Abstract Rethinking Mendelssohn offers a new perspective on Felix Mendelssohn’s music and aesthetics, arguing for a fresh understanding of the composer, his music, and its central relationship to nineteenth-century culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, the present book sets a new tone for research on Mendelssohn. It challenges the traditional modes of discourse about this composer in moving beyond rehabilitation and source studies to engage in rigorous criticism and analysis, seeking to rethink the issues that shaped Mendelssohn, his music, and its reception from his own day to the present. This volume includes contributions from younger, emerging scholars as well as from some of the most prominent figures outside specialist Mendelssohn circles in order to open up new ways of understanding the composer and set out future directions in Mendelssohn studies. Besides offering fresh accounts of some of his most familiar orchestral pieces, particular attention is given here to Mendelssohn’s contested views on the relationship between art and religion, the analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song tradition.
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