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Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

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Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Die erste Walpurgisnacht: Ballade von Goethe fur Chor und Orchester, op. 60. A Full-Color Facsimile of the Autograph Piano-Vocal Score Held in the Museum of Educational Heritage at Tamagawa University. Edited with commentary by Hiromi Hoshino. Tokyo: Yushodo Press Co., c2005. [Message (Yoshiaki Obara) in Eng., Jap., 2 p.; foreword in Eng., Jap., Ger., 3 p.; facsimile (color), 49 p.; commentary (Die erste Walpurgisnacht, history of the Tamagawa autograph, content of the Tamagawa autograph), p. 1-59; appendices (text, original sources), in Eng., Jap., p. 60-73; bibliography, p. 74-76. Cloth (in slipcase). ISBN 4-8419-0396-8. [yen]47,500.]

If the rediscovery of a major Felix Mendelssohn autograph is cause enough for celebration, then doubly so the publication in full color of the document in question, a source previously unknown to Mendelssohn research: the autograph piano-vocal score of the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht, op. 60 (1843). This is the composition Hector Berlioz praised for its "whirling momentum and sweep," its interweaving of voices and instruments "with an apparent confusion which is the perfection of art" (The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, corr. ed., trans. and ed. David Cairns [New York: Norton, 1975], 294; reprint [New York: A. A. Knopf, 2002], 298), and the work Fanny Hensel was rehearsing in 1847 when she suffered her fatal stroke. Published with a detailed commentary by the Japanese musicologist Hiromi Hoshino, this handsome offering augments a relatively small number of facsimiles of Mendelssohn's manuscripts issued over the last sixty years, beginning with the first version of the Hebrides overture (Die Hebriden: First Version of the Concert-Overture, ed. Max F. Schneider [Basel: Amerbach, 1947]),...

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