Taylor
- I Interpreting the Orchestral Music
- 1 Deformed Beauty? Narrative and Musical Form in Mendelssohn's Overture to the Tale of the Fair Melusina, Op. 32
- Thomas Grey
- 2 Brass Topoi, Telescoped Recapitulations, and the Bildungsreise: A New Approach to the First Movement of Mendelssohn's 'Italian' Symphony
- Peter Mercer-Taylor
- 3 'Inner Necessity': Fabulation, Frame, and Musical Memory in Mendelssohn's Lobgesang
- John Michael Cooper
- 4 An Epic Voice with Rhyme and Reason: On Rehearing Mendelssohn's 'Scottish' Symphony
- Scott Burnham
- II Historical and Aesthetic Contexts
- 5 Mendelssohn and the Idea of the North
- Sarah Clemmens Waltz
- 6 Sibling Love and the Daemonic: Contradictions in the Relationship between Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn
- Angela Mace Christian
- 7 Mendelssohn and Droysen: Historicism in Practice and Theory
- Celia Applegate
- III Analysing Mendelssohn
- 8 Mendelssohn and Sonata Form: The Case of Op. 44 No. 2
- Benedict Taylor
- 9 Expansion and Recomposition in Mendelssohn's Symphonic Sonata Forms
- Steven Vande Moortele
- 10 Syntax and Process in the First Movement of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio Op. 66
- Julian Horton
- 11 Form through Sound: Klangfarbe and Texture in Mendelssohn's Instrumental Compositions
- Thomas Schmidt
- IV Art, Ethics, and Religion
- 12 The Philosophical Composer: The Influence of Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Schleiermacher on Felix Mendelssohn
- Leon Botstein
- 13 Rethinking Kunstreligion in the Context of Mendelssohn's Life and Work
- Sabine Koch
- 14 Sacred Sound and Secular Space in Mendelssohn's Instrumental Music
- Lawrence Kramer
- 15 Felix Mendelssohn's Deutsche Liturgie in the Context of the Prussian Agende of 1829
- Laura K. T. Stokes
- V Mendelssohn and the Lied
- 16 Reassessing Felix Mendelssohn's Song Aesthetic through the Lens of Religion: The Case of 'Entsagung'
- Jennifer Ronyak
- 17 Changes of Pace: Expressive Accelerations and Decelerations in Mendelssohn's Vocal Rhythms
- Harald Krebs
- 18 'Time is, Time was, Time is past': The Phenomenology of Travel in Mendelssohn's Songs
- Susan Youens
- 19 Fanny Hensel's Sechs Lieder Op. 9: A Brother's Elegy
- Stephen Rodgers
- Bibliography
- Index
Awards and reviews
With its wide range of topics, this volume suggests a positive direction for the future of Mendelssohn scholarship; it is a welcome model for 19th-century musicology in general
