The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History.(Book Review)

Edited by John Michael Cooper and Julie D. Prandi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xxii, 382 p. ISBN 0-19-816723-7. $98.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, indexes.

The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History is a collection of seventeen essays based on papers delivered in spring 1997 as part of a festival at Illinois Wesleyan University commemorating the 150-year anniversary of the deaths of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn. The book is nicely laid out, with a select bibliography, general index, and index of works by Hensel and Mendelssohn. The essays present the current research of specialists and are directed toward knowledgeable readers in the field. An editors' preface explains the origins of the book and gives an overview of its contents. Without further ado, part 1 ("Sources and Source Problems") plunges into detailed discussions of manuscript cataloging and editing. The majority of essays in this and the next three parts ("Individual Works," "Repertories," "Felix and Fanny") center on individual works or groups of works by Hensel or Mendelssohn. Three essays on "Reception History" make up part 5.

A main goal of the editors, John Michael Cooper and Julie D. Prandi, is the creation of a new image of both Hensel and Mendelssohn. They see this coming about in large part through new editions of Hensel's and Mendelssohn's music and correspondence. This may be one reason they start off the collection with essays on the recovery and reconstruction of musical sources: discussions by Ralf Wehner, on autograph sources of lost or missing works by Mendelssohn; Pietro Zappala, on the need to conflate sources in preparing an edition of Mendelssohn's Organ Preludes, op. 37; Cooper, on the autonomy of each of Mendelssohn's two settings of Infelice; and, in part 2, Peter Ward Jones, on Mendelssohn's first composition, the newly discovered first movement of a sonata for two pianos. Other essays concerned primarily with source material are by Douglass Seaton, on the possibility of hidden cycles among Mendelssohn's songs (in part 3); and Hans-Gunter Klein, on the earliest works of Hensel and Mendelssohn (in part 4).

Though it is not a point the editors emphasize, a new image of Hensel and Mendelssohn is also apparent in those essays that give a broader picture of the world in which sister and brother lived and worked. The two most overarching approaches to this subject are an essay by Francoise Tillard, who discusses the effects of Fanny and Felix's Enlightenment upbringing on their perceptions of music and musicians, which clashed with the bourgeois society of their time; and one by Marian Wilson Kimber, who shows how a changed perception of masculinity and Jewishness after Mendelssohn's death resulted in reassessments of his personality and music. For those who are not Mendelssohn specialists, I would recommend beginning with these two essays, which are tucked away at the end of the book in parts 4 and 5.