Benedict Taylor - Rethinking Mendelssohn

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Benedict, 1981 editor.

Title: Rethinking Mendelssohn / edited by Benedict Taylor.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019052402 (print) | LCCN 2019052403 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190611781 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190611804 (epub) |

ISBN 9780190611811

Subjects: LCSH: Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 18091847Criticism and interpretation. |

Music19th centuryHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML410.M5 R4 2020 (print) | LCC ML410.M5 (ebook) |

DDC 780.92dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052402

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052403

Benedict Taylor

Thomas Grey

Peter Mercer-Taylor

John Michael Cooper

Scott Burnham

Sarah Clemmens Waltz

Angela Mace Christian

Celia Applegate

Benedict Taylor

Steven Vande Moortele

Julian Horton

Thomas Schmidt

Leon Botstein

Sabine Koch

Lawrence Kramer

Laura K. T. Stokes

Jennifer Ronyak

Harald Krebs

Susan Youens

Stephen Rodgers

This volume was first conceived in 2011 in Felix Mendelssohns hometown of Berlin, where both the editor and Angela Mace (now Angela Mace Christian), on research fellowships at the same university at which Mendelssohn had once attended lectures by the luminaries of his age, dreamed up plans for Mendelssohns world domination and drew up the outlines for the current collection. It was originally intended that we would serve as co-editors for this book, and as such the volume proceeded for some time through the subsequent wilderness years at Colorado and Oxford. Angela subsequently moved in a new direction in her career and left the project entirely with me, but her influence remains very much behind this volume, and many of the chapters have benefited from her exacting critical eye. I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for all the work she has put in, and while her name now appears only as the author of a chapter, her contribution has been much larger than this.

Obviously, an edited collection such as this does not come into existence without the efforts of the authors whose work is found within it, and I would like to extend my deepest thanks and regard for all eighteen scholars who contributed so willingly and with such zeal and assorted wisdom to this volume. Thanks are also due to Suzanne Ryan at Oxford University Press, who believed in the project right from the start and has been ideally patient and supportive throughout the inevitable delays we faced.

Parts of the book have been presented as panel sessions at several conferencesmaterial by the editor, Julian Horton, Steven Vande Moortele, and Thomas Schmidt was given as a Rethinking Romantic Form panel jointly convened by me and Vande Moortele at both the Nineteenth Biennial Conference on 19th-Century Music at Oxford in 2016 and, with the addition of Thomas Grey, at the annual SMT Conference in Vancouver in 2016; and a Mendelssohn and the Lied panel consisting of papers from Susan Youens, Stephen Rodgers, Harald Krebs, and Jennifer Ronyak, was convened by Angela Mace Christian at the annual AMS conference in Rochester in 2017. I would like to thank all those audience members who proffered comments and (sometimes amusingly bizarre) questions. Gareth Williams helped with tweaking some of the musical examples and, no less important, remained a constant source of good humour at Edinburgh. The kind permission of the following institutions and agencies for the reproduction of images in this book are also gratefully acknowledged: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; bpk Bildagentur; and the sterreichische Galerie Belvedere.

Benedict Taylor

Edinburgh, April 2018

Celia Applegate is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at the Blair School of Music. She is the author of a number of books and essays on German nationalism and cultural history of music, including The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (Toronto, 2017) and Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohns Revival of the St Matthew Passion (Ithaca, N.Y., 2010; winner of the DAAD/GSA Book Prize). With Pamela Potter, she co-edited Music and German National Identity (Chicago, 2002).

Leon Botstein is President and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities of Bard College. He is the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now and artistic co-director of the SummerScape and Bard Music Festivals. He was music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (200310), where he serves as conductor laureate. He is artistic director of the Grafenegg Campus and Academy, has recorded extensively, and is widely known for expanding listeners experience of classical music by performing works by lesser-known virtuosi and rediscovering forgotten works by popular composers.

Scott Burnham is Distinguished Professor of Music at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is also Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught from 1989 to 2016 and helped advise more than sixty PhD dissertations. As author, editor, and translator, Burnham has addressed the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Haydn, and others, as well as the music-theoretical work of A. B. Marx, Hugo Riemann, and Heinrich Schenker. His best-known contributions are Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995), a study of the values and reception of Beethovens heroic-style music, and Mozarts Grace (Princeton, 2013), an exploration of beauty in the music of Mozart.

Angela Mace Christian, PhD in Music, Duke University, writes on the Mendelssohn family and women in music throughout the long nineteenth century. She has published and lectured extensively on these topics throughout North America and Europe and as Assistant Professor of Music History at Colorado State University. She is currently an independent scholar and is working in the Washington, D.C., area as Business Operations Analyst at Navy Federal Credit Union.