Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Germany

Born to the son of a banker, Mendelssohn grew up to the privilege and comfort of performing in his family's garden home in Berlin. He and his sister Fanny possessed great talent, and Mendelssohn was considered a prodigy; he composed his first musical piece at the age of eleven and twelve symphonies for strings by the age of fourteen. As a seventeen-year-old, he astounded the public with his Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826), which was inspired through the reading of Bach and Shlegel's translations of Shakespeare. His great interest in literature took him as far as meeting Goethe in person in 1821. In 1829, Mendelssohn became an important figure conducive in the 19th century rediscovery of Bach by conducting a performance of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion at the Berlin Singakademie. For the next six years, Mendelssohn became an extensive traveler for the purpose of touring, writing, and promoting his music. He incorporated the highlights of his travels in his music; The Hebrides (1830) is his perception of the Scottish seaside. His travel schedule took him all around England, Scotland, Wales, and Italy, and into the scenes of Paris, London, and Düsseldorf, where he took a job as a conductor in 1833. In 1835, he became director of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, where he founded a conservatory in 1842. Six years before his death, Mendelssohn was named director of Music in the Academy Arts of Berlin. Due to the sorrow of the death of his sister and a series of strokes, Mendelssohn died in 1847, leaving the world his singular style of classically-oriented Romanticism. His piano work, especially his "Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words)" and chamber music are especially notable.

Works
Symphonies
- Symphony No. 3 ("Scottish," 1842)
- Symphony No. 4 ("The Italian," 1843)
- Symphony No. 5 ("Reformation," 1830)
- Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826)
- A Midsummer Night's Dream (1842)
- The Hebrides, or Fingal's Cave (1830)
- Piano Concerto No. 1 (1832)
- Piano Concerto No. 2 (1837)
- Violin Concerto (1844)
Choral Music
- St. Paul (1836)
- Elijah (1846)
- The First Walpurgis Night (1832)
Piano
- Lieder ohne Worte ("Songs Without Words," 1829-1845)
- Sonata for Piano in E flat Major (op. 12, 1830)
Chamber Music
- C minor trio (Op. 66, 1845)
- D Minor Trio (op. 49)
- Octet for Strings (1825)

Additional Information
Felix Mendelssohn- biographical notes
< http://www.sirius.com/~arts/mendbio.html>

Sources:
The Classical Music Pages. Ed. Matt Boynick. Feb. 1996. <http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/classmus.html>

Sony Classical. Sony Music Entertainment. 2001. <http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/eras/romhist.html>

Hagar, Kroy. Mendelssohn. 8 March 2000 < http://www.mendelssohn.homestead.com/ >

Longyear, Ray M. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988.

Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.