Ten years have passed since the publication of R. Larry Todd's magisterial biography of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.Footnote ¹ Todd's work now provides a secure departure point for studies of the composer, and the present volumes demonstrate various directions in which scholars have taken off. Some of these studies extend well-establish paths of research; others steer new courses.

Mendelssohn Perspectives arose out of the symposium ‘Mendelssohn in the Long Nineteenth Century’, held in Dublin in 2005 and organized by Jacqueline Waeber. These essays diverge considerably, however, from that event's original programme; the volume contains only a selection of the conference papers, and some contributors appear in print on entirely different topics from those on which they presented in 2005.

Primary sources, some well known and some hitherto overlooked, still draw scholars interested in Mendelssohn's biography and his music. Four colleagues here focus on letters and other documents. Regina Back revisits the extensive correspondence between Mendelssohn and Karl Klingemann, extending from the composer's late teens until just before his death. Back counts over 300 items, not including those now lost. She nicely summarizes the course of the relationship revealed in those letters. Lorraine Byrne Bodley deals not with Mendelssohn's own correspondence, but with that between his teacher Karl Friedrich Zelter and Goethe, with whom the young Mendelssohn formed a close friendship. A tantalizing line of thought that might be pursued is the mention of Goethe's influence on two projects that Mendelssohn completed during the same period, the Octet and the translation of Terence's Andria (p. 297). Many writers have considered the connection made by Fanny Mendelssohn between the Octet's scherzo and the Walpurgisnicht dream in Faust, but no one so far has thought much about possible relationships between Mendelssohn's own simultaneous literary and musical works. Mendelssohn's reception in Italy, as revealed in Italian publishers’ interest in his works, forms the subject of Pietro Zappalà's contribution to these Perspectives, titled ‘Business is War’. Zappalà tells an engaging story of competition and intrigue. Among the revelations of these documents are the rivalries between publishers Lucca and Ricordi for the opportunity to produce Italian editions of Mendelssohn's works, and Mendelssohn's apparent naïveté in dealing with the Italian publishing houses – surprising in a composer who had worked for two decades with German, British and French publishers.Footnote ² As for Mendelssohn's music in France, Cécile Reynaud compiles a variety of documents to shed light on the reception of the composer's works there, including publications of the music, performances, biographical articles and reviews. Most usefully, she provides information about Mendelssohn's works published and performed in France, including lists of his compositions programmed at the Société de Concerts du Conservatoire.

Other hitherto overlooked sources continue to provide new insights. Angela Mace takes up the performance and composition of cadenzas for Classic concertos by both Felix and Fanny. Especially significantly, Fanny created her own cadenzas in a period when female performers typically relied on those precomposed by (male) others. Mace's analysis of Fanny's cadenza for Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 1 in C, op. 15, reveals Fanny's skill, style and taste.

Monika Hennemann, who always has an insightful way of finding the significant in the offbeat, takes up the intriguing topic of how, in the absence of a complete, mature opera by Mendelssohn, ‘phantom’ substitutes emerged after his death. She discusses two very different sorts. First are the notorious fictionalization of the composer in the 1853 novel Charles Auchester, by Elizabeth Sheppard, and the 1955 pseudo-biography Beyond Desire, by Pierre La Mure, both of which present views of ‘Mendelssohn’ and opera. Risible as these narratives seem, they represent real aspects of Mendelssohn reception history, despite their mawkish or soppy distortions of the facts. Hennemann's other phantoms of Mendelssohn opera are two stage works. One, titled Talassio and dating from 1833, uses two songs that were attributed to Mendelssohn in 1925 by Leopold Hirschberg, but that surely are not his. The other, based on the life of Heinrich Heine and with the unoriginal title Dichterliebe, does employ tunes by Mendelssohn. As Hennemann points out, ‘these creative forgeries … can certainly be culturally enlightening … The result, of course, is nothing to do with Mendelssohn himself, but it is a powerful part of the image of Mendelssohn’ (p. 193). And this remains part of the Mendelssohn scholar's task: to recover his reputation, not only by writing accurate biography and rigorous critical analysis but also by exposing the long history of oversimplifications and distortions.

Of course, the most frequently distorted – and often oversimplified – aspect of Mendelssohn's life and personality is his Jewish heritage and identity. Sinéad Dempsey-Garratt demonstrates that the rhetoric against Mendelssohn as Jew did not begin, as is often suggested, with Wagner's Das Judentum in der Musik, and further, that the musical world by no means universally acquiesced to Wagner's position. Nicole Grimes contributes a discussion of Eduard Hanslick's handling of the Jewish issue, introduced through Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht, which critics from Hanslick's time to the present have suggested reflects the composer's intention to express a sympathetic image of oppressed Jews (in Goethe's text represented by druids) in a hegemonic Christian world. Grimes's real interest here is Hanslick's position; she argues that Hanslick's reviews of the Walpurgisnacht are evidence of his Jewish self-identification – although he suppresses this in other cases – more self-consciously than the Walpurgisnacht was for Mendelssohn himself.Footnote ³ Colin Eatock, in an essay wryly titled ‘Mendelssohn's Conversion to Judaism: An English Perspective’, traces the course of Mendelssohn's image in Britain through the nineteenth century. He builds up a far-reaching context for English views of Jews and of Mendelssohn, drawing upon religion, anthropology, demography, politics, literature and literary criticism, not to mention writings on music.

