The Life of Mendelssohn. (Book Reviews).

The Life of Mendelssohn. By Peter Mercer-Taylor. (Musical Lives.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [viii, 238 p. ISBN 0-521-63972-7. $17.95 (pbk.).]

In The Life of Mendelssohn, Peter Mercer-Taylor provides for the general reader a well-written and thoughtful account of the composer's life, into which he seamlessly weaves a survey of his music. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first is a clear and useful survey of Felix Mendelssohn's family background that, in a short space, paints a lively picture of Mendelssohn's intellectual inheritance from his grandfather Moses and his parents' characters and outlook; the remaining chapters treat Mendelssohn's life and works chronologically. Many extracts from letters and other contemporaneous sources, some of which make available less-familiar material, are used to good effect to illustrate the development of Mendelssohn's character, his career, and the impact he made on his contemporaries. Whether Mercer-Taylor succeeds in confronting "head-on the myth that Mendelssohn's was a happy, untroubled existence," as the text on the dust jacket suggests, is another matter. To do that effectively would require a longer study that examines more closely and critically the history of Mendelssohn's contemporary and posthumous reception; but that is perhaps not the primary purpose of a book such as this.

Mercer-Taylor's discussion of Mendelssohn's compositions contains many stimulating insights that are expressed without recourse to the kind of technical language that is fully comprehensible only to the professional. His discussion of the First Piano Concerto and capriccio brillant (pp. 103-6) provides a good example. In a relatively short space, he is able to indicate the relationship of these works to Mendelssohn's earlier concerted pieces for piano and orchestra as well as summarize their salient formal and stylistic features in relation to the influences of Carl Maria von Weber (especially his Konzertstuck), Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and John Field. On the other hand, he sometimes dismisses the music too hastily, leaving the reader with a seriously misleading impression. Such is the case, for instance, with his reference to the B[MUSICAL DATA NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]-major string quintet. He remarks merely that Mendelssohn "completed his second String Quintet in B[MUSICAL DATA NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] major, a work more polished than inspired, which pales beside the ...