Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn's music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer's life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel.

Nicole Grimes is a Marie Curie Fellow (2011-14) with joint affiliation at the University of California, Irvine and University College Dublin. She was awarded a PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2008, for her dissertation on Johannes Brahms, and she was a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2007-2008. Her publications include articles and reviews in several journals, and she is co-editor of a forthcoming volume of essays on Eduard Hanslick.

Angela R. Mace is a PhD candidate in musicology at Duke University (MA musicology, 2008), where she is writing her dissertation on the Mendelssohns. Mace was a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2010-11. She received her BMus in piano performance from Vanderbilt University in 2006. Mace revised and enlarged J. Michael Cooper's Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Research and Information Guide (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Introduction; I: Mendelssohn's Jewishness; 1: Never Perfectly Beautiful: Physiognomy, Jewishness, and Mendelssohn Portraiture; 2: Mendelssohn's 'Untergang': Reconsidering the Impact of Wagner's 'Judaism in Music'; 3: 'Wordless Judaism, Like the Songs of Mendelssohn'? Hanslick, Mendelssohn and Cultural Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna; 4: Mendelssohn's Conversion to Judaism: An English Perspective; II: Between Tradition and Innovation; 5: Norm and Deformation in Mendelssohn's Sonata Forms; 6: Mendelssohn and Berlioz: Selective Affinities; 7: Between Tradition and Innovation: Mendelssohn as Music Director and His Performances of Bach in Leipzig 1; III: Mendelssohn and the Stage; 8: Converting the Pagans: Mendelssohn, Greek Tragedy, and the Christian Ethos; 9: The Phantom of Mendelssohn's Opera: Fictional Accounts and Posthumous Propaganda; IV: Style and Compositional Process; 10: Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte and the Limits of Musical Expression; 11: Improvisation, Elaboration, Composition: The Mendelssohns and the Classical Cadenza 1; 12: Cyclic Form and Musical Memory in Mendelssohn's String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 12; V: Contemporary Views and Posthumous Perspectives; 13: A Friendship in Letters: The Correspondence of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Klingemann; 14: Mendelssohn as Portrayed in the Goethe-Zelter Correspondence; 15: Business is War: Mendelssohn and His Italian Publishers; 16: Beyond the Salon: Mendelssohn's French Audience