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.

About the Author
Benedict Taylor is Reader in Music at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests centre on nineteenth-century music, theory and analysis, and philosophy. Previous books include Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (2011), The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era (2016), and Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg's Late Piano Music (2017).

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. * C. Cai, emerita, Kenyon College, CHOICE *
A welcome contribution to the literature of Mendelssohn scholarship, Rethinking Mendelssohn brings together nearly a score of notable scholars, representing several generations, who offer new points of view on Mendelssohn's music and on its historical and biographical contexts. Beyond the keen insights these collaborators provide, their essays should also serve to launch a new phase for the ways Mendelssohn is dealt with in the future, and even more broadly as models for studies of other nineteenth-century music and musicians. * Douglass Seaton, Florida State University *
Over the past two decades, Mendelssohn scholarship has focused on foundational work, such as reexaminations of biography and crucial primary sources. Rethinking Mendelssohn successfully builds on this foundation in innovative and exciting ways. It casts new light on those areas of Mendelssohn's oeuvre that have remained in the shadows, while exploring the composer's life and music in the context of recent discoveries and novel historical and theoretical frameworks. * Jeffrey S. Sposato, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190611781
Author Benedict Taylor
Format Hardback
Page Count 544
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 898g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 163mm * 40mm