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A Portrait of Mendelssohn.

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By Clive Brown. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). [xxxiii, 551 p. ISBN 0-300-09539-2. $45.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Mendelssohn scholars are usually loathe to recommend a biography of the composer. Eric Werner's Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age (trans. Dika Newlin [London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]; rev. as Mendelssohn: Leben und Werk in neuer Sicht [Zurich: Atlantis, 1980]), long regarded as the most important such work to appear in the post-World War II period, is now regarded as crippled by serious flaws. It is embarrassing, after a century, to have to recommend George Grove's article (A Dictionary of Music and Musicians [London: Macmillan, 1880], 2:253-310), or to suggest, as a colleague once did, that a translation of Ernst Wolff's Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 2d. ed. (Berlin: Harmonic, 1909) would supply a good English biography.

So the appearance of Clive Brown's A Portrait of Mendelssohn is heartening, in spite of the fact that it is not a biography at all. The book is, instead, an immense compilation of writings on virtually every conceivable topic related to Mendelssohn: his personality and appearance; his nonmusical talents, such as drawing; his family, childhood, and education; the role of religion and race in his upbringing; his professional career in Berlin, Dusseldorf, and Leipzig; his musical aesthetic; his abilities as a performer and conductor;...

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