Also following the course of representations of Mendelssohn, Marian Wilson Kimber tells the story of nineteenth-century images of Jews in relation to theories of physiognomy and phrenology. Using pictures of Mendelssohn (and others), she shows how portraits suppressed or exaggerated the composer's features, according to his reputation. Wilson Kimber, who consistently finds such windows into unexplored corners of history, discovers in Mendelssohn's Jewishness more than just a biographical and musicological topic, producing an essay on social and ‘scientific’ history that will interest scholars beyond the field of music history.

Critical interpretations of Mendelssohn's music in its historical contexts certainly continue to interest scholars. R. Larry Todd takes up ‘Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte and the Limits of Musical Expression’. To be sure, the music is expressive, and the characters of some pieces are obvious. Todd illustrates some of the attempts made by Mendelssohn's contemporaries to identify those expressive characters by adding text, including one wrought by Fanny Hensel. A delightful contribution closes this article, in which Todd notes that Mendelssohn once improvised a transition from the untitled Lied ohne Worte in E flat op. 67 no. 1 to the well-known ‘Frühlingslied’ in A, op. 67 no. 6. Todd creatively imagines that the effect could be programmatically akin to the sequence from ‘schlechtes Wetter’ to the ‘Übergang zum Frühling’ in Die erste Walpurgisnacht, and he provides his own, newly composed introduction for the first piece and a transition between the two, very convincingly in Mendelssohn's style.

John Michael Cooper examines the relationship between Mendelssohn and Berlioz. The usual narratives of music history locate the two composers at opposite ends of a spectrum, in which the German composer represents the ‘conservative’ and the Frenchman the ‘progressive’ extreme. In fact, as Cooper recounts, the two had a cordial relationship, beginning with their encounter in Italy in 1831. In addition, Cooper points out significant points of contact in the two composers’ works.

Anselm Hartinger and Jason Geary explore instances of Mendelssohn's work with material from the past. Hartinger develops the context for Mendelssohn's ‘historical concerts’ in Leipzig, showing that he was by no means the first to programme eighteenth-century musical ‘classics’ there. Hartinger also considers the effects of the Romantic context on the music as it was performed and understood at the time. Geary takes up Mendelssohn's incidental music for the Potsdam/Berlin performances of Sophocles's Antigone and Oedipus in Kolonos, arguing that the dramas were interpreted, by Mendelssohn and his contemporaries, in terms of Christian values.

Striking in Mendelssohn Perspectives are two essays that go beyond the kinds of work done with the composer before the twenty-first century, analysing his music as a means to explore new analytical and critical positions. Paul Wingfield and Julian Horton study Mendelssohn's sonata-form movements, using these works to argue for a somewhat different viewpoint from that of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy,Footnote ⁴ proposing that we should regard the forms not as ‘sonata deformations’ vis-à-vis ‘norms’, but as representing a ‘taxonomy of sonata practices’ (p. 107). Further, they demonstrate that Mendelssohn's compositions take up the practices in the taxonomy not in abstract terms but as ‘engagements with particular models by particular composers’ (p. 110). This enlightens us about Mendelssohn, but more significantly, it cites his music to make a point about composers and nineteenth-century sonata-form movements generally, steering away from music theory and toward the realities of composerly practice as the basis for understanding musical structures. The point itself is a worthy one, and the adoption of Mendelssohn's music as the basis for the argument shows how far his status has risen over the past four decades.

Very different from the essay by Wingfield and Horton but equally a breakthrough in Mendelssohn scholarship is Benedict Taylor's contribution to this collection. Taylor studies the cyclic structure of the String Quartet in E flat, op. 12, as a representation of memory and of the application of recall with reference to Freud's theory of trauma. He finds the F-minor theme of the first movement an instance of the Freudian unheimlich, disconcerting on its first appearance in the development section of the first movement, somewhat submerged but also troubling the following movements, and recalled as memory in the finale. Returning in the finale's coda, the theme seems to bring a sort of curative, though by no means triumphant, resolution.

Taylor's Mendelssohn Perspectives article provides a foretaste of (and for our purposes a transition to) his 2011 Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form. This study offers close analysis and thought-provoking interpretations of a number of compositions. The first chapter begins with a classification of cyclical types in music, with extensive lists of exemplary works, not only by Mendelssohn. These valuable distinctions suggest projects dealing with a wide variety of Romantic repertoire – some of which might be spurred by questions about the placement of actual pieces. The chapter then goes on to establish context for Mendelssohn's cyclicism, both its historical precedents and its relation to some of the nineteenth-century's leading ideas, such as subjectivity and organicism.

In Chapter 2 Taylor interprets Mendelssohn's Octet in terms of contrasting ideas about history from two great thinkers around 1800, both of whom Mendelssohn knew. Taylor first compares the cyclic structure of the work, with its concluding synthesis and apotheosis of materials from the first and last movements, to Hegel's conception of the self-realization of the Geist as the goal of history. He then backs Mendelssohn away from Hegel and suggests as another possible parallel to the Octet Goethe's view of history as manifested in Faust. As opposed to a Hegelian teleological theory that time moves linearly (or circularly) toward its end, Goethe suggests the idea that the past accumulates into the present until time is transcended. In either case, the Octet enacts its course through time analogically with the Hegelian or the Goethean model, or perhaps both, with a transcendent ending.

Taylor observes – in relation to the Octet, but this applies to all his analyses – that the music establishes contrasting archetypal thematic elements so that ‘by contrasting two distinct families of musical motives which are fairly open-ended and inclusive in what they can be seen to incorporate, it can effectively make “thematic” many passages of music which would otherwise just be seen as anomalous’ (p. 62). In this case, the themes in the first movement contrast in the sense that the first is triadic, motivic, wide-ranging and strongly arch-shaped, while the second is conjunct and turns about within in a very narrow range. This not only unifies the music, but it means that for us as analysts ‘almost anything introduced into the music can be viewed as relating to one or the other family’ (p. 62). In other words, we might find cyclicity anywhere, and Taylor does find it everywhere. In fact, that aspect of the task seems to become almost too easy for him. He manages to trace an almost continuous unfolding and developing of motives in great detail across each work that he discusses.

Taylor turns in Chapter 3 to the Piano Sonata in E major, op. 6. He regards this music as isomorphic with the sort of homeward journey toward Arcadian roots that we encounter in the work of many Romantic poets. He names Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin and Eichendorff as representatives of this idea, but finds the best manifestation in Novalis. In Chapter 4 the work under consideration is the A-minor String Quartet, op. 13, whose conclusion finally arrives at a recollection of Mendelssohn's song ‘Frage’, op. 9 no. 1. Taylor argues that this Quartet anticipates ideas about time later articulated by Henri Bergson, and even more intriguingly that the music enacts a Proustian way of viewing memory. Chapter 5 consists of a much-expanded version of the essay on the E-flat Quartet and Freudian psychology in Mendelssohn Perspectives.

A significant shift takes place here, for instead of suggesting that Mendelssohn's music reflects ideas about time that he inherited from philosophies of an earlier generation (in the case of the Octet), or that it pursues plot archetypes shared with his contemporaries (in the E-major Piano Sonata), Taylor sets up the two String Quartets, opp. 13 and 12, as anticipatory of later thinkers: Bergson, Proust and Freud. The proposition that Mendelssohn's music already demonstrated concepts that would be articulated many decades later not only places the composer in a very different light from the conventional view of him as essentially conservative and even classicizing, it also shakes the common historiographic assumption that in the succession of cultural movements music tends to lag behind philosophy and literature.

Taylor argues, by no means uniquely, that after 1830 Mendelssohn retreated from such early experiments. In later works, especially the symphonies, the issues have become different. The final chapter of Mendelssohn, Time and Memory gives some discussion to the Symphony in D minor (‘Reformation’) and Die erste Walpurgisnacht, but it focuses most closely on the Symphony in A minor (‘Scottish’). All these works have more to do with history than with time and memory in the senses that the earlier works did. Among other issues, they raise problems of programme, plot and narrative. Taylor notably arrives at a very favourable view of the coda at the end of the A-minor Symphony, often regarded by critics as problematic, which he takes to represent the image of a new dawn at the close of a ‘darkness-to-light narrative’ and even, in a biographical way, Mendelssohn's own compositional journey over the course of his career.

The reader might find Mendelssohn, Time and Memory troubled by its lack of a single, central thesis – beyond, of course, the fact that it deals with cyclicity in Mendelssohn's works and with an assortment of ideas from the ‘long nineteenth century’. The ideas about time, memory and history that Taylor applies to the music exemplify substantially different types, so that the book has the effect of a series of essays that take different directions, rather than a unified narrative. Taylor's book possesses two enormous strengths, however. For one, it offers original analyses, demonstrating in impressive detail the motivic drive and unity of this music. More significantly, it presents Mendelssohn as more than a highly skilled and imaginative composer; he becomes a representative of profound cultural ideas, even a philosophical leader among the thinkers of his century